33 - Schaffer the Darklord - Boo! (I'm A Ghost!)
sometimes weird things happen to me around music. i often think of songs for no reason several hours before i hear them on shuffle. or sometimes they show up at the precisely correct time.
i first heard this song when you went to Albuquerque. you'd been gone for just a few hours. i felt tension sliding down my body, thinking i wasn't going to have to worry about you wanting to kill yourself for at least a few days. and i laid in bed and put this album on while i played that game you hated me playing. (btw, i'm noticing that i play games to disassociate from my real life. you didn't say this explicitly, but it was an implication. it would have been super helpful if i could've heard you saying it.)
this track came on and it was scourging. it was like he was mocking me. "that's what you get, you silly shit. you built your house on a burial mound." your impeding death was haunting me and it was a fucking nightmare. having you was never having you; you were always going to be on your way out. neither you nor i seemed to be able to stop it from happening. i knew i would probably let it grind me down to a nub.
in retrospect, why was i going to do that? because i loved you incorrectly and myself not at all. actually, yeah, the best thing was to try and stand in your way. and i knew that, but i was stuck in that place, mostly unable to actually do it, because of my confusion around your rejections of tactics that had previously helped. but unable to really wash my hands of it, because... yeah you won't let me touch you or try to talk you into feeling better, but also i don't want you to die. so when you beg me for permission to do it, i can't say yes because i love you, and i can't say no because you hate me for it.
ghosts, both of us. dead where we sat, acting out the drama of what originally killed us: your thousand mortal wounds, my self-made paralysis.
i have so many regrets, but the regrets are tied up in things that could not have happened elsewise. there are so, so many things that i did that weren't okay, and there were also things that you did that weren't okay.
when i miss you, what i'm missing is that time when our insubstantialities occupied the same space. it felt like maybe i could combine with you and become alive again. but as the poet said, two abysses don't produce a height. would it were so! what a dark horse we'd have been.
i'm sorry. i know it's not good for me to send you emails. if you even get them, they're probably annoying. otoh, i've come to remember that when i can see that i've done something wrong, i have an obligation to tell that person. otherwise it's a continued denial of reality. it's completely mad that i would hear your voice and feel so threatened, but that's clearly what was happening. goes to show: the peace, candor, and kindness i show to the outside world is a veneer, as i've been more poetically told. but i don't want it to be. i want it to suffuse to the core.