when you know it's coming... when you first catch that whiff of rejection, even though you've been told a hundred times it won't happen, it will be ok... but there is that change of tone, that slight pause in conversation... just a few little tiny words sprinkled here or there... when you know it's coming and you've already said, "just rip the bandaid off quick and don't care how much it hurts"... but you know that they can't do it that way because they don't want to be the bad guy - they tell themself they are doing it for you, but really, they are doing it for themself, they can't stand to be the one to do it, they can't stand to be the one to slice you off coldly and quickly even though you'd really, really prefer it, prefer to die quickly with a tremendous gushing loss of blood and a scene of ugly carnage because at least then you'll know... at least then you can stop carrying around all the heavy false baggage of belief that you'd really rather just set down and walk away from because you know that inside that baggage is just the pain of the inevitable failure, the inevitable loss, the inevitable throwing away of you ... cos it's so much better to know than to try and keep pushing through the days hanging onto hope, hanging on to outdated promises and assurances... promises and assurances are only as good as the very second they leave the lips... the world is fragile and ever-changing... nothing lasts, nothing stays, nothing is infinite except chaos and the changing of it all... the ever-growing, ever-widening chaos of existence... the existential truth that, in the end, you are alone and nobody is coming to make it better, in the end all you have is you and if that "you" is someone you loathe more than anything else in the world, what does that say about what you are left with?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats, January 1919