#no matter how good an actor someone is they can't rewind time

[duchessofostergotlands]

48 year old Joaquin Phoenix playing a 26 year old Napoleon

[ofsootandsmoke]

Sometimes, you remember all the things you did.

They are immortalized everywhere you look, and every piece is clicking into place like a puzzle you've been trying hard to figure out for months; and then, in a single moment, it's all there, and you can only be overwhelmed at the sight of it all, but you can't unsee it. The images won't go away, and someone keeps pressing rewind and play and rewind and play and rewind and play and rewind and play over and over and over and over again until you go mad. That much repetition isn't healthy, you know, and especially not of a sight that leaves you feeling everything you'd rather forget.

It's quite easy for a person to go insane. Trust me, I've done it quite a few times in my life— there's nothing easier than being tormented by the thoughts in your own brain and losing your sanity over it. No matter how much you recover, you can never really get back what you lost, forever only finding makeshifts to hold yourself together until that breaks, too. Once you lose yourself, you can never get that back. You can build yourself up into something new, but whatever you were and whoever you were will never be the same. Remember that, will you? I'm not sure in what situation that could be helpful, but it wouldn't hurt to keep it in mind. Maybe if I'd known that sooner, I wouldn't have been so careless with myself.

I wonder if any of this makes any sense to someone who still has their full sanity intact. Do my ramblings make any sense to you? Can you decipher things I put between the lines and hide in my meanings? Can you make sense of the thousands of things I've written with shaking hands and a heavy heart and an aching skull? Or is it all beyond comprehension at this point, my writings just as senseless and eccentric as I often am? Do I even have a reason to write anymore? I suppose I do. I never wrote to be understood; I wrote to convey what was going on in my head. If my sentences are senseless, then I guess I am still doing what I've always intended. Even if I make no sense, you can gauge what type of mindset I'm in. No sane man writes this much in this little time with this many run ons and commas and metaphors.

I often think about that one ask. How do you process grief? And I think, "I don't." I don't process it, but it still catches up to me on a sunny day in the middle of the street regardless. Or, currently, on a quiet night in my bed. It torments me, but don't ask what "it" is. Grief. Guilt. Sorrow. Regret. Anything that is similar to those things or is a synonym. Pain. It doesn't hold me tightly and twist my arms back and break my bones; it doesn't touch me at all. It whispers, soft and delicate, yet it feels like a million people shouting all at once. My sorrow is softer than a falling flower petal, and simultaneously, it is harsher than the strongest bomb in existence. The grief I feel could destroy nations (and it already has).

I know I make no sense. Let me be incomprehensible for a little while, but please stick around for when I come to again, even if it takes a while. My brain moves faster, so it won't take too long, I promise. Maybe for me, it takes thirteen and a half years to gather myself. Maybe for you, it takes six months to watch me piece myself back together and sew up my broken edges. It is always easier to be the viewer than the actor, and I've always been quite a character, haven't I?

As with any good character, the show must go on, I suppose. The curtains were called, and they claimed the end, but I called bullshit and tore the curtains down.

Do not clap for me; this is not my finale. There is far more to come. You just have to stay for the second act.