Lost for two decades

[Marine1991]

At least I still have the ocean. But you can’t cuddle up to a wave at night and wake up with it in the morning, not unless your idea of waking up to something beautiful means having it slap you in the face with cold reality.

As I sit here on the beach talking to myself, this pen is the only tool which allows me to pretend that I am not completely insane. Can it be okay to still write to you and to allow the whole world to know who I am? Can it be okay to empty my heart onto these pages in the hope that it just might be alright in your life even if you are in love with someone else?

I fear the longer it takes me to find myself the closer I get to realizing that your life will be shared with another more deserving spirit. Maybe it is a man who walks around in a state of self-confidence and stability to a degree of fault, because this man, this ghost that holds your heart hasn’t the slightest clue that I exist. And if by chance he does, will he know that I have sacrificed my sanity, my words and my years so that I could find peace in knowing I have done my very best to try and honor you and respect you and love you.

I wonder how having broken my promise not once but twice, I wonder will it all ever make sense. Will you know that my mind and my vision have seen across these shores into the intentions of others who have wished ill will upon the world, and that I only knew of these things because you were too close to the action?

I wonder if you could relate to the agony of remembrance and consequently its equal, the struggle to forget.

There is no solace in the waves when it comes to you. It is simply a reminder of the distance between us, and the realization that I will never love so innocently like I did so long ago. I wasn’t so truthful with my therapist when I told her that I was always this enamored by the seas. I think I came to love them much more obsessively the way I do storms when I felt in my gut that someday you were going to cross them for a very long time even when you were standing right next to me.

If we were both meant to be gulls my wings may have been clipped when I was eight, because I could never fly with you. And maybe I have come to realize that we aren’t so similar. Sometimes I don’t feel like a bird at all but a creature that dwells between the cracks in the earth.

I feel so foolish and vulnerable when I consider that these past years may have just been a product of a most hopeful imagination; that you did not smile and then cry when I said “Action against Hunger”. And I feel crushed when I think that you were always more comfortable with this separation. Has it come to this? Has it come to me feeling so desperate that I have indeed become a product of an alternate reality and that I am living proof that the spirit of another is enough to make anyone hallucinate if she is in fact as wonderful as you?

I ask so humbly for your forgiveness in putting you so high into the clouds. But you see there has never been an earth for you to stand on since you left me. I am met with the strongest resistance when I am face to face with a certainty that you will never be comfortable with a man who has chosen to be lost without you. How could you be? I’ve often stated that the immovable force paradox was between your unwillingness to love me and my unwillingness to stop loving you, but that would mean that you are at least thinking of me. Maybe this paradox exists only within my own mind, between the past and the future and the present is the universal explosion that occurs eternally without you, because I am still writing, still missing, still hoping for something, anything to change, for this mass of dust to come together again and give birth to a new star system. To in fact give birth to a binary system dancing around each other and so perfectly in balance, pushing, pulling for as long as their light burns.

I fear their can be no rest amidst uncertainty. It is the ultimate torture, a goodbye without any contact. And maybe that is why I have been so handicapped and hazard prone to the point that I consistently keep driving you farther away with gestures that may only be understood within the confines of my own unhinged ego.

If it is possible to be sane and insane concurrently then I most certainly am a unique soul. Has someone come to you and told you not to play the game anymore, to wait and see if I can stand on my own. And when I do find that strength, if I find that strength will you be gone from my life forever. Will you be what so many others, what so many billions feel? Will you become a moment of reflection and nostalgia, or a hard lesson and nothing more? I find it more than unsettling to think that I may be able to adjust to that new way of life.

As it is right now I couldn’t possibly love another, nor do I want to. And the thought never escapes me that you are not 19. I hope you know that I know this truth. As cliché as it sounds I have been chasing ghosts for twenty years, a new ghost for each year that passes, that has been lost, each year that I am not a part of your life. I don’t mean to sound jealous or narcissistic but I guess I am a little aren’t I? That is the reality that haunts me the most because I had worked and fought so hard to forget how much your eternal year meant to me. And the more that I write, I feel the more you will understand my flaws. I think only those who are not connected so wholly to these words could envy being you. It is undeniable that you could never live up to this dream, but you must know I had never intended for you to. Being a part of your life for better or worse was the only dream I ever wished for. A human existence and a human touch were all I ever wanted.

