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Memory 10

Take this as warning, or at least precaution, the inside of my head has not been a pleasant place to be as of late. I've been brooding; my mind has transmuted minutiae to monologue again and again. Everything seemed to matter more than it ever had.

This was my fault, my wound to bare, my failing. I had been wrong about near enough everything. What a fool I was.

Would've had a word with my past self if I could. Would've knocked me clean unconscious, but I'd already reaped what I'd sown. I had paid a great price for my arrogance, though I thought it only fair. It was neither here nor there for me to feel sorry for myself. It would've been obscene to see me as the victim in all this.

I was no victim. Though I was ready to accept I was no villain either, not anymore. I was just dumb, and naive: a sheltered, ignorant bird. Other people's inner world's had always escaped me. The myriad privileges of my existence had been utterly invisible to me until distressingly recently.

I had never been suicidal, never cut myself, never turned to hate so long it had consumed me, never lost a job as a result of bigotry, never escaped an abusive ex, though perhaps I'd been one, I'd never pulled myself together through my own strength of will, I'd never grown up. I was simultaneously insular and unable to self-assess. I was living in a bubble trapped inside a bubble. I knew, in some vague sense, that there was more to life, but I couldn't find it.

I had been static a long time. Now I was stagnating. Cecil, Ruben and Sophie had all changed, grown, though not all of them had improved. Ruben was even more a mess now than I could ever claim to be, but that was no excuse. Comparing trash to apples doesn't get you anywhere. Though maybe I was less apple, more worm.

It felt like waking up from a dream after Sophie left me that night. Like, that couldn't have actually happened, right? I couldn't have actually been that person. It couldn't have been real.

How could I have been so closed minded and self-absorbed? How did I think Sophie would forgive and forget with nothing more than the force of a frail, fragmented and far-too-late 'sorry'? How did I think she could love me? How did I think I could love her? In the end she was right, I didn't even know her.

My head hurt when I thought such thoughts.

It was real. I had to face that. I couldn't lie to myself any longer than I already had. The truth is I believed the shit I said when I said it. I really did what I did and I meant it.

God, those days were hell, though a hell that I had made. I was writhing in the mess that was me. At times, in earnest, I felt I deserved the pain.

Perhaps in this state, left unattended, I would have fallen only further afoul of self-hatred. Maybe left alone I would break, make a mistake and stick to it, end my own life. Or maybe such a thought was only some sort of perverse fantasy meant to put me on a level with those souls more tortured than mine. Ascension through suffering. Growth through pain. It cannot be the best path to take. It isn't, it never was, it's simply a path some are forced down. To take it voluntarily, to look at it with rose-colored glasses, to romanticize and fetishize tragedy is past perversion, it's abhorrent.

Thankfully I was not alone. I took my time and gave myself space, of course. I tried a technological blackout for a while. I had my days in bed, my tear soaked pillows, my screaming in the mirror, my why bothers, my why even fucking wake ups. I went though it all, but eventually I sought Cecil. Of course I did.

It felt selfish to lean on him again, but I knew I would only feel worse ignoring him entirely. He missed me and I knew it. I missed him too. I supposed that punishing him to punish me was a pointless endeavor.

When I finally did reach out - several days since Sophie sent me spiraling - Cecil was there for me immediately. He was all support and concern kept calm. He cared so much in a way I'd never known how to.

As soon as I saw him we were wrapped in one another's arms before a single word was exchanged. I thought about the recent 'revelation' I had had about him and cringed. I was wrong about that too, I must've been. I had been wrong about everything else. Cecil wasn't in love with me. Thinking otherwise was merely my self-inflated ego speaking out of turn.

And really, I thought, that was a shame.

To be loved and desired was, well, is an exhilarating feeling. To love and to desire another was, well, I wasn't so sure anymore. I was no longer sure of much at all. Other than Cecil's warm arms. His boundless patience. His unending empathy.

I spilled my guts to him. I tried to paint myself as the bastard I thought I was, as the unchanging, infantile idiot, as the same callous cunt I had been, the one who said all that I had once said to Sophie and pushed her to her very limit, but he wasn't having it.

It's not that simple, Cecil told me. And of course it wasn't.

I told him everything that had happened. Every word I could remember Sophie saying, and I could remember most of them verbatim, they were seared into my skull. I told him every word I said too and every word I didn't say. I made my apologies, castrated myself verbally, thought myself unworthy.

Still he didn't abandon me, didn't look down on me, didn't judge me.

He said Sophie was justified in her outrage, in her dismissal of me, in her raw pain and that - if we put ourselves in her place - it wasn't hard to see what she saw. Of course I agreed. He said but Ribbon, just because you've made mistakes doesn't make you a bad person. Just because you keep making mistakes doesn't make you worthless. It's cliché, he said, but we all make mistakes. He said the same way you don't really know Sophie, she doesn't really know you. You were arrogant to call when you did and to think things would be okay between the two of you, but in truth any judgment she makes of you is incomplete. He said she doesn't owe you her time, or a second chance, but you are not contained within her perception of you. You are more than that.

Cecil was telling me everything I wanted to hear. I didn't know how to feel about that.

