I’m a writer, on my good days. There’s a satisfaction to the written word that sews up the tattered parts of me. Filling in the hollows, pieces of me that have flown off like discarded receipts in the wind, with similies and metaphor. I can't tell you what is original hardware anymore. I used to take myself more seriously. Too seriously. A different mind than the one I have now. I used to hate tropes. Now, I find the familiar beats comforting, like the steady hum of a heartbeat beneath skin pressed to my cheek. As captivating as the bare chest that contains it.
It makes the unstructured word even more beautiful and wild when it finds me. It makes unique approaches to tried and true themes feel transcendent. The "in" on a cascading joke.
A well done trope can read like a love letter, and I’m a sucker for a good love letter.
Reality doesn’t often follow the story beats the black and white worlds I straddle do. People on the other hand... well, the books I read tend to feature complex characters. Often I think heroes and villains are more black and white in the chapters marked by months and years than numbers and pages. Maybe the lack of perspective. For some, I’m a villain. Intentions aside.
I used to remember everything. Catalogue everything. Every word that was spoken. The beats per minute of my heart reacting to the timbre of a voice. The pattern of footsteps I could link to identity. A feeling to a phrase. As the years fell away, I made myself forget. I keep the past locked up, deep within myself like the set of a straight to TV thriller. More padlocks than could ever be necessary. Still not enough to keep it at bay. There's more of it than there used to be. There is what was, and what could have been.
Maybe it’s an upgrade. I don’t remember, but I feel. I used to not feel anything, stirred only by particularly charged phrases. Lust, love, hate, corrosive promises of forever tangled in stolen moments. Settling as swiftly as the infamous martini.
When I first hauled all those boxes, covered in a veil of neglect down into their tomb, I didn't know about their shadow selves. The mausoleum of memories lost, like a game rigged just for me, was never designed to hold the what ifs. They didn't even occur to me. For years, those memories sat, a suspended breath longing to exhale its secrets into the world once more. My forgotten era, the dark ages.
Now I sometimes creep down and examine them through the lens of years and growth. More and more, the heroes and villains fade to just people. Broken people, hurting people, lost people. I finally can accept I’m not a villain for my past. Not any more than any of us are. The line between hero and villain is as immaterial as the space between minutes, the circumstance between choices, the rose and crimson lense of perspective.
If not for the trick of almost the phrase would mean nothing more than the tattoo joint I’ve haunted for the last decade.
No, I’m not a villain in the boxes of my past. Not anymore. Just a human with some bad luck, some worse habits.
It's the “what ifs” that make me villainous. They still feel like they belong to me. Sometimes the breath between this moment and the ones that could have been is so fragile I can feel my body react to what was stolen from me. The rapid flutter of my stomach as inches between us evaporate into radiating heat. The chemistry, so palpable it rips air from my lungs and makes gravity an afterthought. The electric pulse of knuckles dragging from cheek to chin. A memory that was never mine, but should have been.
Moments I should have spoken up. Moments I should have quieted down. Moments I let slip by. Moments better lost I tried to recreate. What ifs.
My present is such a stark contrast from my past. The original foundation of a gleaming beautiful home. The faint scent of lemon and lime, clean, crisp and fresh. The drawers are all organized, and the closet is skeleton free. It's lived in, it's loved, and sunlight touches every corner. The sound of laughter endlessly echoes through the halls. Voices don’t raise. The walls have never known a hole. Then I descend the stairs and it's a silence so violent it has blades. The smell of dust. Row upon row of boxes. Compulsively, I need the order, the calm, the right. I need what I've achieved now to extend to those jumbles of memories. Now that I know how to do it right.
That is the stalemate. Surrounded by the remnants of the past, dissatisfied with them. Continually abandoning the clean up efforts for time in the present, the warmth, the light. Then between the two, the “what ifs” the ones I don't mourn because their absence secured my present. The ones that I still believe are mine, moments that exist in a space between reality and chemistry. Belonging to me, but never mind to hold.
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