Pretender’s secret – John and I

Have ya seen Steve lately?

“It’s over,” I hear myself saying. Not that I wasn’t there to talk, even though I wasn’t in the mood. But my voice seems not to care what I want. I haven’t seen Steve in a while, in a long while, and now we were sitting in his kitchen. Me holding on to a bottle of water, and he trying to catch my eyes; but he wouldn’t succeed. Sometimes I forgot to breathe, and when I remembered I sucked the air into my lungs as if I’d be afraid of drowning. He’d turned down the music when I came in, but I could still hear it. We hadn’t talked or seen each other in months, years, I didn’t even remember. We never were that close, but we could talk about everything close to our hearts – and the funny thing, is we didn’t know anything about each other. “What we had, what we were, me, her… everything lies in the past I can barely remember.” I loved talking like this because it seems to be my creative mind that takes the feeling, outwits my thinking. “Nothing stands between us but also there is nothing.” This shouldn’t make sense to him at all – but then, he never should try. We’re just meeting after ages it seems; I lay myself open and then I’ll be gone, until he needs me or I’ll need him again. We don’t write or call, we don’t care, we’ll just be in that moment. I can’t even remember how it started, where we met or how long it has been since. “I’ve been through so much and now it seems she never was part of my live, just a nice picture I loved to look at and loved to hold on to. But I know, my synapses tell me that it wasn’t like that. I loved her, she was part of me, she got me inside, she was my life. My heart refuses to believe that. My memories don’t care; they don’t care about time either. We were each other’s soul and that changed silently, so now I simply know it’s over. There is no “we” anymore. We’re two strangers again. Because she changed into somebody I don’t know and I don’t care who it is, what she had become. I don’t even know who I am. I don’t know myself for the first time in my life. I am aggressive, more blind, weaker, fallen. I always knew what to do, and I had the strength to do it because I knew who I was and whom I want to become. I was fighting for that, I was fighting my whole life. And now I stopped. I don’t fight, I give up – something my old me never had done, I don’t care about me, I don’t care if I become an asshole, I don’t care about my future, I don’t care about anything.” I looked up at him, into his eyes, smiled and shook my head. “It’s madness, I tell ya. I am going nuts and I see it. I see that I make my situation worse, I see that it’s the wrong way I’m going, I see people waving and shouting but I don’t care. Jesus standing a hundred meters behind me and shaking his head. He’s worried and hopes I’ll return. I’m out of his reach. Even though I don’t want to leave him behind, because I remember being scared to hell of the thought being without god.” The music seems to comfort me. So I wanna scream and tell myself it’ll be okay. But it only gave me the closure to stand up and walk away for how long it’ll be this time. So I’ll shed my tears and I’ll face my fears.