In Orbit

I always thought I'd die young. Even as a kid I'd imagine what my funeral might be like. I'd say mental good byes to friends and relatives, in case I wouldn't see them again. I'd watch sad movies and imagine that they'd remind my family of me after I was gone. I had all these beautifully tragic songs that I'd hoped the kids from school would listen to and think of me; my whole life I'd been building my own personal playlist of heartbreak, mentally stealing myself for my own imminent death. A death that still hasn't come.

I didn't know what this pull of tragedy was all about, still don't, but it's always been there. Like some impending doom was always waiting for me just past the horizon. And yet, here I am...still drawing breath, beyond the point of dying young.

I don't know if this feeling was courting me or if I was courting it. Whatever the relationship, tragedy, in the truest sense of the word, would eventually run its jagged wheels across my track. And now, those same movies; my playlist of heartbreak, my soundtrack of tragedy, all those premonitions, leaning on me for years, stir up nothing but thoughts of Her. She's all I can ever think about...all I was ever thinking about, even before we'd met. I may have never deserved her, and she certainly deserved better than me.

And I'm starting to think that I'd misunderstood this relationship with impending tragedy, this premonition of an early death.

It's like the tragedy of that night was so profound, so life shattering, that it was pulling on me before it even happened, from outside of space time, like a pre-déja-vu; a shockwave so strong that the rest of my life has been swirling around this one event forever, from my birth to my death; before and after; the effects radiating out in every direction.

It wasn't the tragedy of my early death at such an early age, it was Monica's. I'm still stuck in the orbit of that night. I always will be... I always have been.

It isn't fair to entertain the idea of fate when its results are this devastating. So I'll just do my best to stay in orbit and keep from shooting off into space.