I'll sit in my window, and look at the moon

Well, fuck.

Having come home from an abbreviated night out with a colleague, after a particularly nasty day at work, I'm now facing the fact that in less than 6 hours, I'll be opening my eyes and greeting the new day.
Some fucking greeting it'll get.

I'm already imagining it, the way waking up after too short a sleep makes you; with a gasp, and a twist of the stomach that makes you snap for air. The tinge of desperation? That instinct of "fuck no, not yet!" that makes you want to just bury yourself under the blankets and hoping the world'll go away until you're ready for it.

At any rate, that's not what's on my mind. During the evening (and the post-work beers), we came to discuss things that spanned further than the drinks in front of us, the brainless bimbos (male/female) sitting next to our table, and the questionable music from the jukebox. For some reason, we came to pick up on matters that matter, something I care highly for. After all, one can only discuss the obvious for so long until it stops even being worthy of a comment. We started talking about views on life, and how one can make the most of it.

After the bartender eventually ushered us out, we walked towards the busstop, which usually ends up the parting point. We discussed how good intentions don't help, if the act itself hurts bad enough; sticking a knife in someone with the best of intents does not undo the fact there's a fucking knife in them, and blood pouring out. We talked about karma, and I told how I don't think karma exists as other than as peripheral addendum, and how karma either can be non present, or punitive and vindictive. As they say, karma's a bitch. Just hope she's busy fucking someone else, and not you.
Boo fucking hoo, I've done things I regret in my life. Things I would dearly love to redo and undo, just like any other person alive and self-aware. And thus, we all struggle with something that has shaped us and others, where we know (or hope) we, by action or inaction could have changed the outcome. It's something I've only ever told one person. And that was tonight.

It's awkward, because the person is someone whom I'd not call friend yet - not because I don't like him, trust him or feel I have a lot to talk about with, but simply from lack of time and chance to establish said bonds. And so, it ended up being spilled onto a colleague. Of all things. Fucking elegant from the person who's until recently lived by containing the essentials inside. It did make me rethink, and realize that it's something I have to let go of, though. I've always lived by some form of idiom of keeping a hold of things; emotions and belongings are all stowed away somewhere, sometimes tidily, more often messily, but they're all there somewhere. I've assumed that by keeping the things or thoughts, they'd still be with me, but if I threw them away or put them somewhere else, I couldn't touch them, I couldn't feel them. Just below the surface, like a gelatine overlay taughtly pulled over troubled waters, I guess.
The thing is, I've done things that I would wish I could undo. One certain person I'd wish, more than anything I could part from, so we could meet as strangers again. Undo the things I've fucked up and start over; say the right things this time; but that's not what spilled out of me tonight.
Like a fountain of regret.

It just keeps fucking pouring.

Years ago, 10 to be exact, I was in school. I had a select few people I spent time with, none of them in hindsight real friends I'd trust anything of value with. I was isolated and, self-pity permitted, desolated. Just like any teenage, disassociated and discontent male. There was a girl. I knew her marginally through aquaintances. She wasn't quite the normal type of girl who'd endlessly drool after either boyband singers or year+2 students; she wasn't a rebel, just someone who fell outside of the system, and someone who had the self-confidence to stand up for it and live alternatively. I didn't realize how much I admired her back then, I only knew that I convinced myself that she and I were similar, and that I wished to learn to know her better. I was attracted to her, definately, but at the time I was not only a virgin, but also of the typical teenage guy notion that I'd go to my death, lust and devotion unrequitted both. If I had known better then, I'd have defined myself as desperately yearning for both physical and emotional gratification...and utterly lonely as a result. Thoroughly miserable and alone, does that phrase sound familiar to anyone?

I knew it would.

Good thing that both you, reader, and I, predated emo, so as to at least avoid that labelling.

She and I talked, on occasion. During recesses, a few times after school when we both went home at the same time. I wished for those times, and each time I was wondering if I would have the courage to ask her if she'd want to meet outside of school time. I never really did muster that courage. Through means of school-class intelligence (and I use this term as loosely as possible), I gathered that she actually had something reminiscent of a passing interest for me. She liked me, I was told, and apparantly talked about me on occasion when I wasn't there. I fell in love with the romantic notion of it. One day where we were talking, and the talk fell on music, I managed to say something right, or maybe I just didn't clam up as utterly like I used to, and she asked if I'd want to listen to some cd's she had gotten a few days prior, at some point.
She asked me home to her place.
I managed to, suave as always, suggest we meet somewhere in the city on friday after school for something to eat, and then go from there. Suave, I say, because I believe I managed to bungle up every single word in the sentence, while feeling like I was blushing grotesquely.
Either she didn't notice, or she didn't mind, whichever way, she agreed.

