“I am not the only traveler who has not repaid his debt.”

Sometimes you hurt people when you are actually doing everything you can not to hurt them.

Strangers.  I can have sex with them and walk away.  I don’t feel bad about ghosting or just leaving it alone as a one time thing.  Maybe that’s wrong but I just think it’s a low risk situation where no one gets hurt.

Then there are people I know well and care about.  I can’t just have sex with them outside of a defined relationship.  Once I know them, the line is crossed and I am responsible for how I make them feel.  I need accountability.  I don’t usually make them feel good.  The more I care about and respect them, the more distance I need to put between us when I know they are interested in more from me – any kind of more.  These are people I do not want to hurt and I am a hurtful person in relationships.  At least, historically.

Sometimes I know I am not at my best or not at the level of what I think they deserve.  So I do everything I can to avoid doing with them what they know I will do with strangers.  That hurts them anyway.

“I had all of and then most of you, some and now none of you.”

I crossed these lines once.  He’s dead.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do haunted by the ghost of you.”

I can’t take anything back.  I can only be who I am.  I know how not to hurt people presently.  I can have the conversations I used to hide from.  But I can’t treat them like strangers and remove the intimacy of our friendships/relationships in order to be icily intimate and walk away.  I can’t fabricate the time when I catch up or lag behind.

Sometimes I am a wounded bird, sometimes I am a Phoenix.  I can’t pick the one most attractive to the audience and play that out just as I can’t expect them to meet me at the pile of ashes I am soaring out of if they only want to save me.

Poor timing.  I can save myself.  I should be the one saving myself.  I have lost so much, so often and so immensely.  And, yes, I hurt too.

“When you had not touched me yet, oh take me back to the night we met.”