Dazed And Confused

I drift down through a darkness that I'd felt before, feeling the same pull that I've felt as I am dragged back to my past or my present or whatever madness awaits me in the library.

For whatever reason this time I'm able to linger there or at least sense it, sense the passage and the movement and the sensation as I tumble back to my first day of college. Or Emilys first day of college. Or whatever is happening here.

I think I've caught a glimpse. I think I've seen an idea of a future but not one that is set in stone.

With Rachel I'd seen some form of happiness. The two of us as friends and closer than I'd ever imagined I could be with her. And when she was in my bed there was a pleasure to it but an emptiness as well. There was Rachel and me, but the whisper of a dream for something more.

Blake had been different. Blake had been the happy home and the unhappy homemaker. I'd married the man, the last man in the world I thought I would ever forgive. I'd taken his ring on my finger and I'd played at housewife for him but there were the lingering memories of long fights and clashing personalities and the continual cycle of trying to fix something by adding in more variables. Get married to fix a dating life. Have a kid to fix a marriage. It seemed like the two of us were just as doomed in that future as I had been with Rachel.

So then Eddie. Oh god Eddie.

Eddie had been darker than anticipated but not reasonably darker than I could have imagined. Eddie had always had that kind of darkness in himself. He'd always had the capacity for it.

And I'd submitted to that darkness for reasons that I could fully understand. For a life I'd lived in a different reality and for mistakes, for second chances, that didn't belong to me alone. But to bend so low and so readily for him spoke of a whole different future than I had ever envisioned. And though I could not deny the subtle satisfaction that came with that submission, I also couldn't accept it as a future I wanted.

Three futures and three options and none of them can stand together. So they had to be just options, just potentialities. Momentary glimpses of different lines of thread brought on by skin-to-skin contact, the only contact of that type that I'd had with anyone.

No these weren't truth, they weren't inevitable. They were choices that I had to make and options that I could choose and I knew, somehow, with absolute certainty that the mere existence of those futures with them didn't mean they were the only future with them.

Life is a series of choices, brought on by perspective. The person I am today would make the choices that would bring those futures, ones not any better really than the one that I had left behind. Just different, maybe not as alone but still not what I wanted, not what I needed.

Not what I had to accept.

I didn't want any of them. I didn't want to even be Emily. I wanted my old life back and... no that's not true. The lives I'd seen had shown me that things could be different but they would still be bad. I didn't want my old life back.

I just wanted my old body.

I just didn't know how to get it.

The flashes had told me one thing only: A change of perspective was needed. When I got back into my old body I still had to shift my outlook. If I wanted a life that I would be happy with it would take action, would take presence, would take me standing up for what I believed I needed.

But that was easier said and done and as I stumbled back through the lines of this thread to the place I came from I knew that I wasn't ready to make that choice yet. I was still reacting rather than acting. I didn't have the strength or the will of character to set out my goals and seize them for my own.

And if I continued looking at the world the way I did now, I'd be doomed to a future not much brighter than the one I left behind.

I had to change. I had to be better. As Emily or as the man I used to be, I needed to stand up for what I wanted and find the strength to assert myself.

I wasn't ready yet, but person soon. But now all I could do is hope I would be, before once again I found myself on a path I couldn't live with for long.

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