We met, we walked around talking about just about everything, we went home to her place. We listened to the music, talked some more. Each moment, I felt so close to tell her how much I liked her. I didn't have the courage to do so. In the end, her parents came home, and I eventually made my way home, feeling like I'd been within touching distance of everything I'd ever wanted. In a way, I had, sitting on her bed, next to her, just outside of reach. As it goes, time passed, she got a boyfriend and was, I assumed, happy with him, although she didn't stop talking to me. She had the decency to not publically show her affection for him, although I suspect as much that she wasn't head over heels with him anyway. We still talked, on occasion.

One day, at a party at my oldest (and at the time, only actual, though peripheral) friend, where the party content was mixtapes with techno that I'd mixed, and light amounts of alcohol (oh Pisang Ambon, the liverache and nausea you've caused!), she called the house. She was apparantly at another party, and had retreated to a bedroom, drunk as hell, and had discovered that I was at this particular other party. (bear in mind here, this time predates cellphones, unimaginable as it may sound, so instant communication was not at all an everyday commodity) She called the house, and asked for me. I still remember, me drunkenly trying to explain the difference between cutoff frequency and a resonance filter to an, unsurprisingly, drunk guy who claimed to be the best thing to happen to electronic music since the Moog synthesizer, and some girl I'd never met before coming down, asking for me. I was guided up to the phone, being told as we walked that someone wanted to talk to me.

It was her.

She was drunk, and had decided to call the house because she wanted to talk to me. She told me she was drunk, and that she was thinking about me, and how she wanted to talk about some music with me. And that she was apparantly, at the time of calling, trying to fit the drink she was cradling into a boot. I believed her being drunk, inebriated as I was, myself. Like the Don Juan I was, I made some lame crack about how the boot really didn't need another drink, as opposed to myself. I think that if I had been any less suave than that, I'd have deteriorated into a series of grunts and hair-flowing-from-armpit burlesque masculinity. Ever the social and sexual butterfly, me. I remember my heartrate being triple-digit, easily, and my palms getting clammy.
I wanted so badly to tell her; that I'd want to be with her, outside of loud music, outside of school and outside of childish carousing. That I cared for her and that she made my heart feel like bursting. I wanted to tell her I was in love with her, even though I don't think I even knew what the words meant. I didn't, because I remembered that she had a boyfriend, and for all I knew, she'd chosen him and was happy with him. I didn't want to be the tragic figure, the hunchback of Norte Dame, come leaping from the shadows, grunting and helplessly trying to mimick a heart-shaped figure with crooked fingers to the queen, dancing at the center of attention.
Picturesque? Definately.
Pathetically metaphorical? Oh yes, I agree.
Utterly human? Indeed.

And I remember her saying something that I think I should have responded to, and me not knowing what the fuck to say, and ending up saying nothing. A few moments passed, and she blew a kiss at me over the phone; I heard her clearly...and she asked me to reciprocate. I locked up, and utterly - utterly - failed to even make the slightest of return of the gesture. Even as I said nothing, I felt like tearing the nails from my fingers, and gouging myself with them, I just couldn't say anything. The call ended in a stalemate, with her unwilling to lay herself more emotionally bare, and me completely unable to utter anything more confound than that I was looking forward to seeing her at recess on monday. Utterly brilliant, I hear you think.

The party, like the phone conversation, came to an unelegant and awkward end, as I fell asleep in the bathroom, waking up only after someone had spent the better part of ten minutes pounding on the door. She didn't come to school the following monday. A week went by without me seeing anything of her, and lacking both cellphones, email address and instant messaging (again, predating such commodities), the following week did likewise. Her friends (whom I cajoled myself to talk to) just knew she was home, with the flu or something.

