I'm driving myself crazy again with questions that will never be answered. There's no way of knowing what's going on in someone else's brain. But instead of accepting that, I run through constant what-if scenarios, all the while entertaining further hypotheticals by trying to anticipate every possible outcome of any situation that would lead me to a resolution that I feel like I need and am owed, knowing that I have to own what I have because this is it. This is the way things are and will be. They don't change. Things rarely do once they've been committed to and whatever I do to fight it, the crazier I am to resist. 

When will I get over the fact that things don't fit into a box. The world doesn't revolve around what I want. I'm a speck of nothing in mountain of heavy sighs. That's the world as it is. This whole self-aware human thing isn't all that great as everyone spends the years telling you it will be. 

There's always just one thing I never tell anyone, but it's not a secret. 

I feel helpless, just when I feel I've got a grasp on this I find myself swimming deeper and deeper into thoughts about how everything falls apart around me. I have hope, but hope is hollow. Hope is weak. Hope isn't everything I've lead myself to believe it is. I remember this feeling, it's been rattled around inside of me a lot. Lost. That's how I would describe it. Tired of talking about the problem I can't get passed, not that it would be this difficult had I been wearing the boots made for walking away.

This is the downside of dating. The uncertainty and lack of closure. I'm all for the chase... or rather, I used to be. Often now, I'm too tired to chase a pretty face around the glowing lights of neon bar signs. I only want someone that I can look at and listen to and not want to kill myself around. Maybe that's still too picky. It wouldn't matter anyway, it'd be a few months and I'd be bored like always and find myself in the same spot with the upper hand on the situation instead of desperately grasping at delusional thoughts like they were pockets of air in the deep, black ocean of depression I'm currently overwhelmed in.

And to track it all down to just one person, one person I didn't sleep with. I didn't makeout with. I just felt comfortable and wanted to spend the time knowing more about. What did it all change? The routine. The straightforward, unabashed snide asshole that got what he wanted. What did I even want from her? Was I just lonely? Fuck if I know. I can throw out all the questions for miles and still come no closer to knowing myself any better than the five minutes before when I started down the good cop/bad cop routine with myself in a dark room with the dim light of this monitor.

I think what's truly terrifying is just how close it all came to being real again. That feeling. I don't feel things, I'm a robot. I've built and steeled myself to digest and process the human condition, and weed that annoying shit out to the best of my ability. And here I am, depressed because a girl up and disappeared on me after putting in two months of 'getting-to-know-you' time. It should be nothing. It should be a flash in the pan, cool - thanks for your time, see ya around, done. But for some reason it isn't, and it's fucking killing me not knowing why...

It's probably just that I didn't get the final say. It likely has nothing to honestly do with me having a heart, just me having an ego.

Where did you go?

Lost again. This time in thought. This time it doesn't feel like plunge a dull knife into my chest. More like spoons into my eyes. So in that aspect, things have improved. 

Why is it that every time I take a second to slow down, I’m just thinking about the things that I could’ve done better with her? Then I just admit to myself that I’m depressed and though things will inevitably get better as time glazes over the feelings that I’m having right now, even though I can barely acknowledge that I was already having doubts. From the beginning, there were these glaring doubts and I chose to ignore them. Now that I’m on the rejected end of the spectrum, I’m too busy feeling pity for myself to revisit things that I wrote-off as my being shallow or self-absorbed and close-minded, when it’s very possible that these were red flags all along. The fact still remains, though, that of all the dates and faux-dates and whatevers I’ve been on in the past year, she was the first one that got a hook in me. She kept me coming back because something in my brain liked what was going on in her brain. I liked looking at her. I liked her words. I liked her. Now, I just like the fact that I breathe, sometimes. I’m a person that needs communication, and she was busy a lot more than not. That left gaps that grew a needing to be filled. Instead of tending to myself, I let her run the gauntlet over my emotions since I like to believe and pretend that I have none. Turns out that I actually do. It gets exhausting being wrong a lot.

