Boxing with Shadows

Been a real tough day.

Some days I can push past all these things that I feel.  I can strap on that sacred and profane mask that makes my laughter seem genuine, and my smiles almost feel real.  A few good friends, a couple good times, and I can push and push and keep going.  I can keep my eyes skyward and almost forget that I'm sinking.  It's never real though.  At the end of the day I curl up in this small room and stare at my pillow, or stare at the ceiling and it all just feels hollow.

I can close my eyes and I can see roads before me, stretching off in to the distance or sometimes just looping back around.  I can dig my fingernails in to my palm hard enough to make my heart keep beating, bite down on my tongue to keep the words I want to scream from leaking out.  I can focus, sometimes, on those roads and regain a measure of hope.  Other times I just can't.  I see those roads leading off through some sort of bright pasture and my mind reminds me with all the subtlety of an orbital bombardment that it will end in another cliff, or a burnt bridge, or something else and I just want to give it all up.

But no matter what I do, my mind just won't stop.  It won't stop considering my current problems, it won't stop pulling up all the small details and trying to make sense of the last three years of my life.  It tries to put these puzzle pieces together and I can get a few snippets of a picture, but never the full thing.  It just doesn't make sense.  How can something like that just *STOP* like it did.  I could never do that.  And it is this horrible lack of answers, even though I somewhat have a shitty sense of closure, that vexes me.  It stabs me in the depths of the night and I come awake out of a dream to realize that, no, I am still alone.  And it might not be something that will end any time soon.

I have friends.  Some of them are good ones.  Some try and reach out and let me know they're there, but there's no hand to take mine and tell me it'll be alright.  I have this fucked up vision in my head that if I just had someone who would just take my hand, physically, for a little while and go on a walk with me and talk so I could feel actually very close to someone while I talk that it would help immensely... but I don't.  I'm in this alien city that I've dreamt about for well over half my life.  I've always wanted to move here, and now I'm here, and it just seems that nothing is changing.  I keep telling myself it will.  It's been 20 days, and the high points have been great, but the lows are awful.  And this one is one of the worst.

My anniversary came and went and I fought and fought and fought.  It finally caught up with me today and just clobbered the shit out of me.  I hit back with helping others, I hit back with music, and my cat kept rubbing up against my leg and clawing the living shit out of some of those soul shadows... but no matter how many I killed they just kept coming.  I feel like Kerrigan when Arcturus Mengsk abandon's her and the Hive finally captures her.  That moment where she has no ammo, she knows there's no backup, and the fight just completely leaves her.  I don't feel like fighting anymore.

And I don't want to.  I want to just let the cold black wash over me and let it all go away, but I can't.  I'm a redhead.  It's in my nature to resist.  So here I am, damning my fists as I just keep fighting.  Pointlessly.  It's all going to come around to pain again eventually, but here I am, fighting.

I don't even know what I'm doing anymore other than fighting for the pure sake of not giving up.  So maybe I will become successful.  Maybe I'll get rich.  Maybe I'll get published.  So what?  So I can put a trophy on my wall that no one will appreciate but me?  It will, in the end, mean nothing, and I recognize that.  I spit at it, and I push on anyway.

Because that's what I fucking do.  I don't give up.  Especially not when you're a redhead.  The fight is just in me in a deep core place.  I keep shooting until I run out of ammo.  Then I stab until my blade goes dull.  Then I pound until my firsts turn to burger, and even then, I keep on going.  Friends may step in and take some blows, or do some damage, but in the end it will be me, and only me, who will be able to win this fight... if it even is winnable, which I am increasingly of the opinion that it is not.

I'm not even able to find peace in Celephais these days.  Even that distant terrain has lost its meaning to me.

I'm just fighting, and I just need to keep going, even though it is pointless.