Four years to confront the runner.

You were always running, weren’t you? I see it clearly now standing on this floor littered with the basketball and track jerseys you left behind.

All of these worn uniforms of this place rotting in black garbage bags.

I’ll see you again. A stranger with whom I share a past we’ll both pretend to ignore.

It’s funny, the bags don’t pain me as much as the hangers. Because tomorrow the bags will be gone, but the hangers will stay in the closets; ghost scaffolding of the places you once claimed.

Good-bye.

I love you.

     All of the work I do today is for her; the better me waiting at the end of this labor. A far off waif on the horizon that can be an ideal I see myself as to justify my procrastination, my lethargy. “What will be, will be,” Because it is so much more comfortable to think “destiny” has a route set for me. As if what I do or don’t do today doesn’t really affect that far off better version of me.
     Sometimes, like in these moments of rumination, I am hyper aware my ideal cannot be without the work I can’t seem to put in. Other, clearer times I’m able to grasp that she will be me as I am now, because I have stagnated.
     No longer bound by fear, but by inaction.
     I’m going through the motions of a changing life, but not actually doing much to change it. I’m screaming loudly to avoid toiling in silence. And I am writing admissions because I need to get these words somewhere that I am accountable for them.
     Even as I stand here and scream, “All I want cannot be!” there is that part of me that sees her; the other better me. The one waiting on the horizon to read carefully the harried words of the younger stranger she once was; trying to glean how she came to be where she is.
     I need to do more and I need to do it now.
     I need to do it alone.
     Scream into the void until it starts to scream back.

Stay good and keep transmitting.

     With anyone else I would bury the hurt and the guilt, but it’s you. It’s you and I don’t know what I did to cast a lens over every move I make. No matter how innocuous.
     I am fully aware of how bared and open this is, and I know this too will pass as all things do. But at what cost? How many times can I pretend not to notice the little voice that questions all which was once accepted with glee? There is no cure for doubt when the other party refuses to take the antidote.
     My penchant for staining the past rose-red is only hindering my forward momentum. Because of your lens, I see every grievance inflicted upon me; every broken promise. In fact, I’m not sure anymore that there were ever any kept promises now.
     A lens of doubt influences both the ones that cast it, and those on whom it is cast. If you fear me, eventually, I’ll start to fear you through no fault of my own.
     Lenses cast in lonely thought, without an outside voice to question their sanity, lenses cast by too many voices speaking too many doubts, cast by madness, cast by hatred, carve in all directions.
     What force to drive love into hatred.
     Faith, absolute faith, into doubt.
     What is the cost? How do I turn doubt back into faith?
     As I write these words I know I am saying too many of the things I keep inside; writing too many of the words I never say. But I will yell into the void as long as I am able, because one day, perhaps sooner rather than later, I will lose the chance.
     Because I can’t scream at you, lest you doubt further still. But I cannot live to do only as you say. Life is far too long and far too short to waste making you proud; I see that you never have been and you never will be. It’s like chasing the horizon on this round planet, it never comes.
     Now that they’re gone, I miss them, my rose colored lenses. But this lens of doubt, it might just save my life.

Stay good and keep transmitting