Ex Post Facto

Somewhere, someone is reading your words and thinking about you. Words are tricky little things--like pieces of skin you can shed and leave lying around. Weeks, months, or years later, you come back to find the molted words and marvel at how something can still be you and yet be so detached from your current self.

Somewhere, someone is steadily growing enamored with you your words, without realizing the pointlessness of pining for something that someone has long left behind. What kind of fool falls in love with snakeskin? And yet that someone reads on, treading carefully so as not to disturb, trying intently to piece the hazy fragments together into something closely resembling you--or at least a shell of who you were.

Somewhere, someone is going through the cycle of your thoughts and emotions, and wishing they'd been able to do something about it. Like anyone could ever keep snakes from shedding, or keep autumn leaves on trees. What's done is done, and someone who has changed is harder to bring back than someone who has simply gone. They fail to see that displacement is most often replacement, too. Snakeskin, autumn leaves--lizard tails, even. It's less rocket science and more 2nd-grade biology.

To be more precise about things, then: somewhere, someone is thinking about who you were, holding on to your snakeskin words--not wanting to bring you back, but simply hoping to be led to where you are now.

Comforts

Sometimes you just have to step back, and step away from the details that are eating you up, to look at the big picture. That's when you see things clearly, and you get to think as the closest to being rational you could ever get (still not close enough though).

The thing is, often the big picture--and the decisions that need to made after seeing it--can be pretty painful to realize.

Still, it's your life, and it's your call. You choose your own happiness, and likewise choose the personal misery pit you will wallow in.

The only comfort is knowing that there's no rush to this decision.

And that you can always choose to curl up in the comfort of things you've gotten so used to, instead of facing the proverbially harsh winds of change.

(Often, being brazen is not being brave. Sometimes it takes a lot more courage to be what others see as a coward--if it means that at least one person is spared the damage.)

No one will ever need to know that you almost changed your mind.

Questionable Intentions

I never meant to write today, but there’s always something about you that compels me—to write, and do various other things I’d never thought I even wanted to.

I never meant to read, but there’s something about a sappy movie at five in the morning that compelled me to.

I never meant to know, but I now that I do, well I guess I don’t mean to know how I feel about it.

Because really, I never meant to feel anything about it. (It’s the movie, I suppose. I unfortunately am a hopeless romantic.)

And if there’s one intention that I at least got to keep, it’s that

I never meant to tell, and I never did.