Every single moment that I spend, every obsessive thought that I generate when I consider your light, it is spent racking my brain for the right thing to do or to say even if that thing is to say goodbye, anything, simply anything for you to look upon me with tenderness. I just have no way of knowing what it is I’m supposed to do.

I want to run. I want to run as I have done so many times before. This way I would not have to imagine that you have been holding my hand all these years just so that I could gain the courage to walk away, to be okay with never seeing you smile at me again.

If you believed that carrying me this far and beyond would lead me to love another, I am so sorry that you wasted any energy at all on that prospect. I’m not implying that I may never try, but I am also half my life into realizing that you are not replaceable. I think my therapist Becky was fully aware that she stuck a dagger in my heart today, because figuratively speaking she knows that a quick death is more merciful.

[Marine1991]

It will be 20 years in September since I first laid eyes on the girl who would alter the course of my life forever. I'm 43 now and I think it is safe to say that unless you are reading a story of fiction you haven't come across something like this before. I'm not going to let it all out here and now on this forum because it requires more writing than I can muster right now. I did post a few excerpts that you can read however and if you are intrigued by those I will keep telling you parts as we go. I have no interest really in publishing a book because I really don't want her getting upset. She is an incredibly private person. But I am a writer and that is my only method of coping with a loss that will follow me for the rest of my life.

 

 

I don't mean to sound pessimistic but reality is what it is. Maybe through all of my writing I can reach others who feel a sense of loss. For me I have become quite obsessed and that guilt is overbearing. Now you may think that it is an unhealthy feeling and quite destructive for both individuals but as you will learn this obsession was fueled by circumstances that were beyond my control.

 

 

When she left at the age of 20 to follow her dreams I was so happy for her, even though it hurt like you wouldn't believe. I went through a funk for a while and in 1999 a year after we parted ways I re enlisted in the Marines. The story really takes a twist from there. I will tell you this. Ever since I was sexually abused as a child I developed a sense of intuition about people and life that defies explanation and I knew instinctively that I had to go back into the military after being out for two years.

[Marine1991]

This pain that I am feeling is so incredibly intense that it’s actually quite beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more alive, except of course for 1996.

 

I think it’s safe to say that life reaches its peak when we are close to feeling the eternal.

 

I don’t question things like before. I’ve reached a place where I have made my choices and I know now that the mystery is not a mystery at all, rather a coming of age to understand that we are meant to suffer. Within this element we find our reasons. Mine is that I was born to love something that I will never touch, and within that suffering I have learned to express to the world my humanity.

 

And maybe the world can pick through my words for something that resonates with them, something that pushes them forward with the idea that they are not alone. I’m quite humbled to admit that I had been so consumed with the idea of being different that I found myself acting all too human. I wanted to find some sense of divinity. I wanted to exalt myself for her to see. I think I exhausted each possibility for why she extended her hand to me.

 

I was so hopeful for a while that maybe she could accept what I have become. But it is starting to show that someone suggested stringing me along until I gave up and let go was a good path to take, since ignoring my efforts has just led me into an endless loop. It’s not her fault. She trusted the experts. But I feel confident that the so called experts never came up against my love before.

 

All that haunts me is not the idea that I may never see her again, but the why. How does she see me? Am I just too incredibly emotional, or is it something even more sobering?

[Marine1991]

There are no shadows more imposing than those which do not belong to you. I fear the one that has stretched itself far into my foreground will remain there for the rest of my life. It is in the shape of a woman who haunts me with such beauty that I am forced to keep its stare.

 

There are no medicines to relieve this endless portrayal of a hopeless tiring man who sheds no more tears because he is near death inside. It has stayed with me, this feeling, and I am morbidly grateful. You see the burn is all that I know. To give it up would require that I accept that my life has been a lie. It is a lie so grand that even this shadow that tracks my every step may have believed it.

