Overtrodden Roads

It felt so familiar: the sound of silence and darkness and crickets past-midnight, the smell of the musky air transitioning from winter to spring, the sparse orange streetlights, the rocks and asphalt crunching under my light steps.

Even the question of Why am I doing this? was familiar as it flashed through my head. And it irritated me more that even though I asked that question, I still did it. You have no self-control, I chastised myself angrily.

I could walk that path in my sleep, those dark, winding roads, with my heartbeat pounding far too loudly in the silent darkness in sync with my steps.

It was crazy that even though so few things ever got me excited, this was something that always did. It was the only thing that ever made me giddy like a child on Christmas morning, the only thing I could spend days anticipating, and it was crazy that it still had that effect on me,
even though I knew that things were different.
Even though I knew it was a bad idea. Even though I knew it would crush my spirits and I'd spend the next couple weeks recuperating from it.

Only you could ever do that to me. One glance and I'd be reeling, tripping, falling, crashing,
burning. Suffering.
Yet I was willing to endure that. Isn't that how drug addicts are? It's pitiful that I behave exactly as those that I scorn. Absolutely pitiful.

It's pitiful that I knew I was breaking down everything I'd built up as I knocked on the glass, pitiful that I knew, even before walking that far in the cold with a fever and a cough,
pitiful that I knew, even before you turned your head away like that,

that I'd return sick, sad, crushed to a pulp, and wishing with every bone in my body
that I had never trekked that road again.