Day Two hundred and ten - Twilight twilight nihil nihil

I walk the streets of this city at ungodly hours, and some streets I do not walk alone. No, when I walk them, I walk with ghosts all around me. Not the ghosts of others, but the ghosts of past iterations of myself. Here, a very young version of me stands outside a toy store and looks with longing at all the toys he knows he's never going to get. There, a seventeen year old leaves home very early one monday morning to catch the train that would take him to start his military training. I am exiting a subway station on the way to meet the love of my life. Some blocks ahead, I am kissing her for the final time. These ghosts are everywhere, and the streets they walk no longer exist now as they were, so they themselves are the ghosts of streets.

These echoes, these wraiths, converge and become my present myself - someone who exists in the quirky dichotomy between hope and nihilism. I once told Carina - my last attempt at a relationship, as chronicled some posts back - I had come to believe that everyone alive was worthy of love, save for myself. I deserved nothing. That's what I'd been telling myself for years, and it made sense to me. It made sense because I reasoned it was just atonement for my sins.

To not want, to not long, to not desire... to not even feign an interest or let others know that you are a living, breathing organism was a choice. A choice I made because I decided I didn't have a choice. That these things would happen to me and become me naturally. But not having a choice, I discovered, was also a choice. I had to choose all this - either bit by bit or as a totality when  everything became far too compllicated for me to bear. And if I had to pinpoint the point in my life where I ceased hoping, I'm not sure I could figure out where it falls on the timeline. I've had a fair amount of people in my life that truly disappointed me, but I didn't allow them to steal the best parts of me. Not when they lied, not when they dissembled, not when they left. I grieved, to be sure, but I always picked up the pieces after. 

I was out with friends today and afterwards I walked slowly back home. On my way I stopped by a place where, in a midsummer's night over twenty years ago, a girl I was dating laid her breasts bare for me to kiss. A decade later I would find myself in the same spot, weeping a love that had fled over the hills and far away. It was the loneliest day of my life. Maybe then I started to lose my faith in hope.

Still... even as I write this, hope beats with every beat of my heart - it becomes a fire that begs to be kindled and stoked to an incinerating roar. But the fire especially, especially does not save, the fire only destroys and though it may purify it takes takes takes and gives nihil back, nihil, nihil, nihil, nihil, nihil.