I will never understand

Saw someone tonight. Someone I have written about, if you are keeping track. She was walking with her boyfriend. She looked miserable, the fire in her I have come to revere extinguished temporarily. It could be I'm wrong. Who knows. Regardless. What's funny. All the relentlessness of my self-doubt, all the moments of reflection, self-laceration, it's easy to forget that others are insecure, that others make mistakes, and, what's more, stick with them, even, out of fear, out of a lack of self-awareness, out of stubbornness, out of the mind's capacity to believe in the holographs we create from reality, the simulacrum of a person that leads us astray (I may be just as guilty, walking down a path in my imagination that culminates in fantasy).

I am an only child, and my childhood was tough, and I didn't even have anyone to discuss it with, didn't even know how fucked up I was, how fucked up my family life was, for so long. And yet, having realized that there will always be, at the core of my being, a profound loneliness, never to be surmounted or overcome, the bane of lovers and wives future and past, I must say: being a beautiful girl in a small town in an unhappy relationship must be the loneliest life ever.

How to trust?

Sorry to be so, um, male, but I used to think that being an overweight and ugly female was the loneliest life ever, and it may be, but if someone wants you, they probably do, you know?

It's true I desire her, that everything above was written with bias, and yet, what she could be, she's not, and will she be if she continues to be who she is? I don't know. I don't think so.

And it's funny. Because the isolation of the pedestal. Because she is a lonely god. Because I am sure I will do more and see more, because I have lived and will live a richer life (a necessary lie). I keep thinking I would be lucky to have her, but, stuck, as she is, in this small place of small thoughts, it may just be the opposite. That's not arrogance.

The freedom of masculinity, why I believe the male gaze exists, even as I wonder, exactly how am I supposed to use my eyes if not to see, is invisibility. To only be seen when one is ready to be seen. I can hide.

The  isolation of femininity, of those not yet fully-emancipated, women whose lives are activated by switches they cannot access by themselves.

The curse of beauty. That I'll never be Dostoyevsky, or Davis, Miles, will make me sad at times,  but the pressure on her is greater.

I can walk away. Easily. And I sort of want to, but, until I meet someone whose words bring me as much peace,  I will continue to light a candle every night, devoting myself to a possible reality I still believe will be just as fulfilling enacted as envisioned.

I do.