 

I don’t mean to force my pain on others, but I truly believe that to allow myself to just let it all fall away and simply resign to a failure that has cost me everything but the beating inside my aged body and the breath that slowly wanes inside my lungs would coldly mean that nobody would ever know the truth. Instead, all who circle me would be content to discuss money because I have been wasteful, or discuss a movie because I have tried to live my own, or sports because doesn’t every man’s man, or God forbid the weather if it is cold or hot or drizzling, forget about its ferocious and beautiful nature. For them the weather of such kind is hindsight. For me it comes much sooner, and I have been branded insane with no evidence to support such a claim.

 

They are the takers who have stripped me of my noble intent on protecting her and replaced it with the illusion of mania. Their resounding effort to supplant this agony with mundane gestures which have no place in my consciousness would speak nothing except an ignorance or a denial of what has guided me through this storm.

 

I can only believe for the sake of her honor that she pulled me along so that I may find my legs again someday. Although, the malignant truth may be that I have been so invasive on her freedoms that I forced her across the ocean and I compelled her to respond in kind to my attempt at projecting her likeness onto the world. I have tried to maintain her anonymity through all this but those closest to her and I are not so blind.

 

Either way the only choices I am left with are either to continue my obsessive behavior to the detriment of her comfort or to cut loose from any and all who have triggered me. It is not my intention to hurt those who are closest to me with an absence that will last as long as I feel necessary to regain the balance in my world, which may never come mind you. But if I am to live again I see no other way. If I could go now I would, but I feel I have been swindled into remaining here until at least the New Year, January 8th to be more accurate.

 

To play the fool for another day might summon a rage that I am determined to keep at bay. If I am ever to become that gentle spirit that she was used to seeing it requires an unprecedented distance. I will never forgive myself for having fallen victim to my own selfish dream. My only way of proving that I am deeply sorry is to write this wretched story and then depart. This will have no ending other than my descent into aloneness. I cannot be brought to give up my heart again to any advances. I will do what I have seen right in doing, trying to guide others away from a fate such as mine.

 

It’s sad isn’t it, when you’re filled with so much Hope one day and then seemingly overnight you’re forced to try and pick up the remains of a shattered reality. That is the nature of my illness. That is how I have lived for two decades, and this is the burden I have placed on the only person who ever saw my unbridled nature. I am left only with guilt, and that is my burden. So it will be, forever.

[Marine1991]

I am the protector of dreams. I am the bearer of things to come.

 

To those of you who have been placed here to discredit me, know that the world will stop and once more I will show you what you refuse like children.

 

For I have not come so far to be undone by the prostitution of lies.

 

You need only look to the west and it will be done, for I am still here.

 

And truth will have unseeded from the world the non-believers.

 

Nothing can tear away the faith in the soul’s counterpart.

 

This heart has become like gravity, where it rises it shall fall again, where it is misplaced it shall find its way home.

 

I am in love with humanity, in love with the idea that we can all rise above our misgivings to a place where once our shadows do not fall to our feet, they dissipate in holy light.

 

A light that cannot be blocked by the dealers of misfortunes.

 

I say to you it’s ok, it is my brothers and sisters, it is children. It’s ok.

 

The fifth world will cradle you like lovers and nothing more shall discover you like lost children.

 

I do not wish to endow you with tragedy and it will pass into better days.

 

By the earth or the hands of men I cannot rightly say only that it will define itself with a lions roar.

 

I have awoken, and I am here and I will bring forth my love and compassion because that is my nature, even in times when my quest for understanding has been thrown back at me unto my own souls questions.

 

I am but one, and so is the earth and we are bound by indifference because I wish to escape it and it me.

 

Nothing in the past will be so clear like that which is unsaid, when truth has unveiled itself there, we will all know that the beginning is upon us.

 

And the end of this fourth world will be marked by a moment of silence.

 

I say to you do not be sorrowful, for that which is come will lift you from your doubt, and you will embrace each other, and the seeker of light.

[ChocolateRain]

This sounds like a serious Heartbreak .... or a well written Story ????

[Marine1991]

It takes a certain kind of story to convince the world with the bionic ears that you are in love with 10 souls, or a billion. Does it really matter, the numbers?

 

I have died that many deaths letting them go and yet I keep spinning.

 

The sun keeps waking up with me and if I was in Ecuador I would be faster than you, but like static cling on my mind you keep following.

