Missing...?: Return Here (If) Found

I wallow in bed, sighing periodically, and staring at the ceiling. There’s this ache living inside of me that emulates a black hole in my chest; sometimes I feel it more presently pressing than other days like it’s actively sucking in every morsel of joy and turning it into a weighted darkness, the same lonely feeling when you’re laying in the dark. You think your eyes are closed, you think you’re asleep, even dreaming but, your eyes were open the whole time. I know I am missing something, but that thing never really even happened. It’s just all these figments of my imagination conjuring things that don’t exist, but I can’t help but picture it, so vividly like it’s a memory. I miss it, I miss it because I know it could’ve been real, I can see it. It must mean something.

I guess I’m more concerned with the sadness of the lost potential of an idea rather than the experience itself. I reminisce about things that could happen rather than what actually happened. I will spend weeks or months mulling over and missing what could be, instead of what was, instead of living in what is. It feels acutely and piercingly more sad; to apply longing to what could’ve become; imagination is limitless and in my ivory tower, I could apply so much of the thing that’s missing and shape it into the ideal I miss instead of the reality of it. Because who says it’s impossible? I will not spend time missing something for what it is but for the perfect beautiful and irresistible potential of what it had the possibility of becoming or being. Nothing is as good as that high of potential, and that’s the apex of every dynamic. Because I’m sadder about missing the transformation to what I can see through the glass, the tender flesh, or the sun peaking through the tree line, because I can feel my hand right through it, I see the scene and I’m excited about painting it in by the numbers.

It feels insane, to spend so much time, harboring a yearning desire of grieving an idea because I lived segments of it, because it died before I could see it through. But, I’ve always wanted what I can’t have, it feels embedded in my DNA. I’ve always had a penchant for what’s not real, it makes sense my body flows with it even in emotion; I feel more of what’s not real than what is. I don’t think I’ve been so bent out of shape about losing something unless I know it’s fleeting or it’s unreal. It’s a shameful feeling. I feel a mess. Splattering notions of desire towards things that don’t belong to me anymore, that maybe never belonged to me in the first place. But I go to sleep with a hatchet buried in my chest and I wake up to see it dug itself further into my crevices, emerging bloody and gutty out the other side. Like I’m pumping longing with a needle in my veins, hungry for a fix, because it’s less dangerous to abuse something when it can’t come back to be something else, paint its’ own picture.