You think you haven't grown, Cecil said, but you have. So much about you has changed. To Sophie, perhaps, you are the sum of your worst parts, but to me you are something else entirely.

I asked what had changed about me. I really couldn't see a thing. I was all endless mistakes made again and again.

Perhaps Sophie was - justifiably - biased against me, and her assessment of my character was not one that I should take at face value, but Cecil was every bit as biased as she was, if only in the opposite direction.

Regardless, he was what I had, and I needed him. I was no good alone, I never had been.

I said everything good that had become of me in this past year was because of him. That I was a fuck up who kept fucking up and that if he hadn't found me that night I would still be stuck in the gutter, face down and drowning slowly in a pool of accumulated filth. Without him I would be just another candle in the wind, left to the whims of fate, entirely without agency. I felt useless in and of myself, like I was lost without guidance and exterior input. Like I was lost without him.

Cecil cooled me from my simmering, said I had changed so much and that just because I couldn't see it didn't mean it wasn't true. Said I wasn't useless, wasn't a mere candle in the wind. Said maybe if he hadn't found me things would be different but that doesn't mean I don't deserve credit. Said I took that initial step to open up to him, that afterwards I took the needed steps to listen, to think, to improve myself. That I did those things, not him, that it was my own willpower and willingness to learn and take feedback that led to who I had since become. That clearly I was more knowledgeable now, that I thought differently than I did before, that my perspective had been altered greatly. That just because there was more to learn didn't mean I hadn't learned.

He said there was more too, think back further. I'd grown a great deal even before the night he found me. Not always into someone better, but I had grown. I said what I said to Sophie back then, and I did what I did with Ruben shortly afterward, but it was ultimately me who removed myself from that situation. I had autonomy and I'd exercised it in the pursuit of self-improvement many times. I was no puppet, I never really had been. At least not for long, never for long.

Even before that, he said, to argue that I was unchanged from the start to the end of college was ludicrous. I had gained not just academic knowledge, but knowledge of myself and others. This wasn't the total and all-encompassing knowledge that I once may have assumed it to be, but it was knowledge nonetheless. And I had gained confidence. My entire personality had shifted. My modes of speech and thought had been adjusted. I had been through so much. He said, in fact, I had changed a great deal. Surely I could see that.

That was his argument, his plea.

His unshakable belief in me was more than touching. His words carried such sweet sentiment, perhaps too sweet. I became, in part, jaded to them. He cared about me too deeply, liked me too much, to see the truth. Maybe I wasn't a monster, but I wasn't much special either - not to anyone but him - and to dismiss my shortcomings so easily was no better than letting them consume me.

Sophie wasn't wrong. I was self-absorbed and self-serving. I used others for affirmation again and again, unable to find it in myself. I had a small scope and a one-track-mind. I was flawed in a myriad of ways that I wished I wasn't. I had to change.

I was dejected and inconsolable. Cecil found pain in my despair and I found misery in that. It was a vicious feedback loop.

He only wanted to see me smile, but I turned that simple task into a mountain climb. He only wanted to see me laugh, but I turned that ambition into a hazy dream. He cared more about me than anybody ever had, and I...

And I listened to him and listened and I looked into his eyes. And when I looked this time I saw them anew, they were deeper than I ever knew. They were a library, a gallery, a great and sprawling collection of undiscovered art just waiting to be appreciated.

He had stopped speaking, and so had I. I got lost in time and lost in my head, did all I could in reflection to hear what he'd really said. I figured out some things and collapsed into myself. He was focusing on my features over my flaws, which meant this time I had grown at least in part on my own, but he was only trying to help. And, as little as I liked to admit it, for the most part his words held merit.

I cried and he asked why and I said it's because you're right, and that means I'm wrong, again, that I'm still lying to myself. Knowing that is hell.

He took hold of me and told me in strained words that life's a process. That none of this is easy.

His eyes were wet and wide, he didn't mask the pain inside.

And I...

It surprised me, it truly did, but in that moment I...

I saw him, all of him, all at once. And he was beautiful. Not merely physically, but in his entirety. On every level.

And I wanted him. I wanted his body, his heart, his soul.

I wanted to pin him down. I wanted to fuck him hard, to make love to him all night long. I wanted to make him mine. I wanted to tell him that I loved him as I was once so certain he loved me. I wanted to be happy and free, but knew that dream was likely nothing more than a convincing mirage.

I'd realized something important: I had to stop rushing to conclusions.

Living on the good grace of assumptions had done nothing but land me in hell repeatedly. I had to stop seeing only what was in front of me. I had to stop working off of half-formed ideas and partially molded perceptions. I had to stop existing only in impulse. I needed to slow down and take stock. I needed to consider things in detail, to work through them, to find some sense of certainty before cutting cords and pulling triggers.

I had thought I was in love with Sophie for so long, but she had proved otherwise in the space of a single evening. Now I thought I was in love with Cecil.

Really? Could it all be so simple, so binary?

It all felt unreal.

I needed time and space for self reflection, not a new love interest. Not another obsession.

God.

I guess I really _had_grown.