 

Except I am still alone and you and everyone else pulled out the fire hoses on me to keep the flames of my thoughts at bay. What purpose did it serve? This shift in polar dynamics.

 

For I am more tortured now than when I am running a half a million miles per hour around our milky way, so that maybe the light of 100 billion stars will blind you into believing that I am not so eternally yours.

 

But you have eased your way into my sleep and whispered I love you, I love you, over and over to slay the dragon who wanted to breathe a path of destruction, with the hope that only the impure spirits would follow.

 

What is it you want from me, for me?

 

Because I have become human again and I can’t stand to think that I can’t rip apart the will of the abusers, the takers, who share their dark religion with the innocents.

 

What have you done? Where has he gone, the one with all the anger, so much that he could have single handedly defeated ISIS?

 

With visions alone, with the backing of your heart and his rage, but now I fear that we will never be the ones that we used to know. I fear I was never that man at all. For I may indeed be the lion and the wolf and the fox and the gazelle and the mouse.

 

And I fear you are not going to look at me the way you once did, with nervous love, with my mirrored frailty and with the hope that we have found each other after a thousand lifetimes apart, or maybe just one.

 

You have shadowed me with all of these answers, and offer none for relief.

 

And I have come as far as I can go. This is who we are now.

 

So I will either be the one who tells this tragic tale of twin flames who are too scared to be together or we will be lovers.

 

I am bound to say goodbye again because I do not wish to walk in the darkness if it is the fire I must follow or the sound of your voice will have to be chosen soon.

 

Because you see my dear, you have exposed me.

 

Now they know I am not indomitable, that I love you like a human, with faults. What do I do with it? What?

 

And the silence still haunts me.

 

I want you to cry, for you and for me.

 

I want you to cry, so that I know that you love me, because the silence still haunts me.

[Marine1991]

Nothing cries so loud as the truth my friend, NOTHING

[Marine1991]

If this is real I wish to hide away again. When your love was all I knew, when your memory was the foundation of my existence, when the thought of holding you for the first time sustained me for 2 decades.

 

I feel like I have lost you forever and my dream has become a nightmare.

 

I don’t know if I can wait for God any longer, and if you ever loved me I have to know soon.

 

My heart is drowning in an ocean of poisonous memories.

 

Where are you?

 

When you told me to go I abided, I listened intently because I love you.

 

Nobody understands that it is you that is the true miracle.

 

I am but a mirror for the world to gaze upon.

 

I served a blind religion of self-righteousness and I beg you for a new faith to cast your eye upon my future , so that Hope is not a lost art.

 

For those who have put aside miracles in favor of what can be devoured today, what about our children? They are leaving them with ashes.

 

Nobody can see the eternal light.

 

I have been pushed in this darkness with them to serve a hedonistic agenda and I don’t want to be a part of any such fate.

 

I pray for your truth because I am torn apart by the grand lie.

 

I can no longer fight alone.

 

I am humbled by the afflictions of all those who cannot remain silent long enough to hear peace.

 

I never needed anyone so much as I do today.

 

Lift me up once more Hope, once more so that I may carry the torch until my body tires.

 

The choice has always been with you. You told me to go. You told me to go.

[Marine1991]

The world has not brought me to my knees. I have placed myself there to give the illusion that I have always been weak.

 

A fox is a fox because it understands the nature of its surroundings, a lion is a lion because it knows to expend only enough energy to feed itself or defend its home, and a mouse is a mouse because fear is its greatest asset. The question I pose to anyone is this, do you believe it is in your nature to be the fox, the lion or the mouse?

 

What I have learned in my enduring struggle for purpose in this world is that it is best to just be yourself. For me my true self inhabits the strongest character traits of all these wild creatures. However, my greatest blunder has been the inability to recognize and conversely disregard them when love asks you to be human. Whether man has sought to be instinctive or our flesh has chosen us to be forever prehistoric is not the question we should be asking ourselves. What really perplexes me is whether or not there will ever come a time when we will no longer need to use them to survive on a planet infested with mirrors.

 

Nothing will ever give me back that which I have chosen to push away from me. She is gone now, and I have reached a level of paranoia that consumes me into questioning if this absence from the world is literal or metaphorical. I’m inclined to believe that maybe it is a bit of both when I consider that experience has a way of mutating everyone into something we no longer recognize as the clock ticks endlessly.

