Underdogs and Tidal Waves

Southside of Mellow
2011-02-25 02:41:02 (UTC)

A Fighting Chance in Hell

Years ago, I remember siting on a school bus, staring wistfully out the window as I listened to The Smiths, thinking of missed chances.
Never did I think that at 22 years old, I would be sitting on a train swaying back and forth, listening to The Smiths once again wistfully ruing missed chances over someone.

I am in way over my head.
All signs point to a fever.
The wind has been knocked out of my lungs.
Only inundated by the discovery that I'm standing the midst of someone who has accomplished at our age what most people hope to do by the age of 35.

Even under the steady aid of something chemical, the words are hard to compose. They're made shallow, unsteady, my tone controlled and indifferent when on the inside I'm exploding.
Even being considered most promising amongst friends in success, I can't even compare to someone like this.
We can be inches away but I feel light years apart.

The painful part is that I wouldn't even know where to begin.
In the past, it's always been easy to blow someone away with what's in my head, on pure intellect alone.
But for someone whose actually done it all, this isn't even child's play.

The maps are officially lost.
Any travel log has been completely thrown asunder.
In the past, it's always been smoke and mirrors.
An adolescent masquerade.

I wonder if I would have been fine if I had never learned what he is.
If I never learned who he is.
But I know that that would have never helped.
It was the first question that did me in.
All he had to say was that first word.
There was no way I could have gone through my days indifferent.
The universe had thrown me in his path.
There was no escaping this.

Even with chemicals rollicking through my veins, my only method of self-preservation is pretending not to care. Keeping my eyes locked away. I've kept on like this. Safe from disappointment from years. Titles thrown and branded, but ultimately meaningless.

But I don't fit into their world.
It's like the jets and the sharks.
My life has become more commercial, attuned to survival, removed from the vice it had been so far entrenched in.
I mean, what could I give?
My words?
These people only believe in visceral things.
My words are intangible. These things are like foreign or outdated currency to them.

I've become so adept at self-sabotage as a part of survival.
Something to escape the fuckery, the disappointment, the bleakness of the battlefield.

It feels easier pretending not to give a fuck. Living life so detached. But it's hard, either way, I'm burning on the inside. The words flow cold and unfeeling with no emotion. But I am burning on the side.

And though I know that it's simple to throw it away. That morning when I woke up, there was this strange stirring in my blood as if I knew that something was coming.
And as I turned the corner and we locked eyes, it was lights out.
In some strange geometry, almost far too mathematically precise, the universe has aligned him in my path. I swear, I was counting my days until I was free and then we crossed paths. Can this so easily be swept away, ignoring the feverish ebbing in my blood?
I'm not sure what other folly the universe has in store, but can I get through this. Burning on fire on the inside and cold as ice on the exterior?

It's just difficult when he's already seen half the universe.




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