i can see your years in my reflection

It's stupid - it's idiotic for a fic to get me this introspective and to feel this ache, a genuine every-cell-in-your-chest-cavity--is-cramping ache but it's a good thing. Introspection is something I lack except for little moments of wisdom - tiny pearls choking me before falling from my lips - and late nights with too much time spent alone. Like now, I guess.

I spend half my life caught between two distant thrummings of emotion: young and eternal and fuck this, i have forever; needing nothing more than smiles and laughter and stupid moments at 3am where nothing makes sense but something lock-clicks in your chest and time is not a concept at all, it's a thing, a rock wall against which the waves of happiness break and scatter before forming all over again.

The other is this thrum beneath my skin and bones and nerves, where i imagine the soul lays, jittering and shaking and anxious, too-fast breathing and hyper-aware of thhe world, that i may not get chances like this again and wanting to do something. Maybe not amazing or world-changing or even remotely life-changing but moments that will shine brightly for a few years or that will become ensnarled in the web of old memories when i get older until something shines a light upon it and it will no longer glisten like it did, but merely pulsate with an inner glow of something that i cannot recreate or recall anymore. The feeling of the entire world changing and the stupid Sublime terror and beauty of that moment.

The need to be with someone; to fuck, to argue, to scream at, to laugh at, to brush the hair from your eyes, to text you at random intervals in your boring day and turn the ventricles in your heart separate and bleed sunlight and giggling, ridiculous joy into your chest, to cause you to clench your fists and roll your eyes and repeat the same stupid cliches your parents utter about the young/the opposite sex/best friends/enemies/society.

There is no reconcilling this. Song writers will always sing about these two contrary states. Writers will always tie the concepts and use them, place the heart of the idea beneath the words on the page. People will know the ideas but will never acknowledge them consciously but they will always be there, like a song on a radio just a little too faraway to make out anything more than the fact there is a melody playing.

I am terrified. I will lose people in my life due to my own faults, due to theirs, due to life tearing us apart. Or I will lose them because life changes us, one by one the seasons change you as The Acorn puts it, or because life leaves us.

So I am sitting here, trembling, knowing that there are moments like this coming the rest of my life, that one day someone else will live in this room and it will never be the same and in some other life I will never think back to this place, this time again.

I don't make promises to anyone now. This is not a moment of self-actualisation and change. I will let you down. I will forget the important things I should remember. I will be cruel. I may vanish and not think of you and blithely do things that you think I should not.

I won't be sorry because I won't realise what.

I won't swear to be kind because it is more than likely that this moment, the throb, will vanish from my veins sometime soon and my good intentions will fade.

I cannot cut my brain from skull and these ideas and memories and half-formed notions of love I have for you or the little sparks that crackle with overwhelming happiness at the fact that you - you - are in the world cannot be extracted in order to for me to show you them.

But there will be moments that I'll never tell you about - moments where I will be still and think of you and the world will blossom with the possibilty of things I could do for you or for those you love. And maybe in some other life I will have done them.

( An extract - the part of the fic, the words that provoked this and broke my heart. )