When the sky goes

I finally let go in the small hours of February 9, 2023. It was an almost stranger I burned to tell first, though that burn cooled with the risen sun. Curled in her words like a cat in a cupboard, I had waited in vain too long.

For years, I have felt miles removed from what makes me me. The life we designed for ourselves, Annette and I, got bombed by circumstance to become a shatter zone of irksome demands and interruptions. The wholly understandable fact that no one need care – that no one should care – eats at me, which is itself a fact that eats at me. In my perception of my recent past – last decade or so –, I gave everything I have to life in as moral, loving and good a way as was in my power to do, deliberately, diligently, to unexpectedly produce a heap of dissonant events of little value or meaning to anyone but me. What remains is the stubborn sense that, having been broadly right all along, I got everything wrong.

Sometimes being on the right side of history is for the dogs. At least, that’s how it seems. 

My past now embarrasses me. It has amassed more weight than my enthusiasm, my ambition. I embarrass me. Who follows their heart so assiduously only to end up in a bitty, unattractive situation, in half-hearted isolation, as I managed? Maybe most who take on this sort of thing? (Or perhaps my heart is not what I thought.) 

So I gave up, and it took minimal effort. Something slipped off the edge of my life and dropped into oblivion.

My advice would be to follow your heart in secrecy, if you can. But perhaps, when history collapses in on itself, and just before narcissism breaks against the hard truth of its insoluble hollowness, all the air of the world can only be thick with the reek of it, a rot the best makeup artists, fashion designers, directors, producers and SFX wizards can never fully conceal. In times like these, there is no escape. I’d now say there never is.

So if you too saw the pig not the lipstick, if the world makes you soul-sick, you might well be one of those who now feels no pride or joy or satisfaction in having seen straight all these years.

But yes, I embarrass me. Not only can I make no clear sense of anything, I am as far as it is possible to be from knowing or sensing that any attempt to understand the depths is worth it, or could possibly be of value. So here I am with my future stretched out before me, a lifeless road dressed in no scenery, skewering an emptied horizon, under no stars, no sky.

☕︎

It could not be more perfect. How else am I to be made properly sensible to what must be felt, how else properly inured against my many egoic sensitivities?