Alone

It’s cold in here. I’m bundled, but it’s not enough. It’s like that last pull-up where you can just lick the bar but can’t get over it. You struggle but your muscles are so content with their position they refuse to move like a reluctant dog. It’s dark. The embers sustain enough light to make out silhouettes on the wall, but everything else is a peripheral unknown. Their reality is irrelevant. It’s all irrelevant. How can one even exist in such a desolate place? The only vessel for light is useless as it’s dusk. Why did I make that hole so god damn small? I hate crawling. That feeling of constriction reminds me too much of the mental straitjacket I fall asleep in every night. The one I fear of falling captive to everyday. The kind I’m in right now. It’s as if I have some underlying masochistic tendency that I fall victim to whenever I let my guard down. Here’s the punch line though: I’m always the culprit. I subject myself to these horrible and arduous situations for reasons that escape me. I say they escape me but here I am, in my head, in this frozen abode contemplating every reason for every action I take. I ask questions I already know answers to. Is it some social defense mechanism? Am I really that uninteresting that I have to ask arbitrary questions just so I have something to say? Darla used to bring that up all the time. I hated that about her. She’d always mock my obliviousness and patronize anything I muttered. I tried to counter her by asking questions with definitive answers as to not look like a fool, but alas, she would criticize my stating the obvious. It was a terribly abusive relationship and I still wonder why I endured it for as long as I did. Perhaps this touches back on the reason I’m in this prison in the first place, that self-degrading masochism. Perhaps that’s why I live such a horrid life. It doesn’t mean anything to be happy and enjoy things. There’s nothing real in that. Nobody is as happy as the people in the photographs that come with picture frames. True happiness is a day off and a new pack of cigarettes. Frolicking in a field with your “true love” is a fantasy people play out because they feel like they’re supposed to. That won’t end the suffering. With each inhale and exhale I contradict myself. I take a drag and rant about how suffering and pain are the only real emotions that occur in the world, but walk into my house and find frames and frames of people I don’t know smiling in places I’ve never been. Places I’ll never go. I inhale all the bad things and dissect them until there’s nothing left but debris, and I exhale with some hope for a normal happy life. A “picture perfect” life. God, how I long for a family. Acceptance. Love. It will never happen though; no one will ever love me. How could they? Even if someone somehow found a way to love me, I could never accept it. There’s something wrong with you if you can love me, and I certainly can’t be with a crazy. It’s a hopeless situation. That’s why I stay here. I stay here where it’s cold and I can rest easy knowing I won’t be disturbed. People are all around me but I’m encased in a fortress. The only way in is through the little tunnel, and not everybody likes the notion of escaping from prison only to find themselves in prison. I can’t leave yet, though. The embers are still burning. There are still a few drags left. That’d be a waste. I may be a lot of things, but wasteful is not one. Nor do I have any sympathy. Killing that last cigarette would be doing it a favor, but I won’t be the one to fulfill that dream. That butt will burn out like every one of us: dark, cold, and alone.