need nothing, attract everything

time is limited, time is a construct, and time is a ticking time bomb.

In this dream, bottles are everywhere and his mom wears all black and cries. His brother asks me if I know where the money comes from and I don’t answer because so many things are hazy and so many things are still unclear. All I know is that the apartment is dark and grey and there are two girls sitting with him on the couch, and he looks over at me and asks why I’m not coming with them. The brother then looks at me and asks me if I’m like the others - and I look at him and say “Do you really think I’m like the others?” And he looks down and shakes his head and says “no.” I watch him as he leaves with the two girls, then his mom starts crying and I watch her as she gets carried out of the apartment.

-

I don’t know many things about addiction. When I told a therapist 9 years ago that I suspected he had a drinking problem, she said that’s a tough thing to gauge because we are young and we are out all of the time. I told her, in the short time we were seeing each other, that there were one too many days in a row where he messaged me and told me he couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. That he drank and blacked out and fell and tore some sort of ligament in his knee. That he drank and blacked out and wrote his last will and testament on a random Tuesday evening. That the massive scar on his left shoulder is from a fight where he smashed a bottle of Jack Daniels over someone else’s head.

But what did I love? How he’d always call me by my first and last name.

And if you had to choose one word to define love - would it be seen, or would it be chosen?

Because a lot of people can be chosen, but I don’t think a lot of people can be really seen.

-

“The other night he told me that whenever he starts to develop feelings for a girl, he finds the one thing that’s wrong and focuses on that until he doesn’t like her anymore. And then he goes, “But you don’t have that. I can’t find it. That one thing.”

“It’s flattering isn’t it?” My therapist asks me, almost ten years ago. “To be told you’re not like the others.”

-

It’s a Wednesday evening in March. I come home from work and cook cabbage rolls for the first time, and I’m proud of the way they taste. Showings have slowed down in my apartment, and it smells like fresh lilies. I make plans for martinis with friends on both Thursday and Friday. It feels like forward movement. It feels like momentum. It feels like spring.

My psychic tells me that I’m powerful. One of the biggest lessons in healing is being honest with yourself.

And if I’m being honest, it’s all starting to feel like mine again.

M83’s Wait plays in the background while I undress for bed. Jeans and an oversized grey crew fall to the floor while I reach for a white spaghetti strap tank and baby blue linen pyjama shorts. I wear the most minimal to bed so I can wrap myself up in my fluffy white duvet. It’s a ritual. I apply a heart healing ointment on my wrists and inhale. Then a sacral chakra ointment on my lower belly and exhale.

I climb into bed. I believe in magic.

I believe it’s all meant to be again.

It’s been four months to the day. It’s not as painful anymore. I can live with it now. An addiction that subsides.

I fall asleep early, and wake up a few hours later to the light of my phone.

A message reads:

“Hi”

It’s him.