2004-05-31 - 12:02 p.m.
in which I ramble on with no direct purpose
Well, surprisingly, I slept. Not a lot, and not all that well, but almost on par with a "normal" not-great night of sleep for me.
Went to bed comparatively early last night. I was finally feeling strung out enough from exhaustion of all sorts, that I thought I'd be able to shut my brain down enough to sleep.
And in a way, it worked. The first few times I drifted off were not so much of a struggle. And as I started to restore my stock of sleep, each time I woke up, I had a harder time keeping my brain from running around at full tilt, so it was a little harder to get back to sleep each time.
Finally just got up a little while ago; there's still almost an hour and a half before I'd set my phone's alarm to go off. But I was thinking too much, essentially alone in the dark - even though I wasn't technically alone. And since I'd been in bed for 10 or 11 hours, even if only part of that time was actually productive sleep, it was just impossible to stay there any longer.
Maybe it will seem strange, but in a way, I'm actually reluctant to leave. Not in the same way that I would've been if the weekend had gone as I'd thought or hoped it would, but still reluctant. That might be because of the five hours or so that I'll be more or less completely cut off from everything during transit - that will be time when it's hard to escape. And it might be because - while I'm certainly faced with the truth of the situation here, once I'm home I'll be dealing with it in a different way. Now I'm faced with being at the end of something, then it will be all over but for my having to find the way to deal with it.
I'll never be here again - by which I mean the particular mental/emotional state that I'm inhabiting. Just like I'll never be where I was just over a month ago, either.
Every time is different. Even with my theoretically limited experience, I know that. And I do know from specific experience that every time is different, even if it's with the same individual.
Should she change her mind - which, again, while I can wish for, I don't really hold out hope for (Hope is too like expectation, and one of the lessons I'd managed to start learning before this is that you cannot hang expectations of what will happen on other people, nor expectations of what they can or will be. It's irresponsible, it's impractical, and it generally leads to disappointment - though sometimes theirs as much as if not more than your own) - it would be different. Even if she hasn't been changed by this experience - which I cannot speak to, as I am not her - I have.
One of the first things I have to do - right up there with finding a way of dealing with my reactions to this without either trying to sublimate them or revel too deply in them - is find my balance.
As much as it might not seem that way from the outside, I never made her my whole world, and I never tried to make her the center of it. She became an external, parallel force - changing my universe, exerting a pull that brought it into a new (and for a time more stable) balance. I'm a creature of habit, and I'm still surprised at how quickly and deeply she became a part of my world. She was, and will no doubt (for a time, at least, though I have no way of knowing how long that time will be) continue to be connected with everything. In a manner of speaking, it's very similar to the way that Talcott (for example) is connected with everything. Things with a direct link - elements that go along with things we've done, places we've gone, or discussions we've had - those are the obvious points of connection. You can't share a real link with someone without the things they've been part of directly continuing to, at the very least, make you think of them whenever they or something similar comes up.
As for things less directly linked... it's difficult to explain. At times, it's that you're reminded of the person, sometimes without knowing why. Other times, it's because you have a reasonably good idea that whatever thing - object, place, situation, what have you - would be something they would like, or dislike. Or failing that, you might wonder what their opinion or perspective is.
Even if contact with Anne drops off more than I expect that it will for a while - even if (god or whom/whatever you choose to invoke forbid) we can't manage to keep in touch and remain close friends - she's going to become one of the people who continue to exist as "voices" for me.
Like how when I do something I'd consider common courtesy, I can often "hear" Gella laughing, and teasingly calling me a gentleman. Or how when I miss a bit of obvious techie/game/lit/whathave you trivia that I should've known, I can "hear" Talcott telling me I've just lost a load of geek points. When I'm goofy, sometimes I can still hear Cait recounting one of the in-jokes from our highschool days. Taking something out of context in a particularly lewd way gets me thinking of Dave's Joey Lawrence-esque "Woah." And so on, and so on.
Of course, those are the less important examples. Those are the echoes of current and past friendships that come out at random. But, like some of those people, I expect she'll also be a voice I can sometimes hear on more important things.
Like how an attempt to stop myself overthinking something will promt Gella's words about that tendency of mine, and cause me to recall advice she's given me in the past, or imagine what her advice - no matter if it be advice I can take and act on or not - would be. Or how sometimes imagining Talcott's reaction to something I'm going through can help me decide if it's something that I need to talk about right away, or if it's something I'm not ready to have brought up.
In a way, I suppose it goes to the old "No man is an island" idea. Of changing and being changed, affecting and being affected by everyone you have contact with. Shouldn't it follow that the more meaningful or deep the contact, the more noticable and lasting the change that results will be?
