Bottle of Soul

It's been a while since I've really written.  I do mean quite a long while.  I don't really remember the last time I sat down and threw down legitimate thoughts or emotions without getting caught up in ten things at once along the way.  And now, I just want to write.  I want to take the bottle full of my soul and tip it upside down, watch soul come gushing out and soaking the blank screen with words, sensations, emotions, anything that will come out, just so long as it's something, just to prove to myself there's still something there.

I don't want to be empty.  I'm rather afraid of it, really.  I don't know how to deal with it or what to do about it.  I'm constantly afraid of things losing their significance, of becoming old or obsolete or no longer feeling the same.  In moments when I want to be pressed against you but know I can't, it's the most important thing in the world, but what happens in the future?  If I'm able to do it every day, will it mean as much? 

I understand people who want to save sex for someone special.  I understand the idea of significance in it and the concept of making it something that does determine a particular kind of bond that one doesn't share with anyone else.  I understand it in part because that's not the way I've done it, and I've often worried if maybe I'm damaged as a result.  Maybe it was wrong of me to not value this action as much as others so clearly do.  But when it comes down to it, the emotion hasn't diminished.

If anything, I think I've gotten some of the significance that I initially threw away back.  I learned the contrast between sex that is just motions and sex that some would call making love.  And to me there is a difference.  It's one that I would have imagined but not understood had I not done things the way I did them.  So to a point, I'm glad I did.  I messed up a lot.  I caused a lot of pain.  Mostly what I'm talking about is this, not what once was but what now is.

I'd like to think I'm better than that, but I've thought it every single time before and something has still managed to go wrong.  So maybe I can't remember when the last time we had an issue was or why we had problems.  But I'm still afraid that there's something I'm missing, that I'm going to mess something up.  I don't know how to prevent things, and I'm afraid I haven't been patched up enough yet to believe that I can make things work. 

I hate to think of it this way, but I still don't feel like I can maintain good relationships.  When someone mentions marriage, I scoff but secretly wonder.  I no longer see myself as the marrying type.  I think of myself as too broken to hold something together for that long, too messed up and selfish and flighty to maintain any semblance of a healthy relationship at all, not to mention for what would, at any given point, be the rest of my life.  I'm afraid of it because if (or when) I get married, I want to do it for life.  I'm one of those people who believes in sticking with things and working out problems.  I'm just afraid that I'm not good enough to stick to that.

I used to plan out my future.  I felt like I knew what I was doing and where I was going and who I would be there with.  I didn't figure emotions or people could change radically enough for things like that to fall apart.  But I'm not so naive now.  I understand that things happen.  I know that everything changes and sometimes no matter how hard you want to hold on to something, you have to let go.  So I'm afraid to think about the future.  I'm afraid to talk about it.  I'm afraid to have anything to do with it because what if something falls apart before I get there? 

I don't remember how to put my life back together.  I've done it before and I think I could do it again.  But the thing is, it's been too long since I've done it for me to remember how, or for me to have any idea of whether or not I really could.  I don't really remember things being too different from the way they are now.  I'm afraid that if they were, I would fall apart.  And I don't know how to deal with it.  That scares me.  So even as I'm sitting here counting down the last seventy-four days of this, I'm secretly hoping that maybe I can live a little bit longer in those last few, that maybe I won't have to say goodbye, that maybe if it doesn't change, I'll be able to keep it all together.

The terrifying part is that I know that life goes on.  I'm very much afraid of what that means for me.