Oh hey. I was thinking about the way I’m living to love, inter-depend, connect honestly, and be real with people. I want to help form pockets of happiness, to help heal broken hearts and make better ways of relating, with results that reverberate out.
Then people are irresponsible, cruel, disrespectful, selfish, totally into appearances, and waste a lot of my energy with their fuckery. So then I’m like, wow–if I’m living for intimacy and care with other humans, why am I doing that? What a waste of time. People are shits!
It reminds me of the WH Auden quote: “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.” Or the idea that takers will never stop taking. So if you’re a giver, you better know your limits, because the takers don’t have any.
It makes me say, oh, that’s why smart people would rather help cats, or collect yarn and crochet a bunch of blankets. Or play with radio, or watch netflix or whatever. Genuine relating is a sham.
Even abortion–seems so stupid to me, that people would care for fetuses more than fully grown, adult, undeniable people. Well, fetuses can’t talk. Babies haven’t done anything wrong yet. People are flawed, complicated, and have done lots of good and lots of bad. Loving actual people is much harder. Fetuses are like ideas and not messy yet.
trust
The last man I really loved, I wrote a note to him and sent it with something I mailed to him. It said, “Thank you for helping me learn how to trust people again.”
When I remember that, I feel like jumping into a roadside ditch and turning into a fish of sadness. Or jumping into the sky and exploding into the darkness like a red firework made of no.
My feeling today is to hide, give up, and vanish into a darkness closet, closing the door behind me like a winking eye.
done
I give up every so often. Then after a night of rest, I can feel better and like I can do it again. Tonight my heart is made of fuck you. I feel so done, I’m like a dun cow.
I was very stupid to trust him. Mostly the flowers–I remember my giddy joy, when they arrived, soaked in meaning. The flowers would not lie–they told me he really loved me. The orange of the lilies–the deep red of the roses, the dark green vibrant leaves. I thought the flowers could only speak the truth, honest symbols my sweet friend bravely sent.
I was proud of him for being vulnerable enough to send them. Now I see how misplaced that was. He could spend fifty bucks or whatever it cost to send those flowers, and write two sentences of the note. But I spent a year of my life adoring him, overflowing with white-yellow light that shone for his well-being.
loss
I wish I had been proud not of him for buying something, but proud of myself, to love, feel, really be there for him, offer, share, and consider his happiness every day. Proud of myself for honestly doing communication and relationship, showing up when I said I would, and giving him my all.
Then proud of myself to see what was really happening and make a path to escape from the harm thicket I was stuck in.
Every love is new, and every loss is new. I wish I could follow a standard way, but my heart always does something weird. It must be confusing to people who think a greeting card should suffice for important moments of life. Anything not part of the standard narrative disappears because it’s illegible, so it doesn’t matter. Erased from the margins.
I’m illegible, so I don’t matter. The way he first looked at me, in that breakout room–I thought he was genuinely curious about me. That was an experiment. I got charmed, thinking I could matter to him.
criticized
He criticized me, at the end, for fantasizing about him. But his heart was a mystery to me–I could have mattered nothing to him or everything. I had no access to that information; I was going on so little.
My overactive mind couldn’t help but connect dots that we were wrong to connect. I didn’t mean to form unauthorized constellations, but what was I supposed to do, with colorful sharpies and all those stars?
In a way it was a misunderstanding and a waste of time. But maybe to love is often a waste of time. I try to explain what I learn, but that’s not very legible either. So I throw it into the sky and hope it sticks, become part of the sky library.
