Stuck in the past

The perfect person is a man who has melted away like a candle into the past. I can see him, perhaps even talk to him, and yet he is very gone. I can wax poetic, memorialize him like an object from a Keats poem, but that brings him ever more distant. I am not worshiping a god, I am loving the man that got away.

After the end, I am stuck in the past because it is my only will for survival. Living now, as I am, I am stuck in the past for the sake of vanity, for the sake of hope: I hope that he will believe my love for him; I hope that he has not forgotten me.

Love is a vanity that does not reveal itself easily. It may become apparent by its enduring self sustenance, or it might be fully realized in the pain it causes. Regardless, it is a vanity, self-serving and wrought with land mines, "slings and arrows," and other hapless calamities that might otherwise warn us against it.

To my detriment, I live now. I live in a seemingly recoverable past whose footprint presses me to the ground, without explanation, and spits on my face. I believe the lie of a better future for us all as dare to ask, "what is in it for me?" The answer is that there is no hope, that I should continue to read books and believe in the rhetoric of change, and die the slow and silent death of closetry. The point is this: when I am loved and I do love, my love has a political location, a legitimization by the popular consensus, "this is what is also correct and real," but when it is me, fraught and alone, is there any consideration for my existence? Do I exist? Is there any thought for the person alone who does not wish to start a family?

The solitude after an apocalypse is very comfortable. Again, it is also very frightening, but not for the same reasons. Comfort is the way of the known, discomfort is the way of the unknown. I wish to seek this out.