Train of thought

One of my brave boasts is that in all my life I've never suffered a hangover. Now that boast seems increasingly brave, much to the point of foolhardiness. I've never been this hungover before, and alcohol or any other substance had nothing to do with it.

It hurts when the affection you devote to someone goes unrequited. It hurts even more when you first come to that realisation. I've been stonewalled many times before, but this was different. This was an investment of emotion, and whilst I am lucky I escape with the friendship [for now], the remuneration seems grossly inadequate and disproportionate. It seems one-dimensional and cruelly calculative to view courtship from an investment perspective, and I guess taking this angle seems to make every maneuvre I've made this past year engineered and contrived. I must stress this was emphatically not the case; my feelings were true, my intentions genuine. It is wrong to expect anything from anything, but this was more than a passing fancy, even more than a lustful crush; this was an actual selfless devotion of emotion, one of the type that once one pulls oneself into, one is given a great sense of self-worth, hope, and self-revolution. I did more than court. I loved, and I want to be loved back.

It can't happen now. The crashing surf has betrayed my supposedly sturdy vessel for what it is: a shallow, leaky pirogue with one oar, now rent upon the unforgiving rocks and swirls, which scoff at the notion of anything designed apparently seaworthy enough to survive their power. The maelstrom has ceased, the lapping tide now gently carrying the shreds of my hopes and scattering them in multitude locations, eroding them into unrecognisable fragments before finally sinking them into oblivion. And I am the battered, weary, torn survivor of that capitulation, drifting lazily onto the sandy shore of some abstract salvation, of immediate peace churned with desperation and grief, and of the future who knows?

One never forgets these poignant calamities, their marks will always be indelible, the repercussions of their happenstance forever marring and watermarking every subsequent relevant decision made. Time and practicality may layer them over with incident, but they never completely fade away. A wound that deep never completely heals, and as I'm left kicking my toes, sliding my clammy palms across my face in a gesture of world-weariness for the umpteenth time, staring into some abstract heaven, the sharp edge of that shard of destitution pushes its way through all the overlying layers revealing its tip once more.

No one who doesn't ask or isn't told will ever completely know. She will never know. Unless I made it known. A step borne out of foolishness, the vain belief that no matter what a faint hope of reparation must be maintained, because a chance exists which if I so happened to be in the right place at the right time, I might be the one who will grasp it. But it is all lechery, the frightful teasing of the mind weighing circumstance upon circumstance upon rationale, feeding the fire of hope which ironically burns more agonisingly than the blaze of initial rejection. This has been the source of my hangover; I have been ill for a week and a day, and till now this abject sense of emotional poverty sees no sign of abating.

The urge is to pour my heart out in a desperate bid to turn favour my way. How practical this is is questionable to say the least. It could only impact so much considering the relationship we have is 110% platonic. There's affection in this relationship; too bad then it has only been one-sided, unidirectional. And so as I spiral unendingly in the chaos of my own mental turmoil, I am left to my own devices, to constrict myself in the savagery and nauseating hangover borne from that which is a love unrequited.

Idiacanthus fasciola.

I held the aged, yellowed glass cubicle in my hand. It was roughly a foot long, by about four inches high. My hands were grasping the cubicle, but my heart grasped what was embedded within. I held the tapered black ribbon in my gaze. Everything about it was beguiling: the almost two-dimensional strip of its body, sequined by regular patterns of white speckles, but itself as black as a gash in space and time, the lines of dots giving the impression someone had tried to repair the rip with a lace of diamond dust. Most beguiling of all though, was the head. It rose, like a horse about to upend its rider, as if defying the pegs that held its otherwise limp physique in suspension within the gently sloshing preservative. Its teeth were needles, projections extending beyond the gape of its jaws held perpetually sagging by more of the devil’s spikes contained deeper within its treacherous maw. In a humorous divertissement of evolution, from the chin streamed a thin white tassel, a singularly incongruous filament which extended into an elegant ‘come hither’ swirl beneath the arresting head. The eye was a sapphire, a jewel, a Koh-i-Noor, set in regal glory upon the bevel of this devilish crown. It spoke of having seen great wonders, fortitudes, repasts and tragedies no human mind could fathom, yet it was Nature’s irony that this blind tailor could not see. Nothing but an endless realm of black dimensions, progressing through black time, which this creature knew no beginning of, and finally was gifted blessed vision, only to behold the portents of its tragic end, the spirit of its existence snuffed out by the monstrosity which swept it into the shallows, initiating the paradigm towards its final resting place. Now its assaulted, cursed form lay bare in the rasping glare of the irradiating fluoro, the magnitude of its beauty caught in a shaft of idle early morning sunlight.

