i am not jealous

other things seem to be awkward truths rather than inevitabilities. it occur to me that what i lack on balance, i make up for my familiarity with fear and unease and occasionally despair; and that this itself is a kind of balance. i try to tell myself i must accept certain private inevitabilities. i will live a life full of continual deep fatigue, for example. i will carry in me, like a poison, like a virus, rancor for most things, and while this conditon will not improve, nonetheless i will learn to live with rancor as if it were a minor irritation. there will be many achievable things that i will not do and then there will come a time when i realize they no longer even achievable.

the outlook of my life is narrowing.

i don't think of this truth but i feel it, as if my breath has been taken away from me as when a rollercoaster begins its plummet. whoosh. the outlook is undeniably narrowing. the horizon is shrinking. then again, though i can hardly speak for the others, maybe it's also true to say that everybody's lives are narrowing, one way or another. if that's the case, why even bother to think of it? certain flashes of clarity come when it seems better instead to stop thinking.
but it's best not to trust clarity. better to welcome and accept the mist that seeps into our life, that clings to our clothes, that soaks us to the bone in this scrapyard we are lost in. the mist. if the options are thinking and stop thinking, and you know you can't stop, that's where the idea of suicide comes from. of course there is despair, when things fucked up and you want to be dead but that's just circumstantial. that's just bad feeling brought on by the adrenaline of events, by violence or rip-off. bad feeling of the imminent sadness. sadness looms like a mountain, i tell you.

and then there is love. you were transported, elsewhere, another. the unswerving purpose of someone in trance. like a mental illness.

i knew nothing about mental illnesses. i didn't know what a nervous breakdown looked like. if any signs were obvious, i think i must have buried them. because when you think you're inlove, you don't want to know about the things that could end it. it was sad. it is so sad that feeling sad was so rare. it was sad too that feeling happy was frightening. it only meant wanting to feel even happier.

it was better to be sad, i guess.