I made you up inside my head.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sometimes I sit with a cup of tea in front of me, and stare. I stare into space, my eyes drifting away from the pages I'm trying to desperately to concentrate on. I hide myself away in fiction, more engrossing, more appealing than political theory. More personal. I find myself wanting to drown in other people's stories, because I am tired of thinking about my own, and I am tired of these circles of regret/grief/anguish chasing each other around until there is no more silence in my head. I am tired of my thoughts.
If I give myself the opportunity of solitude, it taunts me, and again my attempts to silence the onslaught of my thoughts fail until I give in.
I lie in bed staring into the darkness. Sometimes I get up and hug my knees to my chest, sometimes I curl up, and sometimes I just lie there waiting for sleep to come. Waiting and wishing I could stop thinking.
It isn't you I think about, but the idea of you that I had. Because you, and my image of you, are two different things as I've come to realize mostly through pain. So it isn't you I'm thinking about, just the idea of you.
The realization that I did, in fact, lift you out of your absolute ordinariness, out of your selfishness, out of the petulant child you are, into something quite different. I put you on a pedestal that you didn't deserve.
 I don't think of you, but I think instead of my own loss because I am also selfish. I think of my own stupidity, I think of how terrified I was of losing you. I think of promises and everything else you told me.
I think of love being pulled from right under me, so brutally that I didn't even have time to protest.
Everyone tells me I deserve better, so much better than you. And I know it, and I do not want you, or think of you. I do not want to belong to you.
 But that idea of you, that idea I held on to so desperately, because losing it was my worst fear. And then I did, and it made me understand I could go on, but it has also broken me in a way that I do not know how to fix. I find this hard to explain, this conundrum of  not wanting you, and yet not being able to explain myself in a way that will have nothing to do with you.
Some days my strength crumbles, and the resolve floats away. I do not want to reach out to you, and I don't. But I wish you had been real.

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"