Loss
Living in my memories, I can simulate almost anything, any eventuality or dream of mine. For instance, whether I wish for it or not, I spend a lot of time in a world where things went the way I had hoped.
In this world, people aren't themselves. They act like puppets for me, and speak from a script I've written on their skin. A cobbled path is torn into their eyes, one they have to follow endlessly, stumbling into a warm miasma of my wants. Of course, even as my players weep for freedom, desperate to break me out of my delusion, I still delude myself into experiencing the moment as if it could have been.
For example, those I have known in the past, and those who have known me closer than others, are often the subject of these dark paintings. In waking life, they came and went and left a mark that cannot be changed. In my torturous moments of isolation, it was I who mishandled what they brought, and I who steered these ships to the rocks. I should have persisted, tolerated, or believed. I should have known my place, or settled in a station of misery. Thoughts like these cloud reality, and cover up the darkness that drove my actions as they came.
Still, people rarely tell you this... but it's true to say that when you do something "good" for yourself in the long term, you don't free yourself of the pain, and nor do you free yourself from the longing for a world that never existed. Being mature is just as much of a performance as any other, and the true nature of healing is slow and slightly disgusting. You're not porcelain and perfect, and nor are you a mess, but you're definitely far more knotted and far more organic than you imagine. I regret the best decisions I've ever made, and I'm incredibly proud of my mistakes, almost to a point of anger.
Sometimes, I even imagine going back in time to watch myself treading in the metaphorical mud of life, causing myself suffering I didn't need. I imagine watching myself do it, watching with piercing eyes and staying entirely still. Something about it makes me feel stronger, and like I've grown, because I'm not desperate to make my path a clean and virtuous one. As a child, this had been unimaginable, you see. Imperfection was synonymous with sin, and I would've sooner seen myself die than see myself make a small error. Now... interestingly, I find myself more comfortable with being a mixed bag than I am with being admired. It's more honest, and I had always considered myself honest... without knowing that I wasn't always.
When you have time, and especially when you feel at your lowest, you should take the time to write about why or about what it feels like. It might not be distinguished prose or even particularly legible, but an older you will quickly forget it, and try to pretend as if it never was what it was. You must fight that older you with everything you have, and find some inverted joy in seeing the pain you used to feel. That pain, that sore throat, and those tears are all you have to prove that you lived, loved, and lost!!
For me, it's a simple story, simpler than it felt and less interesting than it should've been. Truthfully, that's what life is like. You'll grow up imagining that there's something amazing waiting on your doorstep... and there is! It's just that the "amazing" thing is very very small, and the boring and irrelevant thing often spans years of your life, and takes double that to fully forget.
The magpies on your roof, hopping and chirping, will make you more of a person than anything else you see today. The memory of them won't change or blur, and the story you tell will be so short and sweet that you'll never corrupt it with saucy doubts and fears.
Not to say I reject grand gestures and life altering connections... on the contrary! These things are fuel for your fire, and often the reason you take the paths you do, with all sorts of results... but I trust the magpies more than I trust poetic dreams, and more than I trust myself.