Flincher

I must be somebody’s darling sometime

Photo by Michael Krahn on Unsplash

I get this feeling sometimes that the world’s playing with me, a little bit at a time. By which I mean, jiggles me by the odds and gawky, loosey-goosey ends. I wonder sometimes what my life would look like if it were different. Think too much. It’s exhausting because inside my head, I’m 200 different people in any given afternoon.

I’m the person writing this story, and she is a woman sometimes, though others, she just morphs into this gormless, other thing. I’m hopeful, yet a nihilist in the same sentence. I’m drenched in this love for life, but then give myself to long bouts of drink and depression. And word-fuel and munch-crazies, and laughter and sex and dark and loud and sometimes all that at once. And it’s exhilarating, and I don’t complain, though every so often, I try to explain. Not justify, just make sense of things. Except, it usually ends up making me sad again, because by the time people have finished listening to my explanation, I will have moved again. I can’t sit still. I flinch too much. I change my mind on a whim and want and dis-want, can’t remember owning things, find myself alien from things I loved best.

Sometimes I think I tether myself to places and stories inside my mind because they serve as constants. If I love you, I can love you always, there’s no need for bargaining, for to-and-fro. I…