Give Me All Or Give Me Part

It seems to me time has been passing quicker and crueler. It is September and I am still mourning last year. There's a certain stillness that has passed into my life over the past few months. I’m still deciding whether I like it or not. It rains almost every night. I live paycheck to paycheck. I wake up past noon. The air outside is sweet smelling. It feels nostalgic in the way it makes me think I’ve smelt it before. Perhaps it smells like a boy I slept with more times than I should’ve, or the backroom of a dive bar I don’t really remember being at. I’ve been feeling a general sense of emptiness lately, something brought along by the stillness. I don’t write, and I barely ever read. There was a moment, sitting on a bench at the park with the first chills of fall creeping across my bare arms, where it seemed the world had shut off. I retreated so far back into my body, my mind so quiet, it was as if I had melted into that very bench and at last, become completely, fully, taken and one with the city that now dictates my life.  

When I’m not feeling empty, I feel anxious. And when the anxiety is shoved aside, there is hate that remains. 

I hate how I think about money all the time. How I can barely afford to live in New York, but definitely can't afford to move anywhere else. How the money I do have is spent on cigarettes and cheap beer and my friends. How the money I don’t have is owed to the college I dropped out of and the credit card I maxed out. 

I hate my age and what I have to show for it. Part of growing up meant realizing all the things I thought made me good and special and kind are not as sincere as I had been taught to believe. It meant hiding from my 21st birthday, because all the things I should’ve been celebrating are things I’ve been doing for the past three years, and now know are definitely not things to be celebrated. 

I hate how much I miss my dad. It comes out of nowhere, this feeling and grief and anxiety over the possibility that I can forget. That’s the part that scares me the most. That I can forget how gentle you are, how much I love you. And shadowing over all this is the looming thought of how pathetic it must be, to let this loss still drive my life and my mind the way that it does. Three years, it's been since I lost you. How much longer until people stop saying “I'm sorry” and start saying “get over it”. It feels pathetic to still be blaming the mess of my mind and the sum of my mistakes on your death. I should be doing better, and you deserve to be more than an excuse for missed deadlines and full days spent in bed. 

I suppose when you died, you took a piece of that fragile framework of youthful ignorance down with you. Without it, the entirety of the structure and foundation in which I’d been raised came crashing down, splintering through the years I’ve had with you, and bruising the years to come without you. I miss you so much it aches. 

So in the end, I suppose it’s just grief that remains. In its ill fitted costumes of emptiness and anxiety and hate, it remains. How can I abhor it when really, it's what remains of you? And in the way I approach money, and youth, and the memories of you, I take what I can get.