Now

I should have stayed last night.  I knew it when I put the car in gear, when I backed out and saw the others in my rear view mirror headed into the building.  I just couldn't do it.  I had a curiously hollow place just under my heart that forbade it.  The normally-loud interior of my little Cruiser was quiet; I hadn't even hooked my iPhone to the stereo.  I made the necessary automotive contortions to get out of my space, and I drove away.  I did not look back again.

I didn't have to go to know what was going to happen.  It's been happening again and again for so long now that I probably could have scripted the dialogue for it ahead of time, just another kind of horror fiction.  To be honest, I am not sure it even hurts anymore.  Should it?  Maybe.  But increasingly, the part of me that used to be hurt, scared, alive enough to react has been stabbed so much that it just can't react to new injury from that particular stimulus now.

I was told that I would know when the end of a thing had come, and as I sit here now gazing over my precious little space, once again, I feel the rightness of that.  What that truly means remains to be seen.  The direction is still unclear.  I only know that what is, is unbearable.  What is, is unmaking me.  So many people who know me and care about me have been telling me this for so long now, but I have been ignoring that, have been pretending that it isn't true, that I can be stronger than all of this for so long.  The simple truth is that I'm not.  Nobody is or can be forever.  Water wears away solid stone; look at the Grand Canyon for proof if you need it.  Before all the things that I hold most precious are gone in me beyond the point of reclamation, I am going to make a choice.  I can't help anybody else ever if I myself am destroyed and wrecked beyond use, and that's the point we're coming to quickly.

But there's always another way.

It's time to find it.