And so it is... just like I'd hoped it wouldn't be. But better now than later after my ankles were wrinkled and my waist was wet. 

I write to you a lot, but I rarely write about you. 

Sifting through memories like old photographs, at least the piles are less cluttered. What's more amazing is the dull hum of the television I've left on in the back of my head, it's just static. This buzz of white noise as I pull and plug the faint noises of voices I used to recognize. Now they're just garbled garbage mouth talk with some recording echo effect like they bounce off brick walls.

And I've listened to "Nothing Compares 2 U" at least three times today. Honestly, it gets better, just like everything else on repeat just before your patience collapses and you hate it all over again. I can feel the support beams bowing as I remember the smell and the way that she twisted her hair out of her face. What's weird is that first date, I didn't give a shit - I was too nervous and didn't think there'd be a second or third - and so on. Now I'm floating along this empty space just curious about the closure aspect of it all. Everyone likes a good mystery, except when nothing gets solved. And I'm a ground zero.

You'd think getting older solves a lot more problems, but it doesn't. Even steeling myself against occurrences such as this didn't prepare be very well except in the land of make-believe. I have the face that I wear and I wear it well enough. But when I close that door and no one's looking - it feels so good to fall apart before I have to put myself back together. And everyone always has to put themselves back together. I'm just wondering how long it'll be before the tremors in my fingers become so violent they can't hold the pieces.

I think that's enough free-flow thinking for now, developing ideas can be dangerous.

Do you ever feel like... fuck it, the microwave just announced that my breakfast burritos are well past overdue for munching. 

Would you like to know a secret?

Tonight I sleep with my mind crashing against itself with waves, muttering the same thing under my breath just before I lock my eyes shut.

War never changes, Braille-Reader. 

Sometimes I feel like I'm gasping for air when it's a little too hot in my room and I'm running scenarios through my mind. Irrational things, yes, but still they exist in my head-space - all full of turmoil and that anxious cinder block sitting on my chest. That's what it's like in the time between your name floating on my lock screen, when the hours get longer and there's nothing but empty space wandering through the crooked wrinkles in my brain. I probably just have an insanely overactive imagination, but then again - you haven't said anything in the greater span of two days.

Ah, despair. There you are again, my old friend. With you strings at the end of the toxic feelings swirling around, like the perfect storm, in my chest. 

Fuck. Just... fuck. 

I know the difference and see the raised letters like goosebumps down my arm. It's in the eyes and the words and the cadence of a voice. Carrying charisma like a viral strain. 

And to think, in all this time I could've been getting down to some... Sick. Beat. 

When we have the ellipsis to divide the things we say so... dramatically, I wonder did we create such things to appease ourselves or have a whim to bend to. 

I'm not trying to be clever, just mundane and less educated than people think I am. 

Are you around me? I know you are. I can see you and hear you whenever it suits me. Call it paranoia. 

Braille-reader, do you see me now? Is there a hair, at all, standing up at the back of your neck when you see this stranger's name?

I haven't cared much for a while, but in the past couple of weeks, an anchor cast of your mettle has sunken through the pit of me and I find myself drowning all the other thoughts out. I just don't want it to get quiet. Then my fingers will find you in some fashion or another and wrap themselves around an invisible future full of toxic fantasy. A house made of tarot cards tempting fate to lash out swiftly and leave nothing in its wake. I'm sure you feel the same. 

It's always the things that are just out of reach that keep my mind reeling for another day to think and obsess over those what-ifs. Like happiness and hope. Daydreams laced with pipe bombs or pipe bombs laced with daydreams, I can't really decide. But I've fought this feeling every time it's come around, this shell's crowded enough with paranoia and sun-blistered fantasies masquerading as imagination, and the older I get the easier the win. Now, though, my stomach's bottomed out and I find myself twisted over the ideas of a person I'll never know in a life I'd never want to lead. 

I've been inside my head much too long today. Every day, probably. 

I was supposed to be asleep an hour ago. Am I not already sleepwalking through life?