I feel discarded. Cast aside.
No discussion, no attempt to sort it out.
I would have waited.
But you decided.
Somewhere between Friday night, and Saturday morning, it was all your call. I didn’t have a say.
I had no clue.
You said “it’s for the best, you’ll see”.
And then you were gone, and I was not to contact you.
Somehow that doesn’t seem like enough. Not after “I love you”, “I’m not going anywhere”, “you are safe with me”. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
And now I’m the one who feels broken.
A rulebreaker – writing this, knowing that you want me to “detach”.
I am being someone, who – whilst not 100% detached – still cares, even if it hurts.
I am being someone, who values you, misses your voice, your mind, your hand in mine, and who does not want to be completely shut off from you.
I am being someone, who is grateful to have been loved by you, for a short while.
I am being someone, who does not hold onto blame and resentment – except perhaps, for circumstance and bad timing.
I am being someone, who is trying her best to accept things as they are.
I am being someone, who hopes that you are doing OK.
I am being, Someone.
It has been difficult to focus on work today. I managed to get a couple of hours done this morning but I seem to have lost my sense of diligence to the customer.
Every paper shuffle, every click of a pen, or fork against a plate (being lunchtime) sent a thousand rivulets of irritation coursing up my spine, until it was all I could do to stop myself from screaming with frustration at the entire office.
Needless to say, I have removed myself for a walk in the sunshine. I have been walking a lot lately. I think I clocked up about 40km over the weekend. It seems to be the only thing I can handle at the moment and it appears to be keeping me somewhat sane. The only problem is that the moment I stop, the listlessness returns.
I have found myself at the bench where you first kissed me and I sit here watching the boats bob and rock on the water at their moorings in front of me. A couple embrace and laugh, down on the grass closer to the water and I try to focus on their joy, to share in it and let go of the feeling of loss and envy.
I don’t think I am succeeding.
I suppose I feel the most hurt by the fact that I have had no voice in all of this. I guess it is your decision after all, if you don’t want this then nothing I can say or do will change that. But your apparent lack of interest in even engaging at all with me or attempting to work through this has been torture.
Maybe your conclusion is the right one, but as someone who thought they were an equal in a loving relationship- young though it may have been -I guess I expected to at least be consulted rather than dictated to. I was blindsided. A terse message telling me to detach being our last correspondence ….Well, if someone has physically kicked me in the gut, it could not have hurt more. The wind was quite literally knocked out of me.
I should be angry, but I’m not. I know you are in pain, and you are trying to keep it together. I just wish we could have worked though it in partnership. I thought that was what loving someone was all about. You know, to be there in difficult times as well as the good times.
As I stare at the boats I recall nervously skippering the boat just four weekends ago, and you putting your arms around me and whispering “I love you” into my ear.
I wonder at how suddenly things can change. Just as the sun was a moment ago warming me, the cold breeze has suddenly picked up leaving me shivering so violently I can barely type. Or perhaps it is not the wind.
I can’t believe I am back here again.
What I have learned over the years is that whenever there is excitement, joy, love, and happiness – you can be certain that pain, loneliness and bitterness are not far behind. Lurking at the edges of your peripheral emotion. Waiting to give you “perspective” and ensuring that you never forget that everything- happiness included – is only temporary.
Perhaps in some secret, sadistic way, I have grown to enjoy this pain. Perhaps I ask for it. Perhaps it is my comfort zone. Familiar. Understood.
People tell me that I need to find happiness in myself. Well, I had that – at least I thought I did. It feels different when someone comes into your life and claims to love you though. That brings with it a different type of comfort. A lightness, a joy, where I am launched into the atmosphere to skip among the clouds, at least for a time. Is it really possible to find that kind of love within Oneself? I’m not sure. In some way, the delta emotion seems to be increased by the presence of another person.
It seems to be a popular theme in this day and age, to reject the notion that we need other people. That we can be wholly happy and in love all by ourselves. But, what if I were to simply admit that I don’t want to be all by myself anymore? Is that such a terrible thing to confess? I realise it may not make substantial difference at the end, we all die alone, etc – but what about how I want my life to be in the meantime, while I am living?
And besides, noone is wholly happy and in love with themselves all of the time. We all have demons we battle with daily, so why does it feel like just mine are always victorious?
Why does this one wish, this one desire, elude me – regardless of the days, months, years spent “working on myself”. All that appears to have done is render me more detached, more isolated.
He said he loved me.
That I am the “collateral beauty” in his life.
That I am safe.
Nevertheless, three days later he was gone.
Like they always go.
I do not doubt that he meant it. I do not doubt that he is in pain.
Maybe it’s better to stay alone. Eventually, I will be content again, like I was before.
And then I will meet another, another, another. I will be swept up, and cast down. And so it goes.
The line between being collateral beauty, and collateral damage, is blurry indeed.
Random fact about me #13846
I hate being asked if I’m OK.
Even if I am perfectly fine, the mere act of someone asking that simple little question, results in the immediate formation of a lump in my throat and the sudden, barely controllable urge to burst into tears.
