a thousand tangents

how weird is it to only see you through Zuckerberg... i struggle to remember, but i remember a time when our faces were more than commonplace to each other. just the other day, i ran into my old self and thought about you and the calamity of our break up. here i go again: dramatizing everything... but isn’t it weird we said the word ‘love’ to each other, Sherman? i try to remember what i felt, why i felt it... i know we were slow to brew. i know there was nothing spontaneous about us. i remember feeling like i had a part of you, knowing that you’d be happy with whatever i chose to gave you. for a while, the idea of giving you up felt senseless, but after a while i found myself inundated in our lackluster love. 

i guess in the end i can say my not-so-shoddy-but-still-droning x (you, Sherman) taught me something invaluable about myself: great love survives, obliterates, conquers even-- shitty love sort of just dies and burns out the longer you revel in it.

side note: now you may be a great person and i may be a proponent of reveling in all aspects of life, but reveling in shit is ROFLing in shit and no matter what kind of joy or ecstasy you feel by the act of it all, you can’t really forget it’s shit. or can you?

i digress-- what i’m really trying to say is that nothing extraordinary becomes from lackluster love. it’s too much of an excuse; a half-baked and half-hearted attempt to pour ourselves into other people. do you want to know why i call it lackluster? because it fails to strike the subject in any permeable way. in many cases, it is the subject who desperately clings onto the monotony... thinking ‘something is amiss here’ or, on the contrary, completely oblivious of the(ir) tedium/personal troll project.

spoiler alert: if you’re completely oblivious, i can’t help you (only you can). but if (like me) your tragedy rests on being utterly aware, you’re here to be fascinated. this self-proclamation doesn't necessarily save us from all losers that have yet to pounce or try us. it sort of just reaffirms our intent to stay true to ourselves and our worth. fyi: this kind of self-love is no easy task... takes mad instinct, bravado, and discipline above all.

Sherman, you may have tried to be enough for me but you never were. and if i try hard enough, i can remember the pb&j mango sandwiches i tried to replicate for you to taste, the bundt cake you baked for me on my birthday, and how sad you sounded on the phone when i told you there was nothing you could do to keep me. in hindsight, i broke up with you from the comforts of my closet on the very same day i got my driver’s license. i wrote us off like a chapter in a book but was smart enough to leave our story open-ended. if it sounds like i’m cold or bitter in telling our story it’s because i’ve distanced myself from you-- time has made sure of that-- and also because i’ve been forced to villainize you over time, imagining the parts of you i never did divulge or the pieces of you which i’ve come to know since. 

lackluster love, in my opinion, is a different kind of hurt... the testaments of our broken machine were insignificant to me in the grander scheme, but irrefutably sad up close. immediately following our ‘this is the end’ call, i felt both relieved and disgruntled. now (two years since) i still don’t know what to make of us. i guess the major take away here is i’m not really phased by whatever we were.