#53

unhinged

Allow me a brief interruption —

For those interested, I’ve just releaed a digital collection of poems written between 2021-2023. It features a bunch of newer poems of mine, including things I’ve never posted online anywhere. I’m currently trying to raise funds for my move (as well as dental care, since I cannot afford insurance). Artist Megane Voghell did the cover.

If you’d like to cop, here’s the link.

Alright, that’s done. Here’s the thing.

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I had a date planned for tonight.

I had been looking forward to it. We’d been texting back and forth for a few days. The conversation was good. He’s nice. He thinks I’m funny. But, as it got closer I became crippled with fear, reliving the hell of the past year, what it actually is like dealing with men. Suddenly the idea of getting in a car with one was too much to bear. I am broken by what happened to me. I’m broken by the last one. I don’t know how to not be broken.

So I cancelled it.

I don’t know how to push through this. As I type this I’m sitting up in bed crying. I haven’t gotten dressed yet. I didn’t think, I didn’t know I was still this raw. I thought that I had begun to move on. That’s why I downloaded the app — because I felt ok, because I thought I could. But faced with the reality, I’m incapable, I’m in pain, I am scared.

Like an idiot, I thought I’d over correct. Go from self-involved loser with a fake job to an older divorced man with kids and a real job. Someone who doesn’t sit in bed until 1 pm, someone who isn’t attached to a microphone, who isn’t in love with the sound of his own voice. Someone who thinks about and cares for people other than himself. But the truth is, I’m not ready for any kind of man, not ready to see them as individuals when they still all blend together in some horrible blob of heart ache.

The date was very nice when I cancelled. He said I was “worth waiting for”. I appreciate the kindness, recognize a rare maturity and take it in, as proof of something good. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and feel braver, not like the coward I do right now. Probably not, though.

Something about everything feels like too much right now. Too fast, too new. Maybe it’s the knowledge that I’m just withering away in heart break, wasting all my beauty minutes, letting death devour me.

Spring makes us petulant children again. Spring has its fingers under my skin, spring is pressing down on old wounds and making fun of me for being such a Dumb Bitch.

I’m calling these baby steps.

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