Serotonin

She dressed with a style and grace that acknowledged her age but showed she understood that style exists for every age.

That’s the first sentence he ever wrote about his wife of 17 years but now his ex-wife or almost ex because the papers had not quite been signed but what happens when things get signed it means the deal is done and you cannot go back on your word but he had hoped for so long that they would go back on their word and their signatures and be a family again even though he didn’t really know how to be a family because he didn’t understand what it meant to be with someone. Nobody showed him the way. His parents were divorced and his father died, his brothers were divorced, his ex-wife’s family was divorced. The world around him was divorced from reality half the time. How could he succeed in love and relationships when the rate of failure was beyond 50%?

He had dabbled in writing for a long time with sentences and paragraphs and short pieces but always created a bar in his mind that was very high. Why? An excuse to try, but not really? Right now he is thinking about clicking on a webpage and reading something someone else wrote so he didn’t have to keep writing because deep down he felt he was not good enough. He wanted to write the great American novel but he doesn’t sit down to write. Why write? Vanity? Perhaps. He does enjoy writing, but up to the point it gets difficult. And he can’t seem to get out of his own head because that is what has confounded him for so long.

‘How do I relate? What is my perspective?’ he asked himself. Because that is what he knows. He’s come to the conclusion there must be a developmental trauma component to his fear of moving into the difficult. Laying waste to his life and traveling down the inevitability of a life unfulfilled. That is the script. On so many pages in so many journals and on so many word processing documents; on repeat.

Touch the surface, dig a little with a fingernail, find some tissue and a little pool of blood. Watch the blood sit, coagulate, dry and scrape it off. Wake up another day and pick at the same wound to watch it bleed and pool and coagulate and dry and pick it away again. Over and over and over. An endless sore vacillating between infected and not infected. Was his mind infected? Repeating with the intention of a different outcome?

Now he’s going to take pills and possibly lose the use of his cock so he can get over the hump, get over himself so he can live a somewhat normal life. It sounds grim as he writes those words but things aren’t working and he’s hoping for something different because he sits at the long wooden table typing words that appeared on a page years ago but have come back and continue to haunt him. Will a little more serotonin give him some space to breathe new life into an old existence?