All I Ever Wanted Was Everything
I guess one of the wisest things my first girlfriend
had ever said to me was, “you just feel sorry for yourself.”
I can’t pretend to say that I really know what feeling sorry
for myself would even mean. I remember asking her.
We were in the car and the arm rest was pulled down
between us. We both leaned on our respective doors.
She said something about how feeling sorry for yourself
is something or rather. If I only just. Then I’d.
Which is my point - I can’t remember what she said.
I can only guess about what it means to feel sorry for me.
I guess that I could know, if I tried: maybe feeling sorry
is all I’ve ever really felt. Like I’ve done things
that I can’t take back, even if I don’t know what they
are. Caught red-handed. My face flush, the cold
needles of knowing I’ve been found out.
Not by anyone else - but by myself.
Isn’t that enough to feel sorry?
When I was a little boy, my mother led me by the hand
out of the kitchen and onto the porch. We went down the wooden
steps together and I brought my bare feet into the grass
where a green knot lay with its eyes blinking, its bubbled
skin heaving in the small, stony body of a frog.
I brought my foot down, took its nothing-life and looked
up at my mom. I want to remember the words she said
to me, but there’s nothing. Only the ghost of reproach
and, “he knows not what he does.” And though at the time
I may not have, today I am the glory of hindsight.
Little things like that never leave me.
I’m sorry for what I’ve done - the actions I forge into
what make me real only carry their consequence.
They’re in a line before me, and the apparitions
of unmade choices stand behind them a hundred deep.
Nothing is ever good enough because something will
always be left out.
My biggest apology goes to myself,
for tying up my soul and making unnecessary demands.
The kind that I expect the rest of the world to meet, but
can’t even manage to make on my own.
I guess she was right.
