I haven’t been able to work today. I worked maybe 30 minutes. I don’t know how to cope with these feelings of G being absent, and at the prospect of us not being together again. I can only think of the good things we shared, and my mind represses all the frustrations I experienced when we were together. I think I was slowly accepting parts of her and began to embrace who she was. Or maybe all the while she was drifting, and that increased my attraction to her, until she was gone.
I can’t seem to get it out of my mind. Do I text her? Do I reach out? We decided on Friday to give each other space. When do I call her? Should I call her? Is that what’s best? Or is this time what’s best, this space, to figure things out? I feel that so much is unresolved. My fear is that this space is allowing her to repress her feelings for me, to justify her decision was sound. I regret so many of the ways I handled our relationship. Why? I was cold. I was insensitive. I was ruthless at times. I hurt her because I was protecting myself. My ego comes in and begins to run the show, totally hijacking the mind and relegating the heart to some hardened cold thing. Every advance she made I would burn her with silence or a cold retort, some matter of fact response that I know must have hurt her.
I can’t get my mind straight.
I mean, of course I can. I am struggling if I want to. I keep thinking of her, indulging. I go on apps and look at women and my heart is preoccupied. I have nothing to give anyone else. It’s been this way for a long while, since I’ve known her. But at least I could think straight. Now these feelings have invaded my rational mind, and my heart is in the drivers seat, and I feel helpless.
Of course I know I’m not. I know that every day will get better. I know that I need to stop indulging, stop romanticizing. I keep writing things I’d like to say to her, promises I’d make, memories I’ve had, plans I want to share with her, commitments I want to make. This doesn’t help. I just keep ruminating.
Is it my ego? Of course it is. I’ve been rejected. It doesn’t feel nice. It feels horrible. And I know I’ve done this to her countless times the past year. Why now? Why now am I reeling in pain? It’s like, if there was ever a time to detach, this would be it? Is it because there’s a voice in the back of my mind that tells me that she’ll be gone forever, that letting her go will mean there is no more future, no more hope? Perhaps. Why this time?
My hope is that we’ll talk, and we’ll decide to do things differently. That this episode has awakened a care and commitment within us that we cherish differently than ever before, and created a respect about the need for eachother to be more delicate when handling our relationship.
My hope is that we’ll talk and we’ll agree that we cannot live without each other, and that no matter what happens, we’ll never get to this point again. My hope is that we’ll accept what we can’t change in each other, and work through the rest.
I don’t know how to work in situations like this. My mind is in agony.
I mean, it’s not. But it is. It is because I allow it to be, because of this hope that simmers at the edge of my consciousness, a hope that my heart is holding onto.
I look at other women, and I feel nothing. I feel sexual attraction, but no emotional attraction. I am closed, reserved for G, and this is the way it has been. She frustrates me to no end. And I’ve never been able to find ways to cope, although I’ve done better with her than any other. She’s impatient, she’s emotionally unstable, she’s stubborn and irrational, she can be mean and nasty, she’s never on time, she takes forever to do anything, her life revolves around ballet, and I feel like my life revolves around that. I rarely feel like she’s capable of thinking what’s best for me, or my feelings. Although, I’ve noticed she’s been trying and very sensitive to trying the past many months. I noticed she is listening and does pay attention. I know she’s changed quite a bit. I know she’ll always be herself, always be spoiled and difficult, and may not show appreciation, and just expect things from people.
My greatest fear throughout our relationships was that I never felt appreciated, never felt that I was enough. I always felt that I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t. So it exhausted me, and that’s when I’d just stop. But I also knew, although it was very hard to see and believe sometimes, that she loved me, and that she needed me.
She was too needy most of the time. Too demanding. Too jealous. Too insecure. This drove me away.
If I was more patient, I would have embraced these flaws. But at what expense?
This was always the dialog within. At what point do I just continue to take it? Continue to let her treat me this way, even if she didn’t mean it? How do I look past it, and not react, not take is personal? It was always a difficult thing to do.
Although the past year I’ve put some pretty massive boundaries around myself, preventing her from reaching me, and hurting me, and demanding things from me, recently I was entering a new stage of acceptance, where I began to look past those things. Or thing is what I remember anyway. My heart was softening, and I began to react less, and have more patience. No, this wasn’t perfected, but I wanted to work on it. I began embracing the idea that she was my friend, and that we would be together, and I would just have to accept her no matter what. This made things easier. Though I think I still struggled with coldness and insensitivity, and had too much tough love.
What should I do? I’m not sure. I know I need to give her space, though that’s not what I want to do right now. I want to extinguish this painful fire raging within me. I’m not sure how. Would her verbal reassurances make this better? Would her commitment to love me and work things out assuage my pain? I’m not sure.
I know I need to let go, let my heart be at peace. This is what I need. I need peace. I need clarity. I will have peace and I will have clarity.
It’s just that my mind keeps running and running, romanticizing. It wants to reach out to her and tell her how much I love her, how much I need her, how much I want to work things out.
The ego is the source of all pain, all suffering, all attachment to the things that will inevitably change and leave us.
The ego. I know this ego, and I wish I could control it better, I wish I was more self aware.
I am at peace. Life is good. I enjoy my job. I enjoy my coworkers. Living in the bay is nice. I should get out and socialize more, I should embrace people more, I should see opportunities all around me.
This is an opportunity to start fresh, to start anew.
I would like to move out of my apartment. My new roommate is borderline psycho. Part aspergers, and many other issues. Every conversation is a conflict, when I just mean to communicate. He’s defensive, and gets upset when we discuss normal household responsibilities, like keeping things clean. He becomes visible upset and short and even angry. He says weird things. When he told me his sister passed away from suicide, I told him how sorry I was, and that I could relate, because I had two friends pass away from suicide. He told me “It’s not a competition.” I was like, no, I was just explaining that I can relate to the pain. Many other weird things as well.
I’d like to move out. I’d ideally like to find a place with G and continue this journey with her as two people who love each other, who want to sort through the difficulties and make it work.
This season is painful, but it’s just a season, and like all seasons, it will pass. Although the colors are muted, and the sounds are dull, although sensations are gray and the mind is small, these things will restore in time, and joy will appear again, first in small ways, in the way the breeze wraps around my body, in the way the sun refracts off a glass and splinters into a rainbow, illuminating a sign of hope. My heart will levitate again as I move more often, and stretch more freely, when the legs of my imagination begin to wander and move me to new places, and my eyes open and see new things, new possibilities. I must wait, and be patient. I must exercise hope that there will be better days, better than I can imagine, better than I have now. There is always a new day. There is always a new month, a new year. There is always a new season, with new sights and sounds and smells and sensations to infatuate my being.
Wait
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
Galway Kinnell – 1927-2014
William Dare 