I'm living so carefree now. No bills to pay, no 9 to 5 and no fucking need to compare myself to others. I know other introverted artists are thriving in this world.
In this ideal environment, depression finds you in the weirdest places. For example, sometimes I forget that I can talk or that I even have a voice. I haven't had a conversation with anybody except my brain and my paintings. My thoughts flow non-stop now after spending 2 years of solitude and talking to myself. I think mostly about what had happened in the past, what I could've done, regrets and what nots. I randomly stare at things for god knows how long without thinking about anything at all. And I'm so lonely I sometimes act past scenarios out by myself.
I walked for almost 5 hours non-stop then took a rest and had some jerky and water from the emergency bag. As I start walking all my brain could do is just think about stuff and distract me from tiredness while my feet step forward one after another in auto mode. As for today, my brain menu is serving the memory of the last time I've had goofy fun with a friend right before the outbreak.
"Wait, you guys broke up?" asked John and my mutual friend.
It has been a year since the break up happened, but only now she's hearing about it, or she wants to hear some solid information from me in person by acting like she didn't know. Either way I have to answer as short as possible to end this topic before it gets emotional.
"Yeah, didn't you know? It happened a year ago", I said.
Let's hint at the fact that she didn't try to catch up with me for over a year in this sentence. A little guilt trip will hopefully shift the topic to something else. Or worse, make her dig for more juicy personal stuff. Yep, it's worse.
"I thought you guys were so cute together! I thought guys were endgame! Why did you guys break up?! I don't believe in love anymore!" she says with a frowning face.
Okay, what a way to make me feel bad about my break up. Shit, if I don't give her some specially deep answer then she'll keep on pestering me about this all night. I don't talk shit about John to our mutual friends. We may not be together anymore, but the respect I have for him is still the same. He doesn't talk bad about me to our friends either. In fact he makes himself the bad guy almost every time someone brings me up. And she was a mutual friend.
"Well, it was never a perfect relationship to begin with. We had our own problems. Sometimes fights get bad and we both didn't want to continue being like that. So we talked and ended things", I said, shrugging while looking up to some far away sight. It's best not to make eye contact while lying. I'm in trouble, that was not a deep answer.
The fights did get bad though. There were happy days, mostly there were boring days. One thing I told her was that "we" ended things. It was mostly me. I actually ghosted him out of the blue for 2 weeks. Maybe if he actually tried to meet and talk with me in person it might've not ended. See, I have this fucking toxic habit of testing people, to see if they would do something I'm expecting them to. In the end he left me alone and waited for me to come and reach out to him myself. Which annoyed me a lot. As I said before, I'm stubborn. So I went on with the break up.
"Omg, I'm so sorry. When you start constantly fighting sometimes it actually feels impossible to love them again. That happened with me and my ex too. Men become so scary when they're angry. Like they're totally different people, you know. I feel you" then she started talking about how stupid men are.
That went surprisingly well. Maybe our relatable problems satisfied her enough to jump into other topics. We talked about being single and how deprived we were of sex n stuff. It was such a nice girls night out. And after a month or so the zombie virus sucker punched the whole world into an apocalypse knock out. If I had known, maybe I would've talked about a lot more things. Maybe I would've told her truthfully that I missed John and cried about how lonely I was. We parted ways at 2am, hugged and said goodbye for like 3 times back and forth. I never saw her again. Now I regret not saying "Love you" once instead of a bunch of goodbyes and goodnights.
I loved John. We met at the diner where I used to work, and he instantly gained my respect. Respecting someone who's the same age as you is rare at that age. He was funny, confident, smart and tall. Handsome and quiet the narcissist. We were 17 when we met and dated for almost 4 years. I was naive, gaslit but somehow during all those mental abuse I was happy. Something I don't even want to admit to myself.
Well thinking about it now, in this day and age, after everything that happened to the world, of course I miss the old days. Now that I'm lonely I miss the sex even more. So much that a sex toy is a must have item in my emergency bag. I've raided few sex shops before, and the funny fact is, it has been raided a few times before me! My faith in humanity was restored that day. It's so amusing to imagine another horny girl out there surviving with a huge package in her bag. I love to think about that at least once a day.
It seems that I'm way more tired than I thought I would be. Must be from that fight, I've been walking for 7 hours with a little stop in between but I'm only halfway there. The sun is setting, it'll be dark soon. Usually my motto is not to push myself, also that I have all the time in the world, no need to rush.
So, plan update! Rest here right now, wake up really really early in the morning, get to the city around noon. It'll be easier to gather supplies during the day too. Decide later if I should spend a few days in the city.