Half-Alive

You ask me what I have been up to.  I would like to answer you honestly.  "This past year I have been living half-alive."

Because I'm too old to feel like this.  I'm too old to feel this desperate, this separate, from my own life and society, like a brand new toddler coming off another sugar rush his mother never intended on getting him onto, asking himself if he was the real cause of all this destruction, am I the one who wreaked all this havoc?

I'm too old to feel like this, but I'm too young to know this feeling, I'm too young to have a ghost like you!

You built me up in compliments and late-night phone calls, and I built you up in my own mind: in twisted memories and destructive regrets, and stories, with catastrophic, chaotic, endings, but now we come tumbling down from out too-tall tower of lego bricks and misplaced mistakes to the real world, where honest compliments come from true-blue best friends and potential loves and parents, and you are yourself instead of the second version that lives in my memories, the 2.0, like the modified iPhone 4s with more shit and apps and features than anybody knows what the hell do with.

And what the hell can I do with you?

He says he loves me OFTEN.
He says I'm wonderful OFTEN.
He says he thinks of me OFTEN.
But all that does is remind me, because

You said I love you OFTEN.
You said I was wonderful OFTEN.
You said you thought of me OFTEN.

But he asks me to love him often, like you never had to, and I can't because loving him is letting you go, and I'm still not sure if I can do that, even though it's about goddamn time, and I know I should.

Because I loved you ALWAYS
And you were wonderful ALWAYS
and I think of you constantly, especially the seconds where I shouldn't.

Because you said I love you, and disappeared
You said I was wonderful, and went away
You said you thought of me often, but I could never tell, because your eyes went from oceans to blue-black holes in seconds, like the bruises on my heart that I'm sure everyone could see, that everyone can see, if you cut me open, and let me tell you, you did.

But this isn't about getting back at you.  This is about the fact I could never be with you, especially because we were never together in the first place.

Do you remember when I told you we are all looking for something real, but we aren't all lucky enough to find it?  It was late at night and we were feeling philosophical and I wasn't thinking straight, but I never was, with you, even thought I was right.

This shit is real, this realization is real, I am so very real and the heroes are as guilty as the villains in this tragedy, so no matter what you felt, no matter what you meant, no matter what you should have said, I'm going to believe in the dreams this time because

I can't wait around to calm your nightmares anymore.