Young & Beautiful: Rambling Post Ahead

Soundtrack:

I run into a chick who I knew before I got married and before **** and before **** and everything else that's happened in the past 2 years. She asks me vague personal questions as I can see her female brain trying to read my face to belie my emotional state regarding my equally vague answers.

I know the game. I don't give away anything on my face, only vagueries in word form: "things are good," and "busy, you know how it is," and "oh, y'know, the usual."

I don't ask her shit about her life because I don't have the ambivalence to go through the societal expectation that I return the favor and ask b/c I don't give a fuck.

Her friends are all married now she confides, they're all moving. The age of a few years has not done her any favors. She's still decent looking, nice build for her age, but the corners of her eyes, and her skin.....it gives tell of a couple years of melodrama, real drama, and drinking and smoking.

She remarks she hasn't seen me downtown lately and I tell her I haven't been out much, busy working and training.

She takes one last moment or 5 trying to read my face, for signs of.....what I've been up to and where I've been the past 2 years. I don't give her anything.
---

It begins slowly as I know it will.
I'm going to skip the gym b/c I've grinded like crazy lately.
In the quiet, I begin to hear the siren call of downtown. It's not strong like it once was, but it whispers and licks its lips with a fingernail tugging at the collar of my dress shirt. I don't feel the pull as inescapably as I once did.
I have money in my pocket.....I remember a night that began the same way not long ago and I remember sitting in a cell.

I recall seeing The Great Gatsby.
I recall feeling the tears well up in my eyes as Gatsby sees Daisy for the first time in 5 years.
He's crossed time and tide, and he's come within inches of what he things can now possibly be his.
The golden girl is within his grasp. Her voice beckoning to him from behind the confines of marriage and I think of her for the first time in ages. She fades from my mind's b/c her life and mine will not overlap. She's from normalcy and from homes and houses and families together on holidays and I've never understood those facets of human life.

I think back to my ***** trip and the feel of another girl in my arms, her on my lap, watching strippers grind, later that night, in bed and her quoting She Wants Revenge to me.
I remember walking the streets with her after the rain subsided, posted up in a private corner of a bar, a confidant barkeep who I'd know would keep his mouth shut. The segue to a late night and drinking and her pulling me inside of her while my fingers wrapped around her throat and a moan could barely escape her lips and her grasping my wrist, wanting it tighter, wanting to feel the life almost go out of her.

The first time I'd met a woman with that effect on me in nearly 7 years.
A feeling, a reaction I don't expect to come across but maybe another time or two in my life.
I'm playing roulette. I think I have another chamber or two at best.
A woman that could drive me insane. A woman with that wordless, inarticulable strumming across the chords of my being.
Game recognizes game.

So you go for it and you don't hold back. You tell her exactly the words as they form in your heart and mind simultaneously. It falls apart b/c part of you knows it always would and part of you is glad b/c you're afraid of how loving so much that you won't be able to shut your mind and heart to it.

So part of you rejoices when it ends and you sigh an expression of relief and briefly shut your eyes and block out the image of you and her in apartment, tempestuously living together, and the flame eventually dying and you know that Oscar Wilde is right, that with its premature end it will burn brightly in memory, far more brightly than had time and life dulled the flame to a sputtering puddle of wax only lukewarm and fading faster still with each passing second.

We still talk occasionally and she's keeping me on the line in the event she moves here.
Knowing my luck, she'll move her around the time I settle up accounts and my legal issues and I'm packing my things into 2 bags or less. I am leaving and I know in some room of my mind that she'll move to this area when I'm packing my shit to leave this fucking place only in the dark corners of memory and the like.

I see the future sometimes. I don't know if Fitzgerald was right when he said "show me a hero and I'll show you a tragedy" or if that even matters b/c if I'm the hero, this must be a satire or some sort of Faustian-rewrite where I've already made the deal with the devil but I have amnesia.

I don't know if I'm ready to settle down....if I'm willing or capable of being happy.
I don't know that I believe in the word.
I know some girls will believe I'm ready to settle down.....it's not that I am...I'm just fucking tired.


I look at my life and barely recognize both myself and the other parts from what it was less than a year ago. The work is the same but little else remains of who I was. Single again, lacking the thirst for drink and excitement I once did, no longer curious as to "the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men." Perhaps this is wisdom? Or perhaps this is maturity?
It's not a choice as I once suspected, but rather the eventual passing of time that forces your gait to slow a full step. I smile b/c I'm fucking glad. That shit was tiring.
I found my first white/gray hair on my head the other day.
The decade of "Thirty--the promise of a decade
of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning
brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair."
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

I'm tired of the sprint toward the horizon chasing the red flags and long nights....but I know somehow...that you don't dance with the devil, the devil dances with you.
I fear he's not done letting me ride this rollercoaster.

"Will you love me when I've got nothing but my aching soul?"

I go back to the Gatsby film and seeing the ache, the longing, the ravenous desire and trembling captivation of desire so absolute one loses themselves in another.....

Can a love and desire that burns that brightly burn more than briefly?