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.