Treading the line

"So why do you like to run?"

"I can zone out."

Perhaps that's just the way runners are. Perhaps it's nothing special, just something... in common.

I tell people I like to run because it gives me a buzz at the end of it.
But it's not always true. Most of the time I don't, especially when I've been out of it for a while.

The reason I like to run is the same reason I used to wander down the bank of the Thames in the evenings, all those years ago in the immediate aftermath of Her.

It helps me to not-think, for a while.

*****
Listening to some irritating random chick tell me the other day that I needed to take time to grieve (you think you know me? I feel like hacking your head off with my sabre, organic lemon my foot!)...

I told her No.

I do not NEED to take time to grieve.

I NEED to drink, after the ridiculous nightmare that work has become. I NEED to laugh. I NEED to RUN.

So why don't you take that lemon and stick it somewhere... organic.

*****
So this is what happens when you grieve.

The day comes and goes, and is forgotten.
Except something in the back of your mind lingers, and then sadness creeps in like a cat out from the cold, from the lower centers into conscious thought.

It doesn't go away. It doesn't get better with time.
The bewilderment, the... bad feelings.
The memories of how things were exhilarating, so exciting once, the thrill of discovery, of unexpectedness. The familiar sensation of contentment that accompanied us dying in bed in the afternoons. The contentment and...ease I felt, between us. The willingness to experience your world, and the forlorn wish that you would share that same willingness, for me to share mine with you.

The inability to reconcile the growing knowledge of what I must have been becoming to you. How un-special I must be, for you to... play that game. How little I must mean to you; unable to reconcile all this with the words and the actions you showed to my face, the I love yous, which were gradually dwindling, but still being spoken. Unable to reconcile the person I had fallen for, with the person who was falling down into darkness without her even realising it.

Self-doubt. Doubt in you. Doubt in us.

This is what happens when I grieve, alone in my car en route to the gym, eyes blurring as a dark tide rises.

This is where I stand now, on a fine line - where I knew I would be, one day, and where I struggled against you to try to prevent us reaching.

I just wanted to die in your arms.
I didn't want for this : to be surrounded by women attractive to me, and reaching this line, just beyond that last of the bridges linking us, if only a feeble email, as it burns away into faded obscurity.

I wanted us to be happy, again. A simple, futile wish; it takes two hands to clap.

All I NEED now is to run. And run, and run till my lungs are bursting, and my mind is... empty.

So, so bad.

And after that, to laugh, and then to drink.

*****
Just over two months; sometimes I still feel you in the car by me, sometimes I remember the stupid dances you did in the car to the radio, and it feels like only yesterday, and I could just reach out and touch you again, or drive home to you, away from the nightmare.

Sometimes it feels like something from another lifetime; something that was the nightmare, something to let slip into the realms of the forgotten. A forgotten story of not heroes and not villains, just two good people who werent good to each other. Something... unspecial.

*****
Watching Lady Grey's eyes laugh as she befuddles a stranger who is asking her about her chinese horoscopic sign.

I'm a phoenix! The prospective stranger does a double take. Well, okay... just a chicken.

Laugh.

Yes, the phoenix. Rising, from the ashes. The Lady... Grey.

*****
"I almost wish I did sweet nothings, but that's just not my style."

"Don't worry, you're not doing too badly."

Slightly cheesy, but kinda nice lines for a screenplay. Laugh. Must get back to writing that story someday.