the word insatiable; the word voracious

you've got to keep in mind this image of me googling "here we go again guy meme" while the whole screen blurs into pixels in front of me. I don't remember the last time i cried about Liverpool like this, some kind of good honest 'it is what it is but the hurt still hurts' kind of crying- I suspect it's probably from some nonsense game that we lost or tied in the league or something, in 2019 where I last cared about Liverpool in the way that is hard to describe and yet perfectly clear to only me- there's a lot of different kinds of mourning when it comes to Liverpool football club, which is not to say that's all I remember from it. In fact now that I think about it the title makes me cry harder. Yeah, I did have to go backspace just now and delete the s from title.

I keep trying to make light of it. I guess that's just who I am now, grown up but not in the way I ever envisioned it to be but kind of always suspected, or maybe even hoped, will happen. Someone slightly disappointing to previous-me because I'm happy, and not gloriously dead. Sort of suspensefuly, gingerly happy, like a cat walking on soft paws in an unfamiliar room. And part of that feels like a betrayal, not because of the still alive thing, but because of the happy, but not because of liverpool thing. I've thought of many, many metaphors about football through the years, defaulting often to the most familiar- signing a contract, succumbing to religion, praying at the altar, none of which really gets to the root of it, which is now and will be forever (dismayingly) that once upon a time you decided, based on some reason or other, to believe, and henceforth forever after you reserve some memory of that belief. Or maybe muscle memory of belief, or maybe just retaining the idea that the person you used to be believed-

You get it. You see now, I think. Anyway the gateway drug of hope is once you believe in one thing, like Liverpool will win a match (again depending on when you started doing the believing, this would either be normal belief or some kind of unattainable desire) you end up believing in a bunch of things, like This world is good and I want to live in it (If only to see Jordan Henderson lift a premier league trophy, and put the little crown on someone's head, maybe Adam La- you get it) So now it kind of feels like I'm mourning some kind of training wheels toward happiness, which- I suppose it's not wrong.

I'm not mourning a man. Everything I want to say to Jurgen Klopp I feel like I've said on January 24 2016 and probably also May 26 2018- it has, never, never ever, been about, the ending of things. It's only ever been a man pointing in the direction of the future and me (all of us) looking with him. Once you have a beginning, once you have a promise, once you have a belief, you understand it comes at the price of goodbye, ending, dissolution. When Stevie announced his decision to leave back in that one January I knew exactly the kind of mourning I endured- which is why now I'm kind of marveling at these tears- which is why in the midst of all this random thrashing of pent up emotion I recognize- 

Sometimes you need someone to show you how to believe. Not just a concept, or an idea, or a team. You need someone. Someone putting a hand to the crest, covering it with their palm, looking to the stands. Then you understand, and once you understand, you will carry it forever, no matter how the original belief has morphed or changed. Then you put your own hand over the crest, you look back, you open your mouth, you sing. Even after everything, even if you think you no longer know the words to the song.