For a person with very little, as I’m sure you’ll agree, a very little is a lot. Even friends who only come to smoke or get my pills, they act like my friends and pretend to respect me, and Benny is along that vein, the people who flatter my intelligence towards the end of getting something. Like Bonnie, which is sad, because it could have been so nice for her. I’m not a romantic, I’m a realist, and I know not all relationships can work all the time, but for me, love is one of the most wasted qualities in the world. It is lavished upon the undeserving while those who feel deserving just watch, like a drowning man staring at a picture of water, wondering what it must be like to actually drink, to drink that deep drug of falling, getting to know someone and their quirks, learning how to play with them, how to fight, how to live and die well together.
And in that loneliness, which is towards my bed, to be ashamedly honest, and my voice of encouragement, someone to tell me that it matters, the things I care about, books or whatever, to know someone responds on a sympathetic frequency is enough to keep the idea of romantic love alive from afar, if not in contact, because love starts with the idea of someone. And the consensus when it comes to me is, the man to ask questions, but not really pay attention to the person behind the trivia and all that, and Bonnie plays to that need of mine, to feel that sense of being loved, and not thinking it is being wasted on me. She knows I’ve been, very ashamed of my face after my disfigurement in November, and she plays that, you know, “You’re always beautiful” card, excusing my shame and trying to offer me consolation in the most fraudulent ways.
Not by talking or growing to know each other better, but by the vulgar attempt to skip the play and conversation and challenge of knowing someone and loving them for whatever that is, she wishes to skip that process with me, the best I think, better than anything, the gradual realization of love, felt or being felt, and she makes me feel like maybe I’m not deformed or disfigured, and that people don’t see me as a meth head because I lost a tooth. It started with me not being able to smile in public, then only in groups, and now not even in private. It’s easy to exploit my need for company, because of how long time is, how slow the minute when loneliness is the situation. And she preys on my weakness for those who claim to care about me or want to help me or know me or whatever. I don’t ask for anything or make demands, only meekly hope for some reciprocation in the event I earn it, and to earn favor and not feel ugly when I’m with someone.
She makes me feel like that is possible, but without funds, that process is impossible, because the loving of me is in service to something else, and me as a person is a commodity to be used towards different ends, the ends of another type of self-satisfaction. And I never expect to be loved or even liked, much less respected, because all my efforts are attempts to make deep personal and psychological ugliness harder to recognize, and I feel like even my eloquence is the ink-sack of the lobster, shooting it out so I can slip away in the murky water between being fulfilled by the sincere love and respect of friends, knowing the love will be from afar, and not for my face or for my form, but for, if anything, something approaching sincerity and genuineness, and at best a kind of wisdom.
We all have good moments, when we get to see someone smile because we made them laugh, or to see someone think, or feel a new sense of companionship, and I feel like my obvious desperate needs for contact manifest themselves as easily manipulated people, whose need for friendship negates the knowing eventual pain of when it falls apart, making ever more desperate future attempts at being loved. That’s why all of my advice starts with learning how to swim on my own. Because no one may ever join, so to speak, and if drowning, without incentive, no one will be there to save me. So abuse against me is something I apologize to the abuser for.
I’m sorry you broke a promise to me and it hurt, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make you happy by being me. Sensitivity and the capacity for seeing love between others, or just friendship on a deep level, only reinforces the claustrophobia of my life, and anyone to break it, even if violently, has saved me from these silent spaces.
Sorry, she came by again, her hair smelled good
I think she washed up too
And now she takes my hands and says
How smooth! The smoothest hands!
The fraudulence of such emotion more than anything offends my sensibilities, to know those whom I feel worthy of their love waste it on people who either don’t deserve or if they do don’t powerfully return it, at least in a way that empowers. I just feel, I thought coming back, I thought I’d have something to offer, something to offer someone other than someone who doesn’t want anything but my pill bottle. Sorry for rambling, and you don’t have to respond, it’s nice to have a window, even if it’s bricked. I like the idea of a bricked window, because it engenders no delusion of being helped. That’s the hardest thing to accept, that no one’s going to turn the light on, and if you need the light on now, you’ve misunderstood how to see in the dark.
Brandon fucKing Nobles
brandon the writer | author & staff writer for sir swag 