"ZERO SUM GAME"
[11/10/2024]"It's not art unless you laugh / One of these days I'm gonna laugh / It's a long way down, I know that now"
- lyrics from the song "Pavement" by Teen Suicide.
Sometimes I look back, way back. Sometimes I look back at the person I once was. But an odd thing happened this week. Actually, a lot of odd things happened this week but most of those are private to my bedside journal. The odd thing in question is more of a solemn epiphany, a shaded thicket of trees surrounding me, casting long shadows on the path I walk now.
I still have a hard time understanding the phrase "can't see the forest for the trees." I also don't really understand the metaphor "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" no matter how many times somebody explains it to me. Whatever, I guess. I honestly look down at my feet a lot of the time when I walk, or even hike, or sometimes when I sit too. It's a habit I have. Maybe I feel like if I'm not looking at where I step, where I'm walking right now at the exact moment my feet carry me forward, I'll fall. I worry I'll fall down fast, and hard, and embarrassingly. Or even worse; maybe there'll be a time when I fall and I don't get back up again.
When I looked back at a former version of myself, I saw someone different there. Often, I think about the person who other people saw me as at the time. What form is taken when I am perceived? What ghost takes loose, vague shape in the minds of the people that remember me? I think of that ghost often. But this time, I looked back and I didn't see the ghost. I saw myself through the fog, and I met her.
I sat with her a while. I saw her at a point in my life, a couple points, at all the sad points. These points, they looked similar, overlapping, compounding into and onto itself and back again. It was sad to see her go through that. Hurt, in pain. Distant, alone. Not many people had met her down there.
I played through "Milk Inside A Bag of Milk Inside A Bag of Milk" & "Milk Outside A Bag of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk" this past week. There were so many ways in the dialogue of this visual novel to put the main character down, to insult her, to show no remorse towards her, to be ashamed of her, to hate her. It was a sickening display of internal dialogue so raw to the touch that it hurts to even prod the surface of it. Every moment was drenched, soaked with the sickly slime of self-loathing, of pity, of the space between death and sleep. It was violence.
Without realizing it, after talking with my fiance in a moment now gone, I had thought about all the directions she (my past internal self) could've gone from these points. I thought about all the places I could be at this point, right now today, if I had taken a different path. If she was scooped up by some nefarious body, some malicious thing, some abusive person. If she had given up to the gloom of sadness, the pain of the time, the misery of feeling lost and alone in a world that seemed it could not care about her, the self-loathing of trying to justify abandonment. If I became someone violently searching the world surrounding me, lashing out in fits of unformed emotion, discovering myself through people and action piloted by that malevolent and formless ghoul of someone who could never be at rest. I would not have blamed her; the odds were not in her favor.
Now, she is not alone. I'm not sure how to help her now. All I can do is sit with her in the quiet points. Most of these quiet moments feel the same. Tinged with an aura; the fear of loss. The fear that if I stand in one place too long, trying to pick up all the broken pieces of my history that surround me, I won't move forward. That someone won't stay behind with me, that I can't go on. "Zero-sum game."
Inside, I must be there for my own self. Stay with her; stay with me. Wounds break open if one tries to move to quickly. I should know, I still have the scars from my stitches. I've thought about starting a compliment jar: for every violent thing I say about myself, about her, I write down one nice thing to say about myself, one thing that I like, and put it in the jar for a rainy day. Maybe the younger version of myself will see it too. I hope it will let her know that she is okay.