Every night these silhouettes appear above my head, little angels of the silences that climb into my bed.
What do you write when you feel like you’ve written everything? When that existential need to express yourself falls hollow? I would say I am an upbeat person, I’m certainly an optimist. I would say that my friends care about me. I would say that I would be remembered.
But, then you have these moments, these paradigm shifts where the Earth trembles and suddenly you’re falling. In that flash, you doubt – what’s going on? will I be ok? who’s going to catch me?
I’ve gone many places, I’ve done many things, and I’ve cemented many friendships, but more than that I’ve met many men in this last year. However none stood out so much as Hollen. In the course of a few nights we had become as most couples do after months of dating. There was an effortlessness then, an effervescence that sparkled in every ounce of me. It just felt right, and who questions that feeling? Something so fleeting, so craved that even if it is ephemeral who cares? Seize it.
And so we did, and the story unfolded as you have already read and I have bemoaned.
But, recently I have changed. I don’t need a knight-in-shining-armor anymore. Months of almost complete gay isolation have given me time to recollect myself, to reprocess who I am, what I want, and why it’s all worth it.
And my answer to all of these is I don’t know.
Who does? And why do you have to? Sure I could be writing this as some sort of cathartic expression of psychosis, but I think that the worlds of black and white, of gray and grayer, are rational attempts to define the irrational. Try to define your essence in a few sentences and see how little you know of yourself. What we want must be beyond our absolute understanding, otherwise wouldn’t we all be happy? Or at least on the path towards happiness?
Which is why I’m glad that I’ve written Hollen off. I don’t care anymore about how great he was because no one who truly cared about me could so completely brush me aside later. A friend could never do that. I will not linger in the corners of despair or the shadows of melancholy. Instead, I’ll find a clean, well-lighted place: a place beyond the horrors of the shade, where the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. I need find no mate, I need pay no toil or toll. I am master of my fate, the captain of my soul.
In these final days abroad, these last hours of pause before my regular life recommences, I can only reflect on the fact that life in and of itself is meaningless. And so we must fill it with meaning, bring it to a frothy foam. A foam that drips over the edge, that bursts forth and sloshes with every toast, every dance, every nod, every touch.
I may not know where my soul need go, but I will lead it.
Life On The Ephemeral Plane 