 

I wonder if I can love her now. I wonder if she can love me. Have images that speak a thousand words or with self-inflicted daily ignorance spoken none given me enough to carry forward into piecing together a new destiny? I had never offered myself the chance at anything less than a tragedy and facing the weight of life’s choices has given me good reason to.

 

To define the sun as stubborn for rising and setting upon my skin since the day of my birth would be doing a disservice to the definition when I consider her unwillingness to concede to my will even in the potentially darkest setting for my future.

 

I have given all that I could in turning the tables against her hoping that she would accept the fox, or the lion, or the mouse, and be content with whichever I had chosen to be led by for the rest of my time here, but after seventy three hundred sunsets I still have not felt the light of her touch shining on my skin.

 

What mental deficiency has plagued me to believe a constant shifting of egos would somehow capture her embrace. There is no fool like the man who changes everything so often that he has come back to the place that got him in this mess in the first place, doubt. Why would a woman this beautiful ever love a man like me?

[Marine1991]

The stars have no presence like that which is unseen. But when the possibility presents itself they seem just a little brighter when you look up at them.

 

You begin to notice things that may have slipped through your normal perceptive skill set, because you don’t have to worry anymore about the if this should happen or when will I be lifted up. It just becomes something on par with a great magic act. You know there is a logical cause for what tricks you into amazement but you refuse to dig for it. Instead you get taken in by the complexity and skill at which its holder has cast upon your mind.

 

There really aren’t any mysteries, just unanswered questions, and sometimes that’s okay, because to look back and understand how something beautiful came to be may strip you of the wonder that is finally facing you and spreading its petals under the light. You just breathe in deep and hold it momentarily as you watch the only life it will ever have and this is its defining gesture as you are there to witness the divinity of it all. There is only enough time to comprehend and watch a life changing event once. No recollection will be as clear as that moment, that instant when you know all things have come together perfectly for this to happen.

 

And before it did it had to be strong enough to weather all kinds of harsh conditions, things like the solitary of winter, ferocious storms, hard rains, flooding of the consciousness and nearly drowning in the nourishment that has given it its life. That is when you understand that there are no right conditions for a blossom but that it was tough enough to bend when it needed to, and the root had sowed itself deep enough to find the air to let it grow.

 

All that I can say is, we wish for the magic every day, and when it has reached its peak, when it has opened your eyes as wide as they can go, we want no answer. We only want to live for the now, because that is what we have paid to see. That is what has defined us for what seems like a lifetime of reaching for the light, and not these or any other words can undo the awe of it all. They can only add to the experience which is just present and undefinable. It is love. And I nor you should ever question its birth, for in doing so you play the part of the magician instead of the audience. Remember, the only true magic is not in the hands of the creator but those it has been bestowed upon. So I say to all of you, find your magicians, find the show that will dazzle you into believing in the impossible, than sit back and take it all in. Wait for the bud to open, just wait, just soak it up. There is no greater pleasure, I assure you. And if you are lucky, the wonder of its climax will stay with you forever and ever and you will never question again the storms it had to endure. You will simply know that the scars were worth it, and you are the recipient of its beauty. You become the reason it has opened its doors for even when there are a thousand more watching the same miracle.

 

I have waited for decades for this magic. Now I have come to realize that the anticipation of the pinnacle is not so important. What is important is how you got there, the growth, the battle of never giving up, the nature of all things heavenly. Somehow, some circumstance beyond your comprehension chose this seed to come together with the pollen among countless others.

 

The birth, the wounds, and the hardiness that occurs when it bends in the winds all begins to show itself to be timed like a star, and it becomes your time to blossom with it in the light. How I Hope for my time.

[Marine1991]

I will tell you this. Between the military using me for their twisted agendas because of my IQ and dealing with somebody thrusting her back into my life for reasons which I am just beginning to figure out this story may just be beginning. Mind you I let her go a long time ago and moved on. I was happy for her. I even dated again.

[ChocolateRain]

military using me for their twisted agendas

 

glad u realized it .........

