retreat and remorse

I suppose we all like to see our lives in rewind, re this and re that, do overs and makeovers and things we wish for and want for in the past that when told in normal time don't seem so important or meaningful anymore. Like a high school crush you see at your impending reunion, trying to pretend you used to be interested in someone that looks completely different, yet there is some part of you that still finds yourself attracted to the memory, to the image, to the mirage of the past. Waving lines off the sand and highways of life, flickering heat disguising what we thought we felt.

And those parts of your life are like puzzle pieces dumped onto an old carpeted floor, and trying to put together pieces of your life and make sense of them seem to be so easy when the corners match up and align, feeling your heart beat fast when looking at a particular picture, a particular feeling that doesn't seem too real anymore. Old faces and smells and certain scenery which whisks you away to a place that probably never existed, but it feels good to believe that it did. Not that this feeling is a regret of the past, but perhaps a regret of the present, how did I get here, and why do I feel like this? Like my heart is a million miles away in someone else's body, beating in another person's chest and all I can do is question how blood is flowing through my veins if I don't have a heart anymore. Just some empty echo chamber where the "I love you's" bounce off ribs and lungs, never ending or ceasing, yet somehow diminishing like the shine on new quarters a quarter century old.

This non-feeling feeling, does it have a name? Does it have an end, or just a bunch of almost beginnings? Will it pass like a fever if I starve it, or grow stronger and infect my whole body with pain and aches until I forget that it's there, a nagging sensation that becomes part of living? I used to want answers for everything, but settle now for a simple shrug and any way to forget that slowly but surely this blackness inside of me crawls through my veins. You saved me, you brought me back from my worst, and without you around it feels as if I could slip at any time. If you were only real, only here, holding my hand, whispering in my ear that everything is not okay, but that it is going to be okay. I need those double truths, to feel them, to know I can exist and not exist at the same time. I am just tired of half loves, but not double truths. Tell me that you will rescue me, and I will come rescue you. Hold me close when nothing else seems to hold on at all. My voice is hoarse from not talking at all, from almost saying what my throat and my insides always knew, but my teeth stopped the words from coming out, so the phrases are trapped inside until you can free them.

So please come, and come quickly. Whoever you must be, made for me and me made for you.