into the caverns of tomorrow

with just our flashlights and our love

we must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

Nostalgia always cuts the deepest. I always promise myself not to indulge in the drug, all too easy to become addicted, the high never good enough. I wish to return back, to any day but this one. So counter productive, the opposite of my impossible path to enlightenment. Wishing for a glass of red wine, close friends and a cold Los Angeles night. Instead I find myself so disgustingly alone. Abandoned. I could vomit, I swear I will, with disgust, for how failing today is, the unrewarding, grinding reality of daily life. No matter how hard they try to alter the chemicals, my brain waivers towards a heavy heavy weight. Incredibly consuming never shut down. So I dodge this moment and wish to escape elsewhere. To my back house, my past lovers, close friends and a time long gone. The past. What a looming, unidentifiable notion, longing for something that truly doesn’t exist. That maybe never did. I can’t prove that you were once here standing next to me. There isn’t proper evidence, of your tongue in my mouth and the stain you left on me. No longer bruised, for there wasn’t a wound, but, still holding on to a distant sound of a heartbeat that I cannot hear anymore. Attachment. The promise to never let go.

But it isn’t that the promises failed. A dog’s liver. The end of a life time. What does it mean to him to be gone. I am still here, faced with empty chairs and all too present absence. The silent witness. I will not let go.

So, this is the mantra, the refusal to release, to purge. The need to stand over a bridge, puking every ounce of my gut out until I am released of the poison. The unintentional nicotine. The sorrow I’m left with. I want to strip and run bare into an ice cold East Coast river and pray I don’t die, maybe then I’ll really get to feel alive.

The numb days pass by and I feel less and less. I long for a pinch, a scream, a tug of a shirt and the lift, the reward, the human interaction, the knowing each other differently, fully. Yet I am left isolated, holding my forearm loosely to acknowledge myself as my greatest companion. Always ready to annotate, to comment, to let myself know what today feels like. To ponder if morning will ever come. Wide awake with arm raised insanity, three-position tossing until head ached I come to a nightly conclusion, a promise to do better tomorrow, to wake up earlier, to be productive, to find what it is I am dying for. Longing for.

Nails bitten to blood and I weep. I mourn. A sibling lost, a baby, a brother, my greatest companion. Along with him goes childhood , I must conclude. For he was there all along. Too sad to comprehend, the winter depression setting in. Day lights saving, there is no light here, just darkness, just me and me in the dark, looming and harassing to my bright eyes, unwanted yet ever present.

I listen to old songs and cling to the small waist, jutted hip-bone indecision that drove me to an older, more specific lunacy. Missing when things were simple. So overwhelming then to sip on iced-tea and wish for peaceful matrimony, now just one nice night would suffice. I do not mean to sound so down. No, this is not the case. I value life, its glory, the beauty and promise of each clean day. But it’s all too easy to see the truth behind the sunlight. That there is indeed a stomach-wrenching illness that drives me and the world from which I originate. An error in the equilibrium, no matter how deliberate, an intentional glitch that brings us to one another. The man the solution to woman. How I continue to long for you, anonymous, figureless, the remedy, proper equation, concoction, to heal you.

My depression lingers like an unwanted guest. Always present. Allowing for no time alone. We are always together. Standing in the hallway when I’m trying to get to the other room. Blocking my way. It is so persistent, lingering, dragging. I am constantly weighed down. So I plow forward, tearing down the weeds that grow in my veins and block a proper stream, but I cannot bleed out. I am stuck here, in this wandering yet stationary gridlock condition, waiting for escape.