Megaman

There. I did it. I made it back. My sole mission of the last two years- a mission I lauded, elevated to newfound heights!- was to get right back to where I am right now. Everything between then and now was temporary. A sacrifice. Something I had to do because ... I had to do it.

Yes.

And since everything was some temporary sacrifice, some transient happenstance that was never to be my final destiny, why worry? Why settle? Why focus on any of it, at all?

Of course.

The isolation. My humor a shipwreck on the rocks of a foreign vernacular, the mast of my most dependable sail snapping. When she called and told me it was over, another snap. Watching the sun set, ten horizons away from my nearest friend, leaning against the back of my car after running like something was chasing me. Taking in desperately powerful doses of loved ones to tide me over until I could get my next fix.

The hecticity. The unending travel, long days, longer nights. The feeling of ultimately hollow importance, purpose, drive. I-10. I-10. I-10. Night after night. The nights of a job, talking about nothing but the job, sleep with the job in your head, wake up and put the job back together in the shower, over eggs. The nights in the city, mindless, dissociative banter if the music isn't too loud, feigned fervor and excitement if the music is too loud. A bright spot ... a connection, but at a distance. An immeasurable, impossible distance.

And finally, here. Look, I made it.

How could I have possibly thought anything would be the same when I got back? That I'd be the same when I got back? That coming back to a location was the same as coming back to a time?

I was counting on returning to a life that was gone the moment everyone else left. The moment they left, that iteration of myself disappeared too. Months later, when I finally did leave, I was already changed. Different. And- foolishly- eagerly awaiting my own triumphant return.

I haven't processed anything since then. Not any of it. It was all just temporary. A silly story for later, about that time I went and did all those things, lived all those days. It was an interlude, tiding me over until the great grand hope of here could be realized.

It all came in anyway, filled me up. Charged my mind, weighed on my heart. I didn't want to admit it. Acceptance of those days and nights and feelings would be acceptance that return was impossible, that the period of my life I'd so treasured was truly gone. I did my best to ignore it, distract it, confuse it, dilute it, drown it.

I've spent two years waiting on an impossibility.

The only way forward is forward. Right now, forward means turning around, looking at these years, and facing all that's happened.

And I'm deathly, hysterically afraid of what I'm going to find.