About a month passed, and I saw her for the last time. It was a thursday, I remember, where I ran into her during lunch recess. I was in the cantina early, beating the mad rush for food, and I bumped into her, walking around a corner. I know how cliché it'll sound, but pale as she was, she looked as beautiful as ever. Distraught, eyes flickering around, she looked ready to dart away. I had always thought of her as strong, courageous enough to go against the tide, come hell or high water, but now she looked tired and worn out. Spent. We walked over to a side, and talked for a while. She mentioned she had been ill, and didn't feel that well really. I tried to make some lame crack about how it might have had something to do with drinking, hoping against the situation she'd mention that phonecall herself. She didn't, although I managed to convince myself I saw a flicker of a smile when I mentioned the drink not fitting into a boot. She told me that yes, she had called the house that night because she was hoping I'd be there. That she was drunk that night, and the evening before had dropped hey boyfriend because she simply didn't feel anything for him, but had just gone out with him because it seemed like the appropriate thing to do, and how she'd felt awkward and awful about it. She told me she felt alone and tired, and I remember thinking that she needed me to be there for her.
She told me she wasn't feeling well. She told me her friends were waiting, and that she wouldn't want to keep them waiting, and then she looked into my eyes and said she'd like to talk to me again soon. I failed to respond intelligbly.
Then she left. I missed the spot in queue for food, and didn't care one fucking bit. The rest of the day, I was jitterish and unable to calm down, which nearly brought me into a fight with the teacher for not paying attention and disrupting the class. It never even struck me that I'd not even told her that I'd like to talk to her again, and that the closest thing I'd gotten to a display of affection was telling her I thought she was a cool person, and buying her a fucking 2-dollar key-ring teddybear from a store when we were in the city together. Time went by, and I didn't meet her. Five days later, I dared myself to call the phone number to her home to ask how things were. No one picked up the phone, so I abandoned the project thankfully after three rings. My courage didn't last long enough to find out if there was an answering machine; dialling the numbers was courage enough spent for a year for me at the time.
I asked her friends again, whom I had almost come on a first-name basis with, if she'd fallen ill again; they told me they haden't heard anything, so they figured she was either skipping school or had fallen prey to the flu again.

Weeks went, school holidays came and went, and I wondered where in the world she was; each night I'd sit and look out of the window, thinking if she was sitting at her window too, looking out, thinking about me. Thoroughly miserable, locked in my own unrequited infatuation.

Coming back from holidays, I learned differently.

Each year, a number of teenagers, predominantly girls, commit suicide by taking pills. Less than a week after I had talked to her, she had joined that statistic. I never learned the reasons behind it.

For years, I haven't thought about it. The time after I learned of what had happened, I became even more reclusive. I don't think anyone apart from the closest few even knew why I seemed so quiet. Like so many things already, I bottled it up inside and kept it to myself, close and untouched, in fear it'd disappear if I pulled it into daylight. I bottled it up, and taught myself to forget about it. And apart from a very few occasions, I've kept it underneath the surface and under the radar, to myself and others, because I was afraid it'd fade away like a dream, like a childishly romantic notion, unable to stand up to a scrutinous eye. That the holes in my perception, my failure to even remotely act on what I today consider unrefined, but obvious signs of affection would become too obvious. I didn't react to her advances, because I partially didn't believe that I should ever be so fortunate, and moreso because I remembered thinking "this isn't right, I don't want to spoil her relationship with that guy".

I remember kicking myself, even as I was saying nothing, for exactly saying nothing. I remember me doing a whole lot of that, actually.

I don't believe in positive karma. You either get raped by karma, or you do not. Neutral versus negative, you just don't want to be an asshat and piss karma off. Avoidance of retribution is as good as it gets.

Good intentions don't stop things from hurting. And having done the wrong thing, either by good intentions, or from lack of courage leading to inaction, it still changes lives.

Now, it's late. I've been writing on this for hours, and I feel no closer to closure than when I formed the words to tell this, in whatever abbreviated form my sobriety allowed.

The words are on the screen now, and I wish this would make me feel more calm about what I failed to prevent then. I guess, with a sardonic twist of phrasing, that it's delightfully ironic how for once it weren't my actions that caused things from happening, but rather my lack thereof.

Tonight, I'll sit at my window and look out. And I'll look for the moon and think about you.

I'm so sorry I never told you what I felt, and that I never met your eyes properly and smiled back to you.

I'm so sorry. I wish I could do it over again, and do it right instead.

And I'm so sorry that I still fail to do things right today, to repair the hurt I've caused and set things right. Maybe I'll muster the courage to do it one day, and things will get better.