It’s Not a Thought Experiment if You’re Doing It

Let’s piece some things together.

Conversations that weren’t supposed to happen and chasers, chased, run away. I say I want to help and just pick, pick, pick because I don’t know how to cope. The truth, of course, is everyone is so full of shit they don’t know what to do with themselves.

Six years of guilt, but tonight, I’m done.

I’ve always kind of suspected but couldn’t quite admit it, and, yeah, it’s some way to ameliorate the guilt, to displace the blame from when I promised I wasn’t going to speak to her again.

Still going.

And there’s no way to prove it, so maybe this is just something I tell myself so I don’t have to think too much about it, but I’ve had a lot of Jack and it’s never tasted salty before or since, and I never thought she was all that thought-provoking–her attempts at intellectualism made me balk; I fell asleep in her bed night after night, clothes all on, separate sides, afraid to touch, not really wanting to get near enough and asking myself all the while what I was doing there–if I didn’t have better places to put my head down at night. So, maybe I had it coming.

And it’s victimless, not even a crime, if it’s the best to date, right? At least, as best as I could chop up the pieces and place them in close proximity to one another the next day. Would I have remembered at all if she hadn’t been lying there unclothed the next morning, an arm across my chest?

I was living in black and white, caught between the lines, the sides. I just focused on the guilt and didn’t think about what led us into her bedroom and how much control I had–because we’re always in control, right? I am a pillar, and nothing can move me…right?

To get through, I told myself, if it could happen one night, then it could happen again with someone else. And it did. And it did. And it did, me tracing it all back to some sick point of origin where at twenty years old I fucked over the clingy girl because she wasn’t what I was looking for after the sun came up.

But it gets so complicated.

If I was wrong then, could I be wrong now? Is this what I’ve become, and do I still have to be like this?

I feel like I’ve based so much on a faulty premise.

I’ve felt guilty, and, yeah, I’ve fucked and maybe fucked up; I don’t know anymore. A lot of things are becoming very gray.

I just want someone to become very gray with me.