One moment I'll be calm, and rational, and I seem to myself to be fine. And that would scare me into thinking I'm already sublimating (my defence mechanism of choice, "historically" speaking) my reactions to all of this. But the calm goes by turns, alternating with moments that leave me no choice but to not only feel the beginnings of pain in the keen edges of the emotional emptyness I'm experiencing, but to also feel how tenuous my emotional control is.
I can't let myself break down totally yet.
I suppose she might think I have already; I was embarassingly tearful a few times - most notably during the definitive conversation on the subject. Actually, strike that. Not embarassingly tearful. If ever there's a time when it's allowable to be leaking emotion from the eyes, it's in relative privacy while your world is being altered like this.
But the point I was making is that I wasn't at the break point. I was pushing toward it, and trying to keep myself back from it - which I succeeded in doing. I didn't lose control, I didn't break down. I'm trying to save that. Everyone probably knows by now that I lick my wounds - particularly the deepest ones - in private.
When very small, I was one of the kids who hid when they were hurt, not one of the ones who went running right to their mother. I still have a strong memory of being more-or-less wrestled out from under the kitchen table so they could look at some cut or something I'd picked up.
Maybe that's one of the personality traits that leads me so strongly to identify with animals moreso than people much of the time. The desire, the need to disappear when hurt or weak.
It's funny, I'm a stronger person than a lot of people take me for. You'd think it would be the other way around, given that I have issues with showing weakness.
Although, that might seem like a misleading thing for me to say. Certainly I discuss my shortcomings with others. But the deepest flaws, the ones that I think are the most "dangerous" or cause the most weakness, those I still keep hidden - or at least I think that I do.
In case you can't tell, I have no idea at all where I'm going with this entry. I think better in text or on paper, and I've got some time to kill, and sometimes I don't figure out where my head is at until I've tried to write about it.
I think I've said before, but I'm thinking it now, so I'll mention again. The hardest part of this is that I don't want to let go, that I feel as if I have some sort of choice in it, even though I really don't. That I know, much as it would maybe hurt me, I'd try to struggle on and get past this together with her, if she'd let me. I know, and am doing my best to both accept and understand that that chance won't happen. And I can even conceed the fact that such a path would very possibly end us up somewhere that wouldn't allow us to try to remain friends.
But the thing is, that's not something that's happened before. In the past when a relationship has ended, the pain - or the initiall full force of the pain, anyway - has come on fast. The two times that matter the most, I can still remember the distinct differences in the sensation, actually. But the pain hit fast, and that was just it. The end was the end, and as much as I didn't like it, it was there and I... I guess I either was hurt enough, or was stubbornly insisting that I didn't care enough for it to matter that I didn't have a real option about it.
Then again, never before has the hurt - or the shadow of it looming, perhaps might be better to say - been unable to eclipse the love.
That's the hardest part. Trying to understand how I can still feel it right now. Maybe that's just the final proof of how deep it runs, how real it is for me. While little if nothing can erase love instantly, in the past it's been my experience that it's so outweighed by the hurt that it's as good as invisible until some time when the hurt has begun to be dealt with, at which point moving past the love becomes a part of moving past the trailing ends of the hurt.
It had been a very long time since I'd known what it was like to be consistantly happy, to have it be the normal line of my emotion, rather than a sometimes-occuring high spot that was a useful mark to remember the range of emotional states I'm actually capable of.
And I had that for more than two months. Nothing can erase that. Nothing can take away the fact that I got to experience it. It - along with the love, the sense of connection, and everything else good that was most of this romance - is something that is mine, and cannot be taken from me.
Do I admit that it's possible once the hurt really starts to hit home, I will reconsider my current opinion that not only was it worth it, I'd do it again even knowing the ending? Yeah. It's possible. I can't say with total truth and certainty how I will feel or react to something that hasn't happened yet. But I can make an educated guess, and I can speak more accurately about how I might feel than anyone else could. So I can say honestly that I don't feel or believe that my opinion will change about that. Nor can I at this point believe that there will soon come a point when I wouldn't agree and jump right back in if she were to change her mind - which, again I feel I need to point out, I am not actually expecting to happen.
You can consider that weakness, I suppose. To even know in advance that I'd be back together with her if the opportunity to do so ever appeared. But like I seem to keep saying - some things are not only worth the risk, but worth the apparant certainty of pain.
My realizaton of that, incidentally, is really taking a bit of the wind out of the part of me that is already strutting around, issuing "I told you so" statements to all the other parts of me that were willing to be given over fully to this experience.
Maybe, ultimately, that's the lesson I'm going to learn from this. Maybe it'll give me - if not more confidence - more willingness to take emotional risks for the things that I know to be imporant in my life.
Maybe this will finally be the year I start putting my confidence and pride on the line, and making submissions in the hopes of getting published.
