this morning, i woke up and saw that a prayer bead was missing again from my $10 rosary from las vegas. i split my prayer beads by themes: gratitude, repentance, intercession, requests, and listening. one day, a bead for requests disappeared somehow, so maybe God was telling me that i should not be praying so much for myself. this morning, a prayer bead for intercession fell off, as now there is one less person that i need to consistently pray for.
i thought everything was perfect, but in the end it wasn't and apparently could never be. i was willing to trade so much time for this, but apparently my returns were never worth it. i tried to love, but apparently i couldn't, at least not correctly. i thought worlds collided, but apparently that collision killed something. my metaphors can go on and on, and i hoped this all could too but like all real things momentum is lost.
as idealistic as i am, the real world still tugs at my neurons violently. i was told it was because things perhaps couldn't work out, but i could never see an effort to make it so. i was told that desires conflicted, but there was never intention to compromise. the facade was that of spontaneity, but i cannot help but sense that this project took time. i was willing to look past unreciprocity on my end, but that willingness wasn't mutual.
as usual, i am able to turn most things into a joke (perhaps the very quality of mine that led to this). examples of jokes i made were as follows:
to my friend's girlfriend: "i'm sad you never got to see her. she's cute, or she was... (my friend froze in a open mouth smile alongside his girlfriend)"
to my anime club groupchat after my friend asked if i wanted a liquid nitrogen margarita to cheer me up: "this and a cigarette 🥰🥰" (one other member said to give me a lighter)
to people who knew about my valentines day gift: "if only i were a better programmer, then i could backdoor the program and brick it!" (i will do the opposite and open source my project)
to my friend when he asked me if i was feeling suicidal or alcoholic: "not suicidal or alcohol, but cigarettes look yummy rn" (to which he immediately reminded me not to fall into bad habits, which i will be sure not to)
to the uber driver that drove me back last night: "there's plenty of fish in the sea, rarer ones if i go deeper, and those ones might light up" (he laughed and said i was learning)
even my instagram feed started filling up with advice, so thank you spyware algorithm.
i think God has a sense of humor too, and perhaps to match mine He made another bead from my rosary disappear without a trace, leaving me with one less thing to pray for. one big difference between me and her was that she was methodological and i was adaptive, and perhaps it was what we lacked that hurt each other most and what we had that healed us most. her strategic way of informing me of her decision hurt me and left me in painful and desperate confusion (after what she said in the way she said it, i didn't even know she made up her mind until the day after!), but my adaptivity leaves me in near perfect condition as i write this. my spontaneity hurt her more than i expected and probably led to the perceived incompatibility, but her calculatedness brought her to a conclusion probably more decisively than anything i've ever heard her say. isn't it funny that she was more sure about leaving me than deciding what to eat?
in the end, we are all wanderers and beggars, and i am a beggar above all. we are all needy, some more than others, and we all starve after something to fulfill us but we are picky about that same satiation, some more than others. i used to think i was halfway in a dream, but in reality i was dreaming in my wake.
maybe the two minutes of prayer that losing this bead shaves off was God's solace.
i know that the person this is directed towards is aware of this website, so if you are reading this i only have one more thing about myself that i never really knew how to articulate, but i will try to in writing. i never believed in methodological mental healing or taking steps towards being 'at peace' although i may be doing these exact things without knowing. i will burn intensely for the time being, or maybe even forever, but it's okay! i live with the fact that the world is can be cruel and that peace is impossible at a macro or micro scale, even for this. i can never see you as i did before and make things the same as the first time we met, and no matter how much you convince yourself i don't think you can either. my cynicism for this world, however, is always juxtaposed with my immense hope for small improvements, however minuscule they can be. i am not hoping to heal from this (at least not conventionally), nor am i hoping to be in the same state as i was before this, but i will embrace all the good times for being real and the way this ended as the conclusion. after all, you can't carve marble without wearing it down. i know i said i can't die, but i think it was about time i did and i thank you for this.
ad astra per aspera, ad infinitum nihilo obstat