Chapter 10

During this deep dark period of overwhelming self-pity and isolation, (whether real or imagined I haven't concluded yet...) I decided that I needed to get out of the house. I barged out of the bathroom with a freshly shaved head and made a beeline to the door, careful not to look over at Eros and Echo who had jumped unsubtly away from each other, startled by my cameo. I headed to the Garden, sure that Madame Rook would be able to get me fucked up somehow. I wasn't let down, and left with a vial full of cocaine and the ambition to keep myself occupied. I started to head home, thinking about how Eros and Echo were on the couch, how they probably talked about me in hushed tones after I left and then progressed to peer into each other's minds, or at least the parts they wanted to see. How Eros would surely probe deep inside Echo's well-adjusted grasp of hardship so that they could play a game of soul-doctor. I decided that I wouldn't be able to handle walking in on that particular scene, so my legs steered me purposefully off-course. I was pretty coked up and the distance I wandered didn't seem like any more than a block or two. I wasn't even really paying attention to where I was going, I just put my body on autopilot and enjoyed the ride.
When I started paying attention to my surroundings, I realized that I was in a cemetery. It was like a scene from a dream, and I looked down dazedly to find my mother's name glaring up at me. I started, realizing that for the first time in over a lifetime, I was in the place my parents were buried. I took my little vial and shook a little bit of coke onto my pinkie, not really knowing what else to do, and inhaled it as I knelt to study my mother's stone. It was overgrown and flowerless, all weeds and no blossoms. I had seen it once before in its prime, when one of Lady Ebony's minions had taken me to visit because for some reason I felt like I should. Afterwards, I didn't request to come back again.
Now, it felt just right. As though I was beckoned by them to a safe place where I could finally reclaim whatever it is that I had lost when I lost Eros. I plopped down between the two stones, my mother's on the left, my father's on the right, and sat quietly, alone for the first time since that vast unbearable loneliness had started eating me alive. There, sitting between (and on top of if I wanted to be morbid about it) my dead parents, I began to feel almost...better. Like a fog was slowly lifting from in front of me.
For the first time since Eros decided to choose Echo out of need for a rebound, a “real relationship,” I saw just how important being solitary really is. I didn't need anyone but myself, a lesson I learned the day I realized that Liza was a chicken shit and that I was free.
It was a lesson that Eros had somehow made me question with her need for validation through another person, via her “real relationships.” I wasn't like that, was I? In fact, wasn't that why I had questioned my ability to commit myself to another person from the start? Did I really feel worthless unless I had someone lurking around, ready to pick up the shards of my shattered ego who expected the same in return? Did I really need someone around to tell me how much they loved me only to say the same thing two weeks later to a virtual stranger and drop me like I had forced her to? What the hell kind of love was that? And if that's really love, then there's something a little ridiculous about it. Who needs it? If love is that fickle, then what the hell was it that I had been feeling so intensely for over two years that led to me feeling this shattered once I was told I couldn't feel it anymore? If that fickle, erratic thing Eros was feeling was love, then that other thing in me, that vulnerable, raw, bewildered and broken thing in me, that couldn't be love. Isn't the first rule of love to harm none?
If that fickle erratic bitch Eros claimed was love, love then, was nothing but some huge ugly misunderstanding.
Love then, was abandoning all hope once you don't hear what you want from who you want to hear it from.
Love then, was shopping around for someone who will give you your own way.
I didn't want to be a part of it. I didn't need that crap to be happy. I was better off without it.
Right?
Sitting between my dead parents, I realized that what's just right for some people at times completely alienates the people you want to be just right with, and I wished my mother could have been around to let me know that, or at least hug me when I learned the hard way. Especially on days when I would mope in my room, jotting down random musings and comparing myself and my ripple in the world to carpet dust. As I gazed off into the trees, looking at them without really seeing them, I remembered a piece of paper I had crumpled up on the floor in between my foam mattress and the wall. On that piece of paper, I had written about how I had become concealed from the rest of the world, shrunken down, away from life, deep down and ground up into dust. Carpet dust. I sank between the fibers of alternate realities that nobody on their everyday course would ever think to consider, meanwhile poisoning all the other little carpet dust particles that managed to be within my sphere of influence.
And it occurred to me that without this confusion about love and love lost and trust never to be regained, assuming it was ever there in the first place, without those things I would never have thought to compare myself to carpet dust. I realized that I had given someone other than myself the power to dictate my emotions. I realized that yes. I was as bad as Eros.
Bummer.
Not only did I feel like hell not having her around anymore, but I didn't even know if she was worth feeling like hell over, even though past experience stated that yes- it was definitely worth having her available to talk to. We had had such an amazing relationship before everything went to hell around us. I was so confused. Did I want her to be with me or did I want to be alone forever so that I could maintain my facade of control? This bullshit little black and white reality was rapidly losing its comfort. I realized that the way I felt about Eros was beyond reductionist arguments defending my need for independence. I was losing perspective, hardcore, and I didn't know what to do. I had no idea of how to deal with it.
So I didn't.
I forced myself to stop thinking about it and sat there fidgeting, staring off into space a little while longer until I felt like I'd explode if I stayed still another minute. Simultaneous to a distant clap of thunder, I sprung to my feet and, waving good-bye to my parents, (who, by the way, had refused my parting gift of some tobacco or a gum wrapper), once again surrendered to the pulse beneath my feet, deeply inhaling, basking in the smell before rain. Once I rounded the corner away from the cemetery gates, I began to wander with a sense of determination that my lack of destination left completely unjustified.