I stayed with the block for what seemed an abnormal eternity, my mind, addled from two nights of sleepless tribulation, struggling to come to terms with the culmination of a lifelong dream, one which had transported me through ten years of struggle, in which I danced the tarantella of fate which were to drag me through to my final reckoning, along this self-determined path of paved dreams and esoteric fantasies. Such was the flame of my ambition, and now I was here, having attained this stage, having dragged all horse and cannon slipping, sliding, kicking, crying through the raging gunfire of teenagehood, immaturity and self-doubt. Yet my mind could not linger. Hands trembling, I set the black dragonfish down on the lab table. The emotional fissures from within finally manifested, renting the context of my soul and shattering its already tremorous stability into unidentifiable fragments of grief. I began to weep. Not for the joy of attained glory, not for the incandescence of ambition achieved. No, this was unbridled, unadulterated sadness in condensed form. My knees bent in physiologically violating angles as I gathered my composure and left the stuffy malodorous chamber, perhaps thankful that not a soul had noticed my momentary meltdown. Poignantly I beheld the object of my accursed indecision as I passed, having not previously beheld it for better attentions up to then, paid elsewhere.

Where, where had I gone wrong? It had practically been a year to the day when I first sowed the seeds of my gut-wrenching dissolution. Oh to lament the weakness of the heart, the disregard for the unwieldy handrail of cynicism and caution wiser men use to steady themselves in such periods of weakness, the cataract of romance blinding myself from the forgiving shelter of sensibility, as I crossed over from the realm of pragmatism into one of misguided folly. The conclusion had long been forthcoming; I was too deluded to see it. As the entrancing scent of bait lures even the wiliest fox from its hole, even I was ensnared, too consumed by my own selfish delusions to contemplate any antagonistic ramifications. How I belted logic and rationale with the whip of fantasy and misplaced confidence. Now as I look back I trace the bloody steps of my progress from sane and sensible man to the unearthly pit of self-pity and lost hope. Desire had consumed me, now I was entering its digestive system, my prone hapless form and soul macerated into disintegration.

Those were blissful times. I cannot begrudge anyone the time, effort and soul I vested in this ultimately futile endeavour. The assessment is frank: I had set it up as a goal to attain, and I have through circumstance and loss of nerve, failed. It has proven me a man amongst men, one who sought the extravagant chalice yet ultimately could not hurdle the obstacles in his path. My own self-wrought quest to facilitate romance has now brought about my own self-wrought downfall. This failure has brought me to my knees, rended me to the core. I can no longer say I am wholesome in mind or spirit; I have lost faith in my sense of direction. No longer can I invest full measure of faith in the decisions that I make, no longer can I wrap bloody swords in cotton cloth of purity. I am bleak inside. Chastening is always a stark happenstance, but I have learned. It seems an irony that even as I beheld the very symbol of my greatest hopes and dreams all hope slipped away from me. No longer can I pursue such trifling matters with faith or any degree of meaningful ambition. Like a dog who fears his abusive owner, I cower from any prospect of future engagement and contact with that which has destroyed my confidence. As Edgar Allan Poe’s raven did quote, ‘Nevermore, nevermore.’