This Pain
I like to cry on the floor. Sprawled out on my stomach, my head resting on my hands in front of me, or sitting against a wall, my knees drawn up, my elbows resting on them, my head dropping down into the cradle of my crossed arms. Once in a while I'll cry standing up, leaning against the wall, or, even more rarely, lying on my bed. But the bed feels wrong, too soft and comfortable, even comforting, and I don't want comfort. I want hard, unyielding planes against my body, the almost-pain of discomfort fueling my misery. It's much more fitting.
The best is crying on the floor of a cold, dark place. The cold is oh-so-perfect, numbing and chilling my body until its state matches that of my brain. It makes me feel so very alone, isolated in my misery. And yet the isolation makes me feel safe, cocooned in my own little world where the outside world can't touch me.
I think there's some sick part of me that likes the pain, that revels in it. That looks forward to these moments, tries to bring them about. Sometimes I wonder if everyone is like that, or if I'm some sort of freak.
Well, truth be told, I am a freak-- in "love" with another girl, and obsessed with her neck, of all things. I haven't seen her in months-- we parted ways at graduation, her off to an outside school and me continuing at the affiliated college-- but I can still clearly picture her neck in my mind, its pure whiteness like a beacon in my mind. I remember all the times I wanted to touch it, to reach out and stroke a fingertip down the smooth length of it. I still do, I suppose, though now that I don't see her anymore it has acquired a certain abstract quality in my mind.
My feelings and conceptions and memories of her are beginning to take on that same quality, though the pain is as sharp as it's always been. I've always thought that it would change as well, becoming fuzzier and ineffectual, a halfhearted throb of nostalgia-longing-loneliness rather than this bone-deep ache that can make me sob like a child. I wonder now if I was wrong about that. Will there really come a time when my feelings for her are nothing but a memory? When I feel for another what I've only felt for her? I ask myself these questions as I cry over her, over the seeming hopelessness of my situation.
I wallow in my misery, sinking into the deep. There is a part of me that hopes my feelings for her never fade, or that if they do, that they will be replaced with a similar outlet-- I want to keep doing this forever. I want to keep feeling this forever. This lovely, aching pain.