I had been having a rough couple of nights, and the lack of sleep did not help at the moment. It's become a usual thing now, these rough nights. They usually leave me exhausted and mentally vulnerable. It started a year ago, and the nights then were unbearable. They would leave me emotionally sick, felt like a void sucking out my thin sanity. Now, I've gone through this long enough that the remainder of the night is just a well rehearsed formality. There's the detached me that grapples with layers of transient feelings. So I usually just close my eyes and contemplate. Then comes the self therapy, followed by finding the wrong distraction, and then porn, and then the right distraction. Then despair. And then at half past 4, sleep.
I close my eyes and allow myself to wander into my thoughts. This is usually the time I indulge in some mental pleasures. Playing games with age old wounds, ripping off the band aid and sticking it back just before the pain kicks in. God bless masochism. I notice how some of my most guarded, heavily fortified emotions spill off from weathered cracks of my sub conscious during these times and sometimes when I don't stick the band aid back quick enough, they flood into my memory. These borderline nightmares transform into melancholia when I wake up from this indulgence. It then transforms into something that feels like foreshadow of nostalgia. Like me warning myself of losing something, or someone, before I actually lose something, or someone.
The latest nightmare had a shadow, and the shadow, a face. Midnight black hair and brownish-black eyes. Black eyes, with a perennial white gleam to them, like they were a universe in themselves that housed unborn stars. As much as I'd like to believe that the face was that of a just another crush, which would eventually get lost in the folds of memory, it would be a poorly concealed lie. The other crushes, well, they'd just be a one night stand in my head and one awkward conversation outside it. But, he stayed. In my head. He stayed right from those anxiety ridden days, where he and his slim frame galloped around me, and continued doing so all through the past two years. It might seem like fairy tale material and stuff but in reality he'd just turned into an unhealthy obsession.
I'm not completely sure how it had turned into one. It started as a slight crush a year ago after a football night when I'd first met him. I had "met him" before, but football is unlike any other introduction. His tall frame and perfect hair that he always spiked upwards did not really strike me at first. It was only about forty minutes into the game, he ran pressing the defense up the field and fell down exhausted. I went to check in on him and stood dumbstruck at his masculine beauty. The part of me that was still aware of reality stretched out a hand, for him to pull himself. He did. And thereby hangs a tale.
It was a moment to remember. It wasn't just the cute guy standing amidst dark mountains on a small football turf, but the way my fears zoned out for a moment, like they decided to take a break. I guess that was it. That was it, cause I felt like I saw the alternate self of mine in him. The person who didn't screw up in love, and then didn't go into a spiral of mental trauma. And at this point, I'm left to conclude that all we ever seek is parts of our own selves that have by design of fate (flaw in the law of nature I call it), have eluded us. And that the parts that happen to be in people like him makes me want to make out wildly with them. *Sigh*. Well, from then on, I've made awkward forced conversations, absent-mindedly hit like on random Instagram photos (Of course I was hunting for that shirtless picture that I found out he posted), pushed my glace down his t-shirt when he bent down to pick up the ball, and well two years have passed, and the feeling, still although hidden behind all the other things that I've learnt to hide, was threatening to burst through. Living on the edge here, any push and I might just fall into something that have greater depth of feelings.
