And more importantly, do I need to go too far out at all, or is happiness acquired by dragging things into my lair, things that will sit and stay, and warm my feet when winter comes, and temperatures drop low?
I find increasing comfort in squirreling in.
I seemed to think for a long while - days and years, all fled across at once - the point was moving far out. There is a tendency in modernity to live as though your arms might encompass the whole world, except you find as you live you're not made for this, and grow small and even more depressed.
I seemed to think you needed big groups of people around you, and hands to hang your coat on, and busy schedules, and loads of numbers in your phone. It didn't work, and how would it? I'm someone with an elephantine memory when it comes to trivial things, and a limited interest in people, especially when they're the wrong people, as happens with many of them. I ask more often than is good for me, why should I keep these random faces around, and what's more interesting or less to them than my familiarity of loneliness?
I have great interest in people, but have defined my court, and am not looking for courtside pitchers. If you don't exist, does that mean you're unnecessary, or is it simply because no one ever thought to put someone like you together before? You don't know what I mean, me neither.
For someone who gallops for a pastime, I find I'm comfortable inside well-defined microcosms. It's to say, once I love you, I'll let you drag me into anything, but it takes a long, long time for me to love you, since I don't know how to be sure, and live in fear of my time being severely limited.
We're a creche playing with foreign concepts, who risks drowning, either underhand of our former forefathers, or in our own tremulous, unjustly swift waters. It was fine once, and you don't see why it can't be fine again, but really, the fact is, the world moved too fast for you, didn't give you a chance to say you didn't see what was so wrong about the old world in the first place.
What I know is:
You can't have it all.
You must choose the microcosm you'd most likely burrow in, and start to dig.
There must be something better for me out there, except by the time I recognize that the record's been skipping, I'm farther out than I've arms to swim back. Clench my fists around my breaking belly, forget to open my parachute.
People've been doing it as long as forever, but they ain't ever done it like this before, and maybe it's time to halt and take stock.
If you choose one, you run the risk of your microcosm caving in on you.
If you keep a foot in each boat, you crack your back and drown with mud in your throat.
Define and distinguish yourself. Perhaps I like where I was born, and never meant to go any further.
I like people with well-defined universes.
I'm wary of cages, but ad-block all mentions of newfangled freedom because most people I know define freedom as being different from their mothers, but never stop to look where they're going until they knock foreheads on iron, vaguely hear doors behind them.
Maladaptive, but what if some of the things you do are smart, and don't need fixing? How do I know when it's healthy because it's really, and when it's just what everybody else is doing?
If it doesn't make sense to you, don't think about it. It don't make much sense to me, either. Maybe only a sentence here will. When presented with alternatives, we reconsider what we've previously discarded. Maybe a life hiding here, among people who understand me, isn't the worst way to go.