The Real Risk Of Keeping It Casual

I knew the risks. I’ve played this game before, and I’ve avoided it ever since for good reason. Until now, at least.

I know that emotions creep up on you until you’ve buried yourself within them without even realizing it. You become so addicted to the rush, the comfort, the stability – even when those things are just illusions. It takes a jolt of discomfort to disillusion you. It is when the facade of familiarity and fancy fades that you realize the emotional liability you’ve built yourself upon.

Many people cling to that facade, and either make it real or die trying. Others deny that it’s a facade at all, clinging to it like a child clings to its mother, utterly dependent, utterly fragile, utterly naive. Myself…I knew what I was doing, and that makes it all the more pitiable. I knew I was boarding the Titanic when I bought my ticket, doomed to perish at the hands of ice and water. No warmth but the superficial and the fleeting.

I knew exactly the terms of my situation: I knew I was enjoying the peaceful eye of a storm, and that it would end in a cataclysmic disaster. I knew I would be like those petrified in ash and clay, but I continued my trek towards Pompeii unabashedly, knowingly sentencing myself to the pain that comes with the burning. 

Nothing is truly forever, especially something with an implicit expiration date. I can cherish the wonderful moments I had, I can bathe in the happiness they brought me, but when the low is infinitely more salient and piercing than the high ever was, the former becomes incredibly difficult.

I am the idiot for letting emotions seep in. I am the idiot, knowing that I was getting too involved and allowing myself to do so anyway. I’m the idiot for letting the aged, torn band-aid fester over the wound instead of ripping it off and letting it breathe. And that’s what a non-committal relationship is – a wound.

It’s a temporary infliction that undoubtedly leads to pain in some form, for either or both parties involved. Every human yearns for more; maintaining otherwise is self-deception. The desire for deep connections are part of the human condition.

We went well past the expiration date, and things have undoubtedly turned sour. I’m in a worse form of limbo now – neither of us wanting to say the obvious, so both of us just letting the candle burn out on its own accord. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. A pathetic, sad, unsatisfactory flicker and fade.

Communication dwindles down to views and likes on apathetic social media, exchanging the constant flow of meaningful dialogue to short, piercing reminders of each other’s distinct, separate existences. Spitting in the face of what could have been, and what once was.

I’m not quite sure what I expected. I’m overly optimistic and overly cynical, overly positive and overly skeptical. I’m a panoply of contradiction and contrast that are in a constant battle within my mind and my heart, and I cannot say that I am not self-aware of the scars I inflict on myself, though I wish I could.

It’s a form of self-mutilation, this clinging to the temporary and the insincere as if it were meat to last an eternity. I know that’s what I was doing, all while knowing that it meant absolutely nothing. Cognitive dissonance. 

With relationships, as in life, we hit oblivion with the fervor of a saint and cease to be.