Forever

Forever. I love that word, and at the same time I detest it; forever is how long people claim they will love you for, forever is how long you have to live with your past. It’s really just for and ever stuck together; conjugated to make a lovers word, a mourner’s word and a liar’s word. ‘I love you yesterday, today and tomorrow; I love you forever’; how many people have heard that and have believed it? It’s kept people going through their lives which bring them nothing but shit which they try to pass off as sacrifice for the ones they love; try to call it soul-making. Forever starts tomorrow but no-one knows when it began or when it will end, we have no reason to believe it will ever end and everyone’s forever began on a different day. Forever is like a promise which won’t necessarily be kept; it’s the type of promise which provokes the beast of cynicism who thrives at weddings and at engagements. If you have a bad memory; like the day someone you loved died, it feels like something inside of you has died when really something inside of you is being born; it is the ghost of forever that will haunt you from now on. Perhaps you have a trait, an addictive personality; that will be with you forever; forever will peer over an alcoholic’s shoulder as they order a glass of fruit juice, forever will taunt the drug addict as they walk past a forbidden alley. I have things that I will be forever, things that I will remember forever, and ghosts that I will try to erase from the grey shadow of my soul, forever. But forever isn’t something you can succeed at; you will stop being loved in quite the same way, your memories will never be forgotten, your lies will always be there in the mind of the person you cut down. Forever. Forever. Forever. Forever. It’s an eternal promise and an eternal curse; it’s inescapable and elusive at the same time. I will live with what I have done to people, forever; and they will live with what they have done to me. I will wish my past away, forever, and whatever I do tomorrow will be done not with this in mind, but with a will to make forever a better place in my mind; a place which is dark but with shining stars, rather than a place which is dark and absolute. Not everything is forever, of course; or else where would the lover and the liar be? I will have scars, and make scars, forever; just like you, but I won’t want them to get lost in the quagmire of forever – some days I’ll want them to be there forever, as a reminder, but some days I’ll curse the forever and curse my skin and my heart and my mind. I will love the sea forever, I will be afraid of the dark forever; I will love not only calm seas and I will be afraid not only of the darkness in my mind but the darkness all around, and the darkness in rough seas.