I've been dragging my past behind me, heavy comet. I'm tired. Constantly triangulating who I am relative to dozens of flat and liftless images is exhausting and useless.
Not the bright-eyed boy tinged with a melodramatic tendency. The performer, teacher's pet, self-centered but open-hearted nerd who fully invested in fictions, including stories he told himself about love and commitment at an age when there's nothing solid to commit with.
Not the disaffected obsessive, up all night in a solitary dorm room or in the strange square house where two years happened in six months, singing mournfully and meaningfully to no one as a body's worth of personhood slipped painfully to the floor. Rapid oscillation between zen-green afternoons and pitch-thick nights where self-destruction tried desperately to be rebirth.
Not the angry screenprinter. Not the musician whose voice was dissolving into ambient noise. Not the game-consumed property manager. Not the blooming bookseller and writer. Not the suicidal rat on the sinking copy shop. Not the surprised web professional, using sudden free time, money, and energy to dance and sing and flirt briefly with happiness. Not the debt-ridden, burned-out crater, feeling futility in every step.
I want a new story. New self-image. New me to lean into. That's a story, too, but it's what I want. Stop trying to be everything I was once, all at once. Ineffectively. Heartbreakingly, insufficient in every direction. I don't have to be these people anymore. I'm already not. Catching up to that is the hard part. Forgive me if I have to shed in the direction of something new. Because things are changing around me and I don't want to just be dragged along in the wake.