The Things That Haunt

Someone just told me how she has a truly exceptional memory. And that's how her hurts run deeper and further than most. As for me, I have trouble remembering what I said or did last week... not to mention from five years back or more.

Strangely, the things that DO stay in my mind aren't happy thoughts or happy events. Sure, there are special occasions (passing my driving, first fist fight, first kiss...) that probably will stay with me for some time. But the things that usually stay with me really aren't extremely sad or happy occasions... they're more or less times or thoughts that haunt. Or songs too. And the thing about them is that precisely because they haunt, they keep coming back in a way that refuses to be forgotten. They permeate my everyday experiences of life. So that in a song I hear, a line I encounter in a book or a movie, something mentioned in a conversation, or simply even in my moments of lucidity while blogging (here's keeping my fingers crossed that this will be one such moment), these thoughts start to reverberate in my mind once again, resonating deeper with every encounter.

Just finished watching Closer, the movie that many people felt just fell short of being a truly great film, but which Paul couldn't stop raving about. Granted, Natalie Portman looks even more gorgeous than in Star Wars (while watching that, I never would have believed it possible), but I guess there were a lotta things that kept setting up echoes inside of me. Everything from the song (which I couldn't get out of my head for about three days now, if you trace back my blog to saturday), to the lives of the 4 people. I must say I actually loved it. And of course, I swear my little echoes keep bringing me back so that I saw a lotta things that no one else prob saw.

I saw how people can really settle for something other than a real love. How the doctor could take back a wife whom he might have once loved, but for whom he took back at least partly out of spite towards the man who once stole her from him. How a journalist of all people can be with a girl 4 years and not realise he didn't even know her real name, yet claim to love her. Hell, in fact everyone in the whole movie was throwing the word around more like an epithet than out of anything I would remotely call true love. And yes, I see strains of it in so many relationships around me, including the one recently ended. How one party hangs on ridiculously even after its so painfully obvious that there is nothing left worth holding on to. How by the time one party wakes up and realises what's going on, that there really IS a point which makes it too late to return. And even as she told me to stop her if she ever wanted to ask to get back with her bf, its the one thing I am unable to do. Because I know if my ex had really wanted me back, I would have relented. Unfortunately, before I could stay around long enough to discover if she ever really wanted me back or not, it was too late already.

In fact there was only one winner in the whole movie. The bloody doctor got to sleep with both women, and got his wife back as well as got back at the guy who stole her. Its a movie that would normally leave me highly dis-satisfied. Bad guy wins. But honestly, there wasn't a single person inside you'd call a good guy. Mebbe that's what makes it so real. I never had the guts to steal anyone girlfriend (No, Paul.. I REALLY am not interested in Joz...) and I lost. Pathetic journalist stole someone's wife only to lose even more spectacularly than me. Man. It doesn't get any more real than that.

And these thoughts haunt me. They really do. Its like what the doctor said in the movie - "Depressives don't (want to be happy). They want to be unhappy to confirm that they're depressed. If they're happy then they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live - which can be depressing." I want to be depressed. I really really do. Make me terribly happy for one day and I'd find myself utterly unbearable. I'd be sick of myself. And so I find myself haunted by these thoughts that I will always be on the losing side of the coin, and always on the losing side of life. Mine is the happiness that is lived through the lives of others. And mine is the role that fulfills the dreams of others at the expense of my own. And more than that, mine is the duty to compromise any happiness due me if it should in any way be at a cost a anyone else. Maybe that's truly the only way I can be happy - by making myself unhappy.

I really can't come up with another explanation for why I don't fight any harder, if at all, for what I want, and to make my life count. It seems that everytime I'm about to, I'm afraid that I would succeed, and the world would be the brighter for it. And I don't want it to be so bright. And so I run back into my little bunker hole and find myself haunted by the things that have gone wrong in my life, so that everything that I encounter becomes yet another resonance that echoes what I think to be true.

I keep telling myself its time to pick myself up off the floor and to stop nursing wounds from my past. Yet when I take a look at myself, I find that I don't have any wounds. Only scars.

But as long as they always remain, they'll always haunt me.