goodbye Options

[Wambangalang]

I sit here drunk and depressed, yet filled with a sense hope for the future. The last two weeks has been an emotional culmination of past and present, of fate and destiny (two things I believed nothing in before this night) and I am here to say I am starting a new.

Two years ago I met a girl. She was fantastic in every way. She was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was understanding. She was a friend. She professed her love to me to no avail. I was not interested, I was blinded by youthful arrogance and my bachelor ways. She waited.

Months passed. She waited. I made a choice a year after the beginning of our friendship to be romantically intimate with her, and so our love relationship began. 17/12/05. That is the date, our date. In the tumultuous year that was 2005-2006 much has happened. Much hasn't.

I am a writer. I am a filmmaker. I have been an emotinal wreck (in the bedroom and in the spirit), a result of too many lifetime choices and circumstances to mention, and I allowed this to be the barricade with which to shut my one true love out. She stood by me. She loved me. For one year I sat in front of a computer screen, the pact I had made with myself and loved ones of punching out a screenplay within that year weighing over my shoulders every second of every day, and yet, nothing. Yet she loved me.

Every day I promised and I assured, that I was on top of my goals, running for that mountain that I knew was no where to be seen, I lied to her I lied to myself. You can't achieve anything when you hate yourself. You cant love ANYONE when you dont love yourself. I believed, foolishly, that her love was unconditional, that no matter what manner of defeat I surrendered myself to, she would put me before herself. She is 19. How can I ask that of a 19 year old? For the age she is, she is the most passionate, loving, caring, tolerant, guiding beautiful force I have ever encountered or had the pleasure to connect with, and yet, even that is not enough to penetrate the vile beast that is self-loathing.

It began a few weeks ago, this culmination of events that I have no rational way of explaining. We had an influx of new employees at my store. To my surprise, one of them was an old high school aquaitence. He is a member of a rock band that plays local gigs, and I thought to myself rather enviously how I wished I had a fraction of his success. Then on myspace an old girlfriend and another highschool friend contacted me. You must understand that in the six years since graduating I have not once come into contact with anyone from that time in my life. Then another worker came. Low and behold, he was a high school aquaitence too. He writes rap music, and is planning on heading over to melbourne next year to promote his work. I really felt that I had drifted so far from my goals and aspirations and that the fire that began my love affair with film had long extinguished. I got depressed. Real depressed. The rapper told me somthing that stuck with me. "You'll find the time to write. You just have to wait for tragedy." I laughed it off as the cliched post-educational remark you'd expect from a struggling artist. But it stuck with me.

The tone of my girlfriends loving text messages began to decline into coldness. I had no idea why. In one small week, it turned from a supportive bond to a loveless, friend-like mateship. I felt a distance between the two of us. Of course, she was stressed because it was her exam week! That was my rationale. She loved me as she always did, because she said she would always love me! That is how I reasoned it inside of my head. Tonight we went to a birthday party of a mutual aquaitance. There, beyond any fathomable explanaition besides coincidence, I met another high school frinend. Inside of two weeks, a handful of people I would never thought ot have heard from again began to come into contact with my life. We laughed and reminisced about the old days. He told me about X, she commited suicide 8 months ago. I was crushed. X was a great girl, a true optimist and bright shining success story-to-be. But her path led her into another direction. We talked about other people who had "made it" and those who had not. It was a bittersweet foray into nostalgia. I felt I had something to tell my girlfriend.

I took her aside and told her everything that had been pulsating in my head and my heart over the last year. I could not allow her to ruin her youth because of my own personal demons. I had to fix myself before I could love her with everything that I was possible to love her with. She cried. I cried. She did not love me in the same way that she did in the beginning. It hurt like fucking hell. I walked away and cried some more. She hugged me and told me that I needed to sort myself out. I needed to stop drinking. I needed to start writing.

"Lightning crahes, a new mother cries." If that wasnt the motherfucking darndest thing of the whole fucking night, that song began to play. At the exact moment of my breakup with the love of my life, at the exact time that i realised that i needed to die and be reborn, of all the things that happened in the last couple of weeks, this song cemented the realisation that i was beginning somehting new. I shit you not people. It played on the radio at that very moment. I do not believe in god or fate or circumstance. I do not believe in guiding angels and spiritual forces. But I am at a loss to explain what happened to me. Fuck. Yesterday my life was going to be with her forever. Today, everyhting is different.

I got home and cried harder than I have cried before. And Im not the crying type. I let it all out. I have been given a gift by something fucking bigger than me. Something took away the love of my life and placed many signs in front of me to allow me the courage and determination to get my shit together and write. There's the tragedy I needed. This is the most I have written in a year. I am grateful. I am removing every source of distraction from my life. This is sadly one of them. I dont really know anyone here but its hard to say goodbye.

goodbye