If you trace the topography of your love life, could you ever determine if you've come to the destination or if maybe it's just where your car got totaled? Maybe it's where your heart got totaled...remained leaking, sputtering, totaled for three years. If the engine needs replacing, is the vessel salvageable or must you wait for the cells to regenerate into a non-version of what it/you, once were? Maybe if you open the locked files and pour over the details you'll find the story arc. Maybe you'll find another peak to climb. Or maybe you're Sisyphus and you're pushing your totaled heap/heart up a hill only to have it crush you again? Is it a lost cause? Can you figure out from the map you've traveled whether you're damaged goods or whether you're the damager? Maybe you left your own trail of totaled parts behind you. Who puts out the damage report on future lovers? Those walking wounded? If you compile the letters-relationships mapped out but never driven and unfurl the mixtape soundtrack, maybe you could give it all back. The bands introduced, knowledge shared, kisses stolen. If you re-trace your route, could you figure out where you made that wrong turn? If it was a wrong turn? Perhaps every punctured tire, heart-heavy hitchhiker, accidental bridge crossing, were written into your map in the smallest of print? Every time you think you made a wrong term, you're where you are, where you're meant to be, you can't get lost enough.I found a journal in my high schooled castaways, started from the beginning. The first-this is
it-in a long line of I thought it was it before but now I know(s). I found a letter I wrote to myself as a seventeen-year-old girl to the same seventeen-year-old girl 9 months later. Sympathetic. Hurting. Acknowledging hurt. I found the letters from half a dozen love affairs never entered but fully emotionalized. Those tucked-in notes and creased secrets. Very real, very temporary feelings. The immensity of knowing no. this. is. it. And losing it. Laying the map out will probably do nothing to determine where I'm going but sometimes it helps to know where you've been and how you pushed through to now. Ticking. Sleepless. Now.
