Stepping Away From Well-Worn Rhythms

snowmachine (64)in #writing • 7 years ago

I have already had what I consider many perfect days. At least they’re perfect, to the mangled poor-excuse for a human being that I’ve been living as for so many years.

So on a perfect day I wake up, and I get to love someone, and eat without worrying how big my thighs are getting, play videogames or read books. I get to write without hating myself too badly, and I go to sleep without a lump in my throat. Maybe I’ll even walk in the park with my dogs, for a second remember sunshine.

When Robert and I still lived at the hotel, every night we'd go outside and look at the moon. It moved 13 degrees in the sky every night. I still remembered the night it was so bright I could barely look at it, its white surface like a halogen bulb. A full moon. The buck moon. (I looked that up in the Farmer’s Almanac.)

It’s been so long since I’ve really looked at the moon. But it’s been there the whole time.

I’m not rich in my fantasies. I’m not clean and opulent. Even in my dreams I’m sitting on a mattress on the floor with modelo cans scattered about, reading on my cracked Nexus tablet while the dogs lay beside me. I’ve had enough money and enough material possessions to know that real happiness is a much more complicated construct than external acquisition.

I forget what’s happening to me, and-
I catch myself.
I catch myself.

For a moment my breath is heavy, strained as if through a mesh filter, as I realize that I’m actually happy. And I want to pull back, to remind myself of all the awful things that happened, how she pushed my face down into the carpet, the “I don’t love you anymores”, all the pain rupturing up through bubbling whispers. The pain is safe. I know how to hold on.

When I walk through the park with my dogs, there are demons in the woods. My demons. My pantheon - I’ve talked about this before in those aforementioned therapy sessions- horned gods and ghost girls, whispering to me to come back into their comfortable and melancholy arms.

I have to push them back. I’m going somewhere new, and they know they can’t come with me. They’re terrified, and so am I, because I know the texture of black and tattered wings pushed against my spine better than the texture of a warm hug and beach sand.

Nobody ever writes about this moment, I think. How much learning how to be happy can be the most painful, difficult, messy, terrifying thing that a miserable human being can do. How buying a bouquet of flowers because you think they’re pretty is an act of defiance, not just against yourself but the world that put you into this position.

It’s training your body to move to a new rhythm. Every day, stepping out of the well-worn grooves. Telling the demons “I’m sorry, but soon I’m going to have to leave you behind.”