I do not look forward to the day that I never feel sad, or embarrassed, or disappointed, because that is the day that I also won’t feel happiness, or excitement, or hope.
In other words, I’ll be dead.
That’s not to say that I am scared of death (although I can’t state unequivocally that I am not, either). We humans always want just that little bit more time, don’t we? To do, or say the things that we thought we should, because fear is the ultimate instigator of procrastination, and humans are tragically fearful creatures.
We think too much.
I am definitely guilty of that. I let fear stop me from doing a lot of things. I allowed it to condemn me to an entire day holed up in a sunless hotel room, deliberately avoiding the possibilities and interactions that might await me in this city that is both foreign and yet somewhat familiar. Fear has kept me sitting here, languishing in the comfort of my own isolation, not because it is enjoyable, but because it is known to me and therefore I am less wary of it.
I am conscious of this, and yet still here I sit, in silence, containing myself within boundary of my own skull, indulging a perpetual cycle of questioning my worth and weighing that against my worthiness.
Sometimes I just don’t have the strength, nor the will to argue with the more destructive voice.
Sometimes, I need to conserve my energy for another day, and a battle that I may have at least some chance of winning.
Some months, for a day or two my body feels completely alien to me. Not just my body, but my thoughts, my emotions.
A word of advice to all young hopeful, well-meaning lads out there.
At your own careless risk, do you advise a woman about her body, and what she should/should not do with it, at a time when she scarcely recognises it herself. Such advice, no matter how heartfelt upon offer, is seldom received without ferocious repercussion.
Volcanoes explode before the ash settles and silences the landscape.
If you insist on calling me out on things and telling me I must accept these “calling outs” because to do otherwise is to allow my “ego” to harm only myself; then, by the same logic you must accept it when I call YOU out.
You can sulk all you choose, but by your own logic, I am right.
So, who is more childish and egotistical:
Both, equally, of course.
Image by Danny Ngan https://www.flickr.com/photos/dn/2193764236
Shapes and shadows danced in distorted cacophony making it difficult to focus.
Although bright lights of stores trimmed with Christmas decorations and twinkling street lamps would have painted a far more joyful scene beyond the glass, the water streaking down the pane cast a sobering edge from where She sat in darkness. Deciphering exactly what lay beyond the bus was made more difficult by a grubby smear at her eye level – perhaps from a child who had occupied the seat earlier in the day – distorting her view. She fancied a child may have knelt up on the seat, rested their face and hands against the window as they peered out, absorbing every detail of the outside world in gleeful anticipation of their arrival at a destination.
It would have been sunny then. The weather had turned very rapidly this evening.
Eventually, the shifting colours and shards of light began to take shape and materialise as human forms. Young women in heels, arms laden with shopping bags, handbags, gym bags, laptops, umbrellas and more. Men striding confidently along, raising arms and umbrellas sporadically to avoid colliding with those who, finding themselves without umbrellas at an inopportune moment, were running blindly for any type of awning, regardless of size.
A trembling hand appeared in the forefront of the bustling scene, and She observed an ageing woman seated at the bus stop just outside Her window. The woman was replacing a cap on a small bottle, but her hands rattled so violently she could barely bring cap and vessel together. In one hand was an electronic cigarette. The device resembled more an elaborate pen than a modern-day smoking implement.
As She raised her eyes to rest Her gaze on the woman’s face She was surprised to discover, at second look, features much younger than expected. That’s not to say the woman was young, but rather, the stoop of her shoulders and the haggard poise of her fingers belied the youth of her face.
Or perhaps it was the other way around.
Would She prefer to have a youthful face, or a youthful body? What a strange thing to wonder.
The image of the older woman melted into a blur of shadow and shards of light as the bus pulled forward onto the road.
Perhaps, neither, She pondered. A youthful mind, is surely far more important.
“What do you want?”
Why is that such a difficult question to answer? Decisiveness, it seems, is not one of my strengths. As I get older, it becomes ever more difficult to make a clear decision and feel comfortable about it. Strange really, when I think about how I always assumed that decisions would come more easily with age and experience.
What I hadn’t counted on, was the fact that seemingly wrong choices can make you fearful to trust your own judgement. Is that my gut talking? Or my old companion, Fear? I don’t know.
People often say there is no such thing as a “wrong” choice. I would like to think that is true, and I do hope it is. But you never really know until later, do you? Until you have found comfort down the road, that you can look back and feel good about what you did to get there.
So, if you can’t know until later, then even seemingly RIGHT choices can wind up being royal clusterfucks – where is the comfort in that???
And then of course, there are the disasters that are never chosen at all, but forced upon us anyway, despite our best efforts to keep them at bay. Illness, unemployment, freak fatal theme park accidents…
And that there my friends, is just a very mild example of my escalation to catastrophic thinking.
*deep breath*
All I can do is keep going, one choice at a time, and trust that I will one day wonder “why did I waste so much energy worrying?”.
In Search of 'Serene' 