That Kind of Night

The caffeine has me blurry for the pound of it and those peels of my mind not scythed away in pseudo-lingual artifice wander most questioningly into places long tied away, sunken to the bottom of my being, for the ordered and secure progression of that reality most preferentially ordained by those concerned with that sort of thing.

I’m coding again. I know the sun will be up soon. I will not yet have found my way to sleep.

If you’re not interested in diluted self exploration bristling with prickly coming-of-age angst, festooned with faux complexity and beset on all sides with that ‘I’m somehow special, different and secretly better than you’ essence you have come to love in my writing, now would be the time to click away. I have provided links to aid you in this, should you them.

My mother dislikes it when I do this but I fucking hate you. I smile all day long for the almost crushing depth of my hatred for you. It actually hurts, inside it hurts, to hate you as much as I do. It is a physical pain, the way you would think being kicked in the diaphram would feel were the kicker somehow lodged upside-down in your stomach. As a child I used to imagine, perplexed, the at once dull and finely pointed ache that comes with the very thought of you when adults explained that there is a place one goes if one doesn’t believe in jesus. I’m not misguided. I am not selfish in this. I am not missing some control device in my personality that does not let me get past what happened with us. I hate you and every day it is fresh with the new sun and, as I click and clack away into the night, refuses to dull, to drift into sleep, with the rest of the goddamned world.

When we started off representations were made. I promised to be one thing, you had me convinced you were another. It turns out that I couldn’t be what you needed. My god I tried, but for everything I am I was never enough. To say you failed to hold up your part of the bargain would be calling LV-426 an unfortunate clerical error. You probably don’t even know what I mean by that.

I gave to you. I gave to you with everything I had. I supported you the best that I could manage. I pushed as hard as possible when I didn’t fit what was expected of me and when that didn’t work I lied. Right to your face I lied. It was that or face the fact that I may not be what I wanted so much to be; that I was not deserving of you, that I was not good enough for you.

No, I didn’t do all of that, there. I did most of it, to be sure, but there’s stuff in there in case mine is not good enough. In case you need to finish off your fantasy with something that I cannot give to you. You see, you meant so much to me. You were what I needed. You were more important to me than you knew. You were busy with the fantasy of it and were never able to see the boy breaking everything he had for you.

You tell everyone stories about me. You tell them about how I took advantage of you. You tell them that I was terrible to you, that I lied to you, that I am a dangerous person for it. You suffered me for the worst of it and paid in the end. You do this because you are unable to reconcile the truth. Where I can say that I failed you, you cannot understand that what happened between us was in your hands as well; that your desire for more presented a challenge to me that I, for your approval, was willing to take on.

That is really what it was all about for me, your approval. For us to work I needed your approval and you needed something bigger than anything you had previously experienced. That was clear from the beginning. You don’t come to me for average. That is not why I am sought, and you sought me for true. You saw the potential and your eyes, like saucers full of the fucking sun, lit up at the thought of it.

I never made you happy. Those moments, the big ones, those were temporary. They ended and you needed more. It wasn’t enough that I brought them to you, that the expectations were met – exceeded. You always had something else, some new fancy. I was the greatest thing in the world to you until I couldn’t deliver; until the limits even of my unprintable tenacity in the pursuit of your desire could not bring it to you in full. When I needed you, needed you with the self-same fervor with which I lashed into the world to devise your dreams, it was too much for you.

You’ve settled now. You’ve got a replacement and he’s awesome. You see, he doesn’t promise you everything you want. He is incapable of even wanting to be those things that I was for you. He doesn’t know our secrets, the ones you would surely blush and retract to tell. He hasn’t scraped the gut of your person and wouldn’t know how. He doesn’t threaten you and you know what you’re getting. He doesn’t lie because he doesn’t need to. You’ve refined your expectations and he fits them perfectly. You’ve grown up, perhaps, and done away with me and my need to be everything for you.

You’ve kept me, though. Parts of me. Things you didn’t have before – you flaunt them. You have expressions now. You have interests, histories, traditions now. I am a part of you and it is irreversible.

You, however, wouldn’t even aspire to be for me what I so painfully wanted to be for you.

I’ve got nothing for the effort. I’ve become a liar. I’ve hurt you. I’ve taken from you. The landscape of your life has ruptured, spit into reality a new and unique take on your pre-me self seed and I am left with your ire.

You take succor in being rid of me. I haunt you. I know it. As much as I wish to never have been part of you I am in there. I come up when you take interest, I echo when you speak my words or your misinterpretation thereof. You took your part, had your fantasy – that fantasy which I lived so wholly to build for you – and you are better for the experience. You’ve learned from it. You’ve grown and moved on. You’ve flowered. It was all about you anyway. All I wanted was consistent and honest approval. When we parted, you took of me what you could and your approval with it.

The greatest thrust of my hatred, though, must be focused on the fact that you don’t realize that this isn’t about you. That you’ve read this far and decided that it was you I was writing about, that your life with me was unique. That’s so like you.

The hatred comes from the fact that there are so many of you. I hate you because I cannot stop it. There is something inside of me that makes me want not to be great, not to be influential, not to be vast in my effect, but to be good and true and absolutely the right thing for you. That such intent could be so perverted by your insatiable desire for more stuns my heart.

That you think yourself better now in my wake, satisfied with the lower cost of fancy as it is, strikes me. Not that it isn’t me that you have chosen, but that you wanted so much from me and were unwilling to pay for it, instead choosing the a lesser path for its ease of commitment.

Don’t you realize that I’d have never stopped for you?

The code baffles me. API programming sucks when it isn’t your own API. The more caffeine I have the worse I feel but I am not due to finish until the sun is there to burn out my eyes.

My employer will contact me. He will tell me that he appreciates my extra effort on this project. He will show me on paper that he does and others in the office will tell me that he speaks highly of me.

My friends will check in and see what how I am holding up. Not one of them will be dissatisfied with my current state of affairs and will report genuine interest in those things that I am doing.

This is because I have learned to hate. I have learned to take. I have learned to expect. You should approve of me no matter what because I know more over 40 programming languages, was asked to join the Prometheus Society and can kick your ass at Cho-Ren-Sha. You’ve never beat me at chess and I’ve made a goddamned movie. Aren’t I the hot shit? Don’t I deserve a great girl, a hot job and kickass friends? Of course I do.

I do because you taught me to act that way. You took from me, with my jokes and code and games and hopes and interests and friendship and secrets and time and passion devotion and particularities, the very ideal that made me want to be perfect for you in the first place. I realize now that when I want as much as I do to be great for you, for anyone, I crush the world.

As happy as I am, as wonderful as life has the potential to be for both of us, I will never forgive you.

How’s THAT for angst?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Doncast.

IRON MAN!!! HOLY SHIT!!!