God, everything really does come back to my writing in some way or another.
There's one question that will plague me for a long time, though. Unless my position of disagreeing with her on this point changes, I will continue to be mystified by her stated belief that I am/was "too good" for her. By applying the converse, I continue to be mystifed that she would think she wasn't good enough for me.
Good memories, having been really happy for the first time in a long while, and ultimately lessons learned that will make me stronger in the future (in a variety of ways). That's what I'm taking with me.
I'm a better person for knowing her at all, and I think a better person still for loving her, for having had her love for a time. Someone explain to me how that could be, if she wasn't good enough for me?
There is so much that I already miss - so much that I know I will realize I miss in the coming days.
Peter Mulvey playing in my head now. "Sad Sad Sad Sad and Far Away from Home." However, I cannot even pretend to agree with the bit about being the happiest fucker alive.
Nothing will just magically make me feel better. There is going to be a lot of time involved. But there's always things that help you to feel better. I just wish I knew what those things were for me right now.
I'm kind of scared that I feel so rational just now. It's very hard to see the line - to know when I'm being rational and "strong" because it is the time for strength, versus when it's an illusion or an act of sublimation - a front I'm presenting even to myself, which will only lead to my breaking harder when I do.
Want to hear something very wild? I still Trust her. I've been hurt, and fear or expectation of being hurt is perhaps one of the root causes of my inability to trust most people on a fundamental, gut level. And the hurt that I am/will be feeling orginates from her - a fact that does not change much even knowing that hurting me was never her intent. And yet, I still trust her. Maybe it's for the same difficult-to-define reasons that I'm not angry with her over this. Maybe it comes from the fact that I still feel that connection between us, even if it is inevitably being changed by this. And maybe it's because whatever her opinion of it is, she at least was for a time exactly what I needed in my life. Even when I can't agree with everything (at least on my part) that she's said, she's never been - and has not become - anything but honest with me. And not only do I have the deepest respect and appreciation for that, perhaps it's the major part of what's sustaining my trust for her.
I don't understand how her feelings for me and for this relationship have changed so quickly. But then, I'd never been able to understand how it is that I came to fall in love with her so completely, so quickly.
I can let go of the non-platonic dynamic of our relationship. And - though it will take me time and a great deal of effort - I will be able to let go of my expressions of being so totally in love with her.
But I can't let go of that love. I won't be able to unless/until the day comes that it lets go of me. I never controlled it, and I never wanted to. While it might make getting over this easier, I don't want to now. I am the one who "owns" my emotions and my reactions to things. What I can change is how those things are shown or expressed, how my visible reactions play out. What I cannot change is the root, personal experience of them. I am responsible for my own emotions, but I do not control them, merely the way they are allowed to play out externally.
I miss her so much, even still being here in her space, surrounded by her life and her things. That's something else that - while I can eventually let go of on a concious level - will take a lot of time to move past, I think.
I am not allowed to get what I want and keep it, but maybe I am allowed to get what I want for a little time. And that little time is worth everything in this case.
Just because the end of the story - or at least the end of the chapter - is painful, it doesn't make it any less a brilliant story.
There is no light without darkness, no sweetness without bitter.
Maybe it's worth the whole of the pain not only to have had what we did for a time, but because it serves to point out even more sharply just how good it was.
I still sound so scarily rational, so much like I'm already dealing with this.
Somehow I more than half expect that one of my next entries will end up being more along the lines of "fuck everything." I can't have been this honest about everything without thinking that eventually the raw edges of the pain will slice through, demanding their own expression.
I am a stronger person for all of this, both in positive ways, and in ways that come from the temporing of the pain that waits for me on the other side of this hollow near-numbness. But sometimes strong isn't standing up in the face of the pain. Sometimes strong is being brave enough to let that pain and hurt rage through you, having faith that whatever it tears apart will be mended eventually, and that you'll still be standing on the other side of it.
A willow can be stronger than an oak, exactly because it knows how to bend against the storm - where the oak will sometimes be too rigid, and crack fatally under the fury of the wind.
I can stop being usettled by hawks now, I suppose. Didn't see a one for a solid week before this trip.
I need to find my old quiet place. The one that isn't within a memory of any person, but is purely my own serenity.
I need wolf.
I need to figure out fast how to start feeling whole again, in stead of more than halfway to damaged.
And I need to stop thinking about the things that I want, because the things that I want right now are not options, and may never be again.
And now that I've killed more than an hour, I need to go and get myself gathered and ready to start the trek homeward.
previous howl
next howl
Murrrrrrffff? - 2005-01-04
A Late Review - 2004-09-12
Weekend Update - 2004-08-08
Intermission - 2004-08-07
Rambling or something. - 2004-07-31
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