I pretend it doesn’t hurt, just like I can pretend I love my work or that I can get up early, and pretend that this is what I want; that there is anything I want besides to know.
Curiosity consumes me, the urge to draw out all your secrets, fears, feelings, tips, and tricks, and the joy of knowing things makes me want to pretend I don’t feel that sinking feeling drawing me back in to my worst habits, keeping your darkest moments close to me, to use, to motivate me to dim the bulb just a bit more.
The price I pay, my finger on the trigger, is a lack of desire to improve. Instead I function in favor of learning more, when learning is what brought me here in the first place; blue eyes, blue screens, searching and questioning why I am told the things I am, and why I am not told the things I’m not.
I’ll twist and turn the knife and pull it out with the right words – I am manipulative – and as the words spill out I don’t think I care. They tell me less and less each day, gains and losses in the field of my mind, longing to go back and to bring back that feeling that I was winning, instead of how now my ears absorb fears and digest them to form jealousy, making myself sick.
For once they’ve not followed me down this time, unlike how I followed them back then: when they once sat up in bed scrolling, sighing, denying, and I, far away, contemplated doing the same thing soon, similar and opposite, purposely ignoring my own boundaries just to know how.
I have watched you for so long and the ways we show our best to the world couldn’t be more separate. I pretend it doesn’t, but deep down it makes me sick: at the expense of my own mind I consume your secrets until it makes me sick.
But I can pretend it doesn’t.