 

 

other than that ...you write beautifully

Edited June 24, 2016 by a LoveShack.org Moderator
quote formatting ~6

[Marine1991]

I worked long and hard to fly under the radar. But when I was not thinking clearly I made the stupid mistake of getting a perfect score on the ASVAB. DUMB DUMB. After that I was screwed. They did their homework on me and well without saying anything else, they used me up inside.

[Marine1991]

I'll post some more soon. I have more but just mull this over for now. Mind you this is my interpretation of the events that have shaped my life. I cant speak for her.

[Marine1991]

I am questioning the universe as to why it has seen fit to put me here. I dont pretend anymore to know my fate. My days lie somewhere between hopefulness and chaos, both of which I have grown addicted to like some extraterrestrial drug. The legendary stories of apprehension by an angel have left a hole in the space time continuum and I am drifting through it like a lie that has shaped itself into an unrecognizable cloud of confusion and self indulgence. I don’t believe there has ever been a place in this world for someone like this incongruent identity I have become. I only know that clinging to the lunacy of it all is the only way to record my effortless thoughts, for each time I believe she has rested in my imaginary arms I am compelled to throw down my words for the trappings of normalcy. I don’t know what my therapist was thinking when she acted as if she has pulled me out of this prison for some other grand design. And as long as it remains just a fantasy I have chosen to sabotage it in the Hope that I will create a divine poem and entice her into believing no other man can enter her soul the way I have come here unchecked, unhinged and ready to show her a side of me that nobody could topple with the dullness of confident mundane gestures. Why must I feel outmatched by chiseled bodies and stable minds. Has she become predictable? God I hope not. For all that has separated her from the masses has been her unwillingness to conform to the likes of those who have left behind there sense of adventure in favor of a more manufactured lifestyle.

It is all that I have ever dreamt of, a day under the stars in a place that so few have travelled, outside ofcourse to the indigenous species who reside there.

I feel abandoned by my own shadow and lust for the equality that so many take for granted everyday. Its as if the sun has purposely dodged my body in favor of the air that surrounds me, and I can see the light in front and behind but I am trapped in temperatures that border on absolute zero.

It’s so cold here Hope.

Do you know how beautiful the world is anyway though? I have come to love this pain because it reminds me that there is someone out there who can bring out the best in me, the best that this stick in my hand can offer the world. I adore you every day for it. And maybe we will never take in each others gaze again but I am encapsulated by your presence anyway.

God I can’t take it anymore. I am overflowing with your spirit. I want you to take me with you. I want you to cherish me. I want you to hurt me. I want you to anything to me so long as I can feel your touch upon my existence. It is the nature of my affliction, and the hormones that have burst into tiny little stars that permeate in my blood.

I love you.

[Marine1991]

