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Goodbyes 3 by Owen Jones
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I have this mind I put on more and more regularly of late, it tells me I'm happy. It tells me I'm wealthy, good looking, prospects, great girl on my arm and the sun never stops shining. Dipping into the delusion I'm able to banish all my problems, they seem to slide away as I sit in the same place repeating the same cycle of actions over and over. It's not true of course but reality is just a form of perception that I try to avoid as much as possible, where's the benefit in realising you're a washed up loser who, in his late twenties, has no savings, no girl, no job and lives with his parents. Woohoo go me.
I've always been on the cusp of something, I've had more epiphanies than the protestant and catholic churches combined. Just about to break through, just about to turn that corner where things get better, except the one truism I know is they never do. Misery loves misery and as Albert Camus so succinctly noted "Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day," and every day I fail. Most times I ponder where it went wrong, as if targeting a single moment in my brief life may be enough to energise my life's path into a slight detour onto a better line. I wonder about broken hearts and foolish exuberance, where everyone is now and praying that someone's life is worse than mine. Oddly I already know that they are, there are millions of people worse off than me but self-degradation is such an easy groove to slide metronomically into. There are fleeting moments when I remember what it was like to run more than a hundred yards without being winded, where the future was something of vast possibility and very little to fear. That was always one of the problems, so many choices, so much not understood and in the end no clear road to knowing what was needed rather than wanted.
The memories slough like a leper's skin, falling where I stand in a tight circle, each suffocating the other for light and life. So many things I've forgotten, did I really know so much or was that too a self-convinced act? I can no longer tell, my realities have blended, fallen into a knot that cannot be untied and I'm left holding a scissors, wondering about beginnings and endings. In order to go forward we must go back, but to go back is to see what has been lost, to see the opportunities that no longer present themselves, the doors sealed tight against reoccurrence. How do you walk with no legs and no one to carry you? I have been carried, through my life, through my mind, never in complete control, never pushed all the way out there to survive away from the pack. I am a kept child, one with neither the wit nor the inclination to escape, because there is nowhere to escape to, how does one escape one's own mind without putting up the space to share. Craziness is simple, if you look in the mirror and don't recognise the person looking back then welcome to the club.
I scratch the dates of my life into my arm, the day I was born and the day I die, today. It seems so obvious in retrospect that I'm amazed I didn't think of it sooner. So long me, you were a loser and a wimp but I loved you all the same. I don't know what else to add in the way of an obituary so I'll settle for something easy: Goodbye.
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