the eulogy you want more than anything

[It's been a week. I've let the words fall beside me, let them land on me, I've stepped out of the way for some. You're here, ish. Is this what you're looking for? Is this what you're here for?]

The other day, I was in a place that played that song. The one that so captured the feeling it was for me to know you. The one with a metaphor for a title. The one that eventually all the words came true, and then suddenly none of it mattered.

I keep hearing you wonder (not that I heard you, but your voice is as solid in text as in the air): I hope you never hate me.

I never thought I could. I trotted out a simple phrase to assure you through all your doubts and predictions of the way it would be between us, and I believed in that phrase; that generous phrase.

[I wish I could've assured myself]

I never imagined the machinery of my mind could turn in the opposite direction. I could not foresee any instances of grief between us, given that nothing but discreet intellectual discourse and polite admiration had passed between us. I suppose I thought we were better than this.

"just like an angel off the page, you have appeared to my life..."

Your entrance was mythic, like manna raining down from the skies, your words were full and heavy with promise, fascinating, glittery;

Yet it was you, your grandiose ideas, your opinions, your feelings on the matters of so many things that enraptured me. I've known a lot of people, been known by a lot of people, but you were incomparable.

Mostly, for me, it was knowing someone else who straddled the grayness of the world, being neither a lover, nor a fighter, but elements of both and essentially all things, and basing it on speculative logic all the while.

"I wonder why it is, I won't let my guard down for anyone but you"

If there is any hate in my heart for you, which I try to muster up in bursts of exclamations that no one believes or wants to hear anyway, it is that you got inside my walls, the ones that have been in place for longer than I'm aware. I still haven't figured it out, except that perhaps you traveled back in time, told yourself to be the most wonderful, serendipitous peripheral acquaintance, which would grant you unequivocal access to me some years later if only you could deduce the secret password.

I wake up every morning with phantom memories of you entwined in my thoughts, that I weed until they are no more, but like weeding, it is an endless task, just when the garden has been picked over, it seems the rest of the weeds underground have surfaced while the eye was distracted, and so I spend my nights picking out more things and trying to push your influences and opinions back into my periphery.

I was starved and your words were the sustenance that brought me out of the delirium of hunger. You spread glorious words at my feet, showered me with linguistic feats, and smothered me in the joy of language. I couldn't resist you and you couldn't resist giving me yourself.

"I wonder why it is, I don't argue like this with anyone but you..."

You gave me what I was hungry for, and then you took it away. You had your reasons. You had your logic. But it seemed turned against me. It seemed opposite what I was then clamoring for. I keep trying to trace its twists and turns in my mind, but it is complicated, my memory is bad, and I can't. I try to tell the story of us and every time I am interrupted, told to stop, that it is too much.

You say the most garish things. It is hard for me not to argue them. The analogies? For you. If you look back through the entries before your entrance, it is an occasional device, but nothing more, not relied upon. Those analogies were my way of writing just for you, my gifts from the skies,

And it is easy to say that you must have known, you should have known that every beautiful word was for you. I can reconcile that you didn't always understand my intentions, in fact have misinterpreted them, just as I did with you. I understand that we are only human and cannot read minds. do you understand?

For me, there are definitely points you've made that cannot be denied. I was a wheel of contradictions with you, and I spun in no predictable fashion. Yet, from the beginning, and throughout, and at the end, I have produced disclaimer after disclaimer that who I am at this time in my life was someone who was not well and not at my best. And all I wanted was for you to know me at my best.

It is funny to me that you said emphatically to let it go, there's nothing to prove, but here you are, there you go, your presence haunts me. Why don't you let it go? What do you have to prove? Why don't you leave me alone?

Do you feel as cheated by our recklessness, our hastiness, our clashes?

In the end, I know I will never really hate you. Hating you would be easier, actually, I could blithely place the blame squarely on you, and spend each day loathing you. It is much harder to ache for you, to want to speak to you, to want to be with you and not be able to. It is much harder to be misunderstood and ostracized from your circle. Your misanthropic ego did validate me.

It just didn't have any compassion for me.

[Goodbye. I'm gone.]