I guess I had stopped paying attention again. Or gotten too involved with my new lover- my work, to notice my life catching up with me. When I was done with duty, and I became lean and vulnerable once more, it stood before me, face to face with that menacing look in its eye that said, ‘we have unfinished business’. And so here I am.

All the preparation and experience are worth nothing. When you feel your heart breaking again you forget what you knew from before. It’s so much like falling in love. So very much like that. I ask myself, what is the worst that can happen? I will be abandoned. or left. I will be suspended between 2 lives again. It’s not new. This is homeground, familiar territory, a neighbourhood of pain that I have grown up in. It like re-reading the same pages of the same old book. I know the lines by heart. I can read the words backwards. What is amazing in the most sad sort of way is how much it affects me still.

What am I going to do. Prepare. Release. Unleash. Stay sane. Not normal, not unaffected, not nonchalant. Just sane. Is that too much to ask of myself? Yes. But I am going to try. Even if I fail, I will remember the effort. My mind will remember I tried.

So bring it on. The worst that can happen is you win and I stay alive in fear of the next moment of pain. Or I win and that means saying goodbye to you; you who have brought me to so much misery almost every single year of the 33 I have lived through. So fuck you, life. Just do what you have to.