He did not understand how he ended up there in the first place. A place he swore he’d never visit again. But, apparently, it happened nonetheless. The same friends, the same issues, the same outcomes. History repeating itself. Trapped in limbo. He asked himself how to move on, but he already knew the answer: “The tricky part is to leave before the lights are switched back on and the music stops,” he said earlier. “If you can’t leave then you are prone to repeat your life over and over and over again.”
Those words ringing in the cold, the thumping music, lots of opportunity, nausea, and the heavy urge to go right back home and leave it all behind forever were his companions in that particular night. But being trapped is fun: One can dance around the issues or one can chose to neglect them completely. Frankly, he thought he would not be pulled back in, but that’s how life goes. Now honesty was the only thing that remained. Being drunk may not have been the best idea, but a clear level of understanding to better describe his personal reality had to be established. After all, that’s what truth is for — when stories are stripped from the lies and implications we all derive on a daily basis. It’s the only thing that keeps us going forward: Being critical, aware and in control.
And how he liked this previous life. Yet he also liked not having it, which in turn folds back to a single question: Is it painful to leave it be? No, he said to himself. I haven’t regretted the choice in years, he thought next. So how did all of this happen again? Maybe it’s a character flaw of his, or respect, or hope, or foolishness, or love, or naivety, or unconditional friendship, or something he can’t even begin to understand. Either way, at the end of the day, understanding cannot prosper alongside people who don’t chose to care. Consciousness is a hard thing to build, ever drawing from the input of your subconscious, because if you feed it with conscious thoughts, you end up coming up with the same issues in different wrappings. He looked at his phone and saw there were no new messages — something that happened quite a bit these days. Eventually, he smiled and thought: It’s ok, I got the message.