I see strangers look at me, with their warm smiles, as if they wish to cradle me and wash away the pain. And I feel closer to them now than I do with my own family, who with questionable intentions have tortured me for the better part of a decade. I started telling myself that your life story has been generated by someone other than you, that you have been my perfect creation in the fall of 1996, because I can’t fathom not being a party to your dreams. Nothing becomes a harsher truth than the concrete fact that I have just been wasting time and growing tired in body, and that I have found myself in an endless loop. I am no farther along in my journey for understanding and acceptance than when I first began this metaphoric death spiral. And I don’t mean it to sound completely hopeless and tragic because I am still here, still pushing myself to a conclusion wether it is the darkest fate I have imagined, or somewhere in the middle. Were it not for this holy tool of creation that drifts along word after word I fear that I may never come to grips that I have been the carrier of this disease, of my own haphazard fall forward into the irrefutable constant of heartbreak and madness. I am the recipient of the most notorious award for love, the most dreadful of it’s kind, obsession. To think that I had actually believed that she had been fighting a battle with me and not its polar opposite, what kind of fool am I to report to the world that I may be the luckiest man alive. Nothing separates a soul from the masses like a grand delusional belief that lasts half a lifetime. I feel compelled to try and turn my thoughts around so that I do not project as a blind man but this agonizing pain is all that I have to hold onto at the moment. I am forced to endure this insanity for as long as my creator has deemed necessary that I remain joined to this body, this plagued mind. It makes me want to begin another forray into reckless love with someone who will never challenge me the way that she has in absence. I wonder if their is anyone out there who might glance at this loud cry, and who has the spirit to lift me up again and cause me to worship their existence as I have done so carelessly with her. Could anyone make me believe that she has fallen to second best, or third, or anywhere that is out of reach of this prison of hopeless waiting. I would challenge anyone to take on this monumental task of supplanting this paranoid romance. Am I so locked away from possiblity that I have come to lose reason in exchange for burden. I will never bow before any soul that has been pushed on me by those who have attempted to rip her from my world. A forced destiny is as detestable as a virus. No, I must not only walk away from her, I must run away from all those who have injected their agendas on my dreams. I do this with no regret because it is a necessity if I ever wish to survive long enough for peace to wash over me like these waves that fall endlessly over themselves. I have given fair warning to them all, and now they must accept the same finality I must embrace, that we will all lose something. I have put myself in a position that traps me in this place for another torturous year. I will spend it in solitary and write this miserable tale. I will then go to the other side of this earth to distance myself from all who might strip me of this monumental task of self inflicted amnesia. I do this without any remorse and with numbness in my heart because I am incapable of anger or love for theives. I have to laugh at the prospect that I was going to bring everyone together with this struggle of mine. I still don’t know who the greater fool is, them or me. I have my demons but I will walk quietly from the guilt of not conquering them. I will instead do what I have done best. I will take on a new persona from the vault which stores so many, and I will pretend once again to be an average man with average dreams. Who am I to claim I have been different than all these reflections, these blind apparitions who walk around in search of material wealth. I was right about one thing this time. This was my last stand. I will bow my head in defeat, beaten by my own game, and nobody will be awarded a prize. We have all laid our cards down on the table and the community is the ace of spades because metaphorically speaking we will all die a little from this. Each of us will say farewell. I only wish that I could run now. I am a defeatist. That is my nature, because nobody else has measured up. That is what I am best at. But in this final round we all must concede to failure. And I will not force a tear upon my cheek because I have gotten exactly what I had expected all along. Did I make it clear to them what they should expect. I will return to those which I have been given, the loss of a decade. I do not do this out of spite or anger but simply as a matter of cause so that one may understand the only way one can.

Although I feel this pain I will find a way to make good to her and wish her every happiness, so that at least I can run away from this agony knowing that I am not as mad as everyone claims that I am. I know that I am bound to end my time on earth heartbroken and alone. I had believed to my best ability that someday I would find what it was I have been searching for my entire life, but I had always prepared myself for the worst in the interim. It goes without saying that the interim has consumed about 3/4 of my life. The other quarter was spent hoping that my other relationships would blossom. That was definitely not the case though. God I feel like such a fool. I can only be thankful for what I did write while I was consumed in ecstacy at the idea that maybe, just maybe she was reaching out to me. If I hadn’t written all of this nonsense when I was manic I think it would have gone unspoken because this self, the depressed self can’t write with such exuberance. It just doesn’t work that way. She is my muse for better or for worse. We are indeed married in my warped mind. She has absolutely no clue though. Yes, I know. Believe me I know. It’s ludicrous, crazy, obsessive and above all a pipe dream, but the heart sings a different tune. You have to understand though, I have lived in my own world since I was ten. My fantasy world is more real to me than your reality is to you. So you may see me and talk to me and think he doesn’t seem different. Understand, that unless you are incredibly interesting or you are one of my closest friends, I am living two lives right in front of you.

[Marine1991]

From what I am beginning to finally piece together, I got manic in 2006 and had just a little bit of financial trouble. This is when my family and her family decided to intervene without her knowledge or mine. While I was in a relationship with someone I cared for very deeply, somebody went through all of my journals and these two parties decided to see what would happen if they put her in front of me again after 8 years of not seeing her. So one day at Barnes and Noble I spotted her. At least I thought I did. It turns out it was an imposter with her back turned the entire time. Somebody may have placed the suggestion to me while I was sleeping that I would see her there. Turns out I am incredibly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. Anyway I turned to stone and couldn't move. This was the beginning of my downward spiral and the eventual end of an 8 year relationship. I believe now that Hope finally knows what has been transpiring under both of our noses, but Im not positive yet.