There's a coldness in this room.

There’s a coldness in this room.

     Not an uncomfortable one, not yet.  Enough to keep me awake, alert, not quite enough to reach for a blanket, another jumper.  I can feel my hair half on end as my body figures out what to do, the appropriate measure of response.  I’ve never been good at controlling my temperature.  I seem to be naturally a couple of degrees colder than I should be.

     Friends, lovers have played on this.  Pulling me closer to “give” me their heat.  Telling me I had “cold hands, warm heart” as though human beings can only maintain either physical or emotional warmth, not both. 

     Why is that?  Where did the concept of a “warm personality” come from?  Is it because of how we feel when some people are around, the coddled and cosy feeling somewhere in the chest, of our brains and bodies saying “we like this person, you’re safe around them”.  As if any instinct can truly make that judgement.  My current state of cynicism has left me in doubt of what any instinct tells me to do.   Since I alternate between wanting to be an absolute recluse, and wishing I could burn up, tear everything apart, that’s probably a good thing.

     Much though I spend plenty of time moaning to my friends about the inanity of social norms, without such norms, such friends would not stoop to be mine.  My self-abusing, humble, cutesy, naïve, overtired, sideways, loathsome nature is a carefully crafted compromise between what I know, what I want to be known and what must never, never be known about myself.  I moon over people, thinking “they would want me, if only they knew me” when in reality, they know all that they would need.

     Then there are those who know me too well, those who know, knew, a different me to the current version I’m selling.

     He was one of those.  His knowledge of me was based on himself, so was bound to go sour.   Now, he knows himself through me, which I can’t take, I can’t stand, why can’t he just leave me be?  Whenever I see him, I punish myself, for failing him, failing us, failing my dream.  Why couldn’t I keep my head, stay on task?

     And then.

     Was he always this melodramatic?  I must have enjoyed it, back then.  Now, it grates.  Did he always have such narrow-minded views?  I must have justified it, made it my mission to open him, back then.  Was everything always to do with him?  I must have ignored it, revelled in it, fed the fire when I danced around him, back then.  Worshipping him, loving him, wanting him, ever ignored until it was too late.

     Now I am different, I am new. More mature, or less, or just revolving in another sphere.  And yet he still fetters me to the corpse of what I was, with his actions, his words, the very memory I have of him.

     There’s a coldness in this room.