The last straw? I’ve been biting the inside of my mouth more and more, not the slight cheek tweaks that might leave a discernable tiny row of bumped up flesh that is little more than an interesting typological change, something to give your tongue something to check back in at, something that bothers nothing, really, and is gone in hours, but I’m talking top of the bottom lip chomp, inside, a front teeth pinch that ought to be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, the sort of bite that swells, bleeds, and then keeps getting in the way enough for you to bite it again and again, enough to consider fasting, fat-lipped now that you are, except that you’d want to wire your goddamn jaw shut for that to work.

I’m figuring, since this self-ingestion’s been going on for months, years if you count the slow growing frequency until now it seems just about goddamn daily, what I figure to be the entropic consequences of the shifting of teeth long held by the work of braces, but now, given the decades and meals and grinds of my life, slow-marched enough to cause this shit I could do well enough without anytime I’m munching on an apple, or trying to eat a goddamn sandwich, for chrissake, or simply closing my trap to keep myself from drooling.

I know that biting my lip a lot isn’t a reason to pull the plug, and it isn’t that, just that, that’s just a bit a swirled frosting, like half a rosette, at best, on the cake.  It’s the fucking cake I’m really talking about.

I know that this is just another frustrating thing, one of a number on a list that seems to keep expanding year after year, like the fucking hemorrhoids that once occasionally flared, but now seem companionable compared to a lot of the newest stuff, what probably is a small inguinal hernia, or testicular cancer, who the fuck knows, who the fuck cares? The chronic shoulder, tight hamstrings, the weight.

It is all maddening, as in making me insane, enough to consider this very counter-measure, I’m simply leaving you a note so that you know what went on, maybe some closure, not that I’ll give a fuck, down under.

For one thing, I am so bored I could kill myself.

Or, I am so fucking bored, I could kill myself.

How many times have you heard someone say something like this? Or heard yourself say it?

Myself.

I’ve often enough said something like this, I’m sure, and I’m someone who tends to keep busy.

I’m pretty sure that what I mean when I say something like this is that I’m sick and tired of feeling the same old shit, and that it isn’t so much a matter of boredom, per se, as a matter of the seemingly unending disgust of my not solving my real feelings, not so much of terror as of fervent dislike, of ongoing disappointment that progress seems impossible in my life, except, maybe, in the smallest increments, and ephemeral moments at that, those extremely rare instances when I’m not entirely disgusted with how fucking stupid and meaningless my life is, or fixated on how substantial the failure, how fleeting anything approaching happiness, in the midst of a depression no doubt tied to the unconquerable complexes formed while my brain was elastic, the surviving child, now hardened into the very being I am, and I am sick of this pervasive sadness, this grief for the absurd strivings, the absence of love, of connection.

***

 

Well, I just deleted a lot of what I just wrote, mainly because it seems repetitious, more of the same, whiny in the extreme, exactly what I’m hoping to stop.

And it is not that I have never had connection, that would be a lie, but it doesn’t ever matter, not enough, at any rate. A long, but failed marriage. Several careers, success, but so the fuck what? Old friends, dears, they’ll miss me no doubt, before they continue on with their lives, and besides, they’ll all be dead soon enough, too, with or without help, the beginnings already in view of that stupid slide into longer and longer periods of acute suffering and disabilities, of diminishments and pain and disappointments, of making the young uncomfortable and duty-demanded, even as they glance, unwanted, into what lays ahead for them when the time comes.

It isn’t so much that I am bored, there is plenty of terror mixed in, but I’m tired of it all, I’m taking my fucking ball and heading home.

Or where the fuck ever.

Away. Gone, at rest, finito, thank you fucking very much, that’s all she wrote, Katie bar the door.

I’m mad, that seems pretty goddamn obvious, just as it is obvious enough that it isn’t my lessening with age the real issue, I can imagine how this might go, graceful, love-filled, surrounded by loving family, etcetera, and so forth.

But what I know, not imagine, or at least what I keep seeing as my certain knowledge, therapy and effort to the contrary, is that even with active connection, love for another, I keep coming back to the same old shit, and my connections ain’t so great these days, and even I can’t blame anyone for that, as much as I might want.

Well, there is the kids, grown-ups now, and I know that they love me, but they are in their own lives, and thank god for that, mission accomplished, but I’m wondering why I need to stick around and the best I can come up with is that they’d be hurt, they’d be disappointed, maybe confused, and even then they’ll get on, but I will have set an example, and that gives me pause.

I know that I’m loved. My friends have their families, their kids with kids, their struggles with plenty of shit, stuff that has already gone ahead and killed in one case, not the other though, I remember feeling that those last days were important, precious, what the fuck, a new therapeutic regimen, going to others’ funereal services?

So, shit, we connect while we can.

Shit.

I can still connect, what is past is prologue, right? Evidence-based actions, or inactions, I guess.

Shit. I’ll delete this all, ha.

I guess that makes this aptly titled, in its way, goodbye sweet note.