Did you forget I showed you?

This was hard to write. Harder to admit. Even harder to publish.
Here it is for what it's worth, anyway.

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I was trying so hard to like you.
To get you. To get to you. To get to know you.
Harder than you'd know.
Harder than you'd guess.
Harder than I'd want to say aloud.

And now, here we are - sitting across from one another in a painstaking silence that I'm wondering if you notice. In an uncomfortable position that, if I could be honest, I'd realise I only brought on myself.

So, here it is. This is the backlash.
Y'know, the one we were talking about?

The one that comes when something - whatever it is - in your head tells you that someone is "great", is "wonderful", is going to "make the difference". Then, time passes and you suddenly realise that the "greatness" your head (or whatever) assumed was there has dissipated into reality. And now, you're stuck with the feeling of being robbed, cheated, wronged. Betrayed.

Which leads to the bitterness and the loathing and the pushing that same someone into trashcans and calling them crumby and a load of shit. And then, after that the avoidance, and maybe we can see somewhat clearly after all that.

More than likely, though, you won't. And the let-down will never fade - fully. Because it never does. Because once someone falls from wherever that somewhere is inside of you, they can't get back up.

And everyone falls.

Even you.

So, if we're going to move forward in any beneficial way, we have to figure out what that ledge is, why everyone in god's name ends up on it, and why everyone (including yourself) has fallen, and why that in and of itself didn't destroy your goddamn concept of the ledge.

Even though it should have.

But you keep all the old concepts with you, despite the fact that you're a writer and you prise yourself on knowing yourself more than others because you spend so much time thinking about motivation, ideaologies, characteristics - all the things that make up a character, and likewise, a person.

But do you really think that just by its nature, a writer knows any more than anyone else? That just because you delve into the depths of humanity and so, as a result, are frequently faced with the opportunity to do the same to the self - that you actually do it with clarity and regularity?

Do you reall think that as a result of sheer repetition, you often go that route?
More likely, you're in a deep hole of avoidance and patting yourself on the back and telling yourself you have all the answers - when in reality what you have is a load of fear, self-pity, self-exultation, and bitterness.

But, you are trying. Right?
Just like the other writers in your league, in your line of work, in your strain of thought - you must be trying. Trying to know something more about reality. About yourself. About cause and effect of life when others can't be bothered.
Then again, perhaps you tell yourself that to make yourself feel better for being just as narrow-minded.

I feel I'm on the brink of a very bad decision, all the time now. Between going too far in and being pushed too far out. Between being irrelevant and psychotic. And the more I go into myself, the further I go from the life I had before and the closer I go toward a life I wasn't sure I could have, or even wanted.

The more I become Brandon, which is terrifying in its own way.
I'm not so sure I could be Brandon, even if I wanted to be.
I'm not sure I want to be.

But, I'm not sure what else I can be, either.
A shell of the person I was and a ghost of the person I can't or won't be. Stuck in the middle, in between, in suspension. In irrelevancy and psychosis.

I think I thought I was making life better, thought I was interpreting that reading that we did altogether, thought I was making life richer, thought I was pulling everything together.

I think I really fucked up this time.
Backed myself down a hole I, now, don't like either end of.
And I'm pretty sure there's not another way back out.
Well, shit.

Where do we go from here?
Well, the fact that the old adage is coming up is itself the answer, isn't it? Not a question, just a turn of phrase that we'll go around living by, I suppose. What else is there to do? What else can we do? Just ride out the backlash, because it probably isn't as bad as you're thinking it is. Is it ever?

In five, fifteen, fifty, five-hundred years, someone is going to look back on all this and have figured it all out and all of the things that I'm struggling with and mulling over and trying and trying and trying to get right won't really matter. Because it will have all faded away.

The water will have risen and people will be gone and the few of them that are left will get another shitty chance to do something, or to believe that it can be done. And then, they'll see that five-hundred years ago, we got so backwards that the backlash lasted up until where they are. And then, they'll see how bad we had it - or just how bad we made it. And maybe one or two of them will realise that maybe it was worse or just as bad for some of us who didn't want to be going that way - but that we had no control, and sometimes that's the worst.

And the future might even have compassion on us where we are.
Maybe just a little.

But. For now?

Oh, we'll just sit in the same room and not have to look at each other and not have to face the hard facts that we can't get along together, because we have so many layers between the couch and the chair that it's impossible to get through.

So, no worries. I won't ever, ever, ever have to face you. And you won't ever, ever, ever have to face the things I'd probably be saying if we ever did. The things that might have made this backlash less awful. The things that might have made us both better. The things that might have made all the difference from the very start.

And we won't ever have to say any of them.
Is that fair? It's fair enough, anyway. Too bad, but fair enough, I suppose.
In theory.

And maybe, in theory, the future will get better from here. I don't have a lot of hope that anything will actually change, but then, it would be hard-pressed to get any worse unless something traumatic were to happen. Which is always a possibility, I suppose.

So, we'll see if one of us dies or if we both make it out alive.
If we're both still alive.
I'm not sure that we are.
But then, in this age, it's so goddamn hard to tell.