Exhausted with tension

Words pass into my head as a matter of course, and some are endowed with intensity and force, but today the words that have caused me the most grief have floated my way on the winds like light, dead leafs. They caught up in the works of my body, twisting themselves where they didn’t belong, and I have been tightening like a network of old, rusty springs- and there is acid to them, and I am wearing down. An ancient automaton of the world before computers and robots and before anyone thought to build something to intentionally wear out, but where things simply wore out as a matter of the delicacy of matter. Built from hardened steel and carefully measured springs and sprockets and designed to do one thing perfectly again and again and again until one part wears down to dust and the whole machine just stops. I have not yet come to that final day where my parts no longer fit together and my springs break free, break down, but I can feel the peices inside me wearing down with friction where no two parts were meant to rub together, and I can sense that this is one wind-up-toy that has gone too long without the needed attention and maintanence – without someone reaching inside me and winding me up. I have not been treated with the same care and respect I see endowed upon the antiques and collectibles I sell, yet I feel as though I am more worn out than even some of the parts that have become so old and rusty they are no longer identifiable – people still love them and take them home to be cherished, 100 years after they have run out of usefullness. Perhaps I am of that newer breed of machine, built to fall apart a year and a day from the day it is born, built to be mistreated and misused and thrown away and replaced by something better and newer and younger and forgotten. A relic of a time gone by, but not old – merely designed to be forgotten, a relic of last week. ‘If only…’ and ‘if only…’ and ‘if only…’ I had been different, the world would not be as it is. These gentle words falling on open ears, these words designed to coerce regret and despair and pain. Yes, pain. And I wish I had the strength to resist their gentle tugs on my heartstrings, to go on as I was – as myself – without consideration for impossible nothings. Without spending too long on thoughts of what might have been, or what ‘ought to’ have been, and moving forward to what can be and what I’d like to see.

Okay, this is starting to turn up and away from the exhaustion and tension and resentment and pain that it was supposed to be about – it must be time to go write on something else.