Thursday, January 20, 2005
This post would broadly refer to two people, who i would suppose are the dearest friends i have and whom at one point or another made up huge parts of my life.
Note the past tense. Because it gets depressingly lonely when both these people are so fucking far off and far away and basically inaccessible. I was reading one of their blogs recently and it suddenly occurred to me how out of touch i was with almost every aspect of her life. She has a whole complete new life where she is and somehow i feel unceremoniously betrayed. Its not like i have a right to feel like that, of course I don’t, but that’s the closest approximation I have to describe how I feel
It’s a combination of the following: the sense that I don’t know her anymore, and more, that i don’t agree with a lot of the things she says or thinks, but I’m too distant from her life for my words to have any bearing on what she does. Also I somehow feel myself losing respect for her, which surprises me because I’ve always thought she had the sort if character i admired. And also, she sounds just so freaking happy somehow that i almost resent her for it. Not very nice, lynnette, but I do. Because pissed off as she is at her life (amd i think she has a reason to be, but not the the degree she drags it out to) she seems to have found something that i haven’t and i can’t find.
Maybe you can out it down to pure, i dunno, insane jealousy? It is inevitable that we drift apart, but at least she’s drifting towards somewhere and someone, while i am just…plain drifting.
Don’t get me wrong darling people, i’m not such a turd that i would rather rejoice in the unhappiness of my best friend than share in whatever she has that makes her happy. But the happiness of another somehow magnifies the fact that i am, well, not as happy as I would like to be.
Something Timothy said that sort of stuck to me was that in order to bring happiness to another, one has to be to a certain degree, happy as a person. Otherwise everyone involved will just get sucked down into an endless vacuum of misery and depression, with the end result being everything a relationship
isn’t supposed to be.
The second of my two friends in question…Well Phoebe and i once came up with a sort of pictorial metaphor for how we functioned. Imagine a guy drowning in quicksand hanging onto a bunch of helium balloons. He’s the only thing that’s keeping them balloons from drifting off into space; the balloons are the only things that keep him from going down completely. And this is the sort of knife edge we balance on; the miracle of balance is followed on its heels by the ever present threat of collapse. And I feel it falling apart, somehow.
And right now it feels like everything that’s anchoring me in place just isn’t, and i’m not quite sure what to do with this hollow shadow of myself. I’ve always needed to have someone around to keep me sane. Not necessarily a lot of people, in fact more often than not its just an individual. or two. But right now I’m faced with the horrifying prospect of having
absolutely no one , or rather, as Anne Frank describes, the horror of ” not being the one and only to anyone .”
and I never felt alone until I met you sang third eye blind, and truly, what is worse? To be so constantly alone that you cease to notice that you are lonely? Or to have loneliness spring at you like a ghost in the dark, and finding that you are not sufficiently equipped to deal with it?
My reaction to all this has been to turn icy and cold towards the people who matter the most. I think, sub consciously, it’s a reaction designed to provoke in them the same sort of pain that’s scratching at me from within. It’s a lousy way to respond and no one will gain anything, that’s for certain. But I can’t help myself because it just fucking hurts so much i can’t get past that and into rational thought.
It’s difficult right now to recognize myself in the girl who can’t get through a day without hiding herself in a room, wracked with sobs. Sometimes in the middle of the day I get waves of hopelessness so scary I have to run somewhere where I won’t have to face anyone. The thing is that most of the time I’m perfectly alright, as in, I don’t even feel like anything’s wrong. But when these dark moods descend on me I’m just not capable of dragging myself out.
I don’t know what my fucking problem is.
Or rather, I think I do, but when there isn’t a foreseeable way of resolving it, its just as well that I don’t.
0 comments
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Back from Perth at long last and maybe now I’ll get down to life as we know it
I love the zillions of second hand book and CD shops there, I love the people and their friendliness and easy smiles, and i think all in all it was a pretty good trip. Its easy to be happy, somehow, in Australia. Or at least that’s what the deluded, biased sheep looking over the other side of the fence in me thinks at the moment.
I got two really old, vintage-ish Indigo Girls albums. They’re black and white, old, and almost impossible to get here. Also a lot of books, my particular favourite being a sort of first or second leather bound edition of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, gotten cheap and second hand at Elizabeth’s. And Aussie shops have fun names
1) A Fez of the Heart: Shop selling Turkish things
2) Cellar-brations :Wine shop, what else?
3) Holey Sheet!: Linen place or something
4) The Pickled Fairy. This just sells fairy-ish mystical things, but i thought the idea of a pickled fairy was pretty funny.
Parents as usual got up to their little nonsensical and supremely annoying little games. I am too tired to oblige either one of them and I have learnt that when they’re in the “lets psycho our daughter to take our side” mode the best thing to do is to be as non-commital and nonchalant in my answers as possible. I respect my parents and they’re both really strong, talented people, but they’re hopeless at dealing with one another. Gah. I won’t quote jamie, I’m not going to say that I’m bringing them up instead of the other wat round, but I do wish they’d handle their already screwed up, dysfunctional relationship in a more, well,
normal way.
Im glad to be back though, despite the relative niceness of the trip. Have stuff to look forward to – Particularly the fact that I’ll be turning 19 in something like 3 days (woohoo!) Cass and the girls have major plans to what they call “corrupt my mind”. And friends to meet, and salsa lessons, and my soupspoon job, commencing, this time for real, on the 24th. So at least I wont be working on my birthday, though more cynical beings tell me its because they want to keep me as their slave all through Chinese new year.
I entered the new year with the sense that there is some sort of happiness waiting for me round the corner, only I don’t know what exactly. I can’t help being optimistic, despite everything else that’s happened that i don’t want to talk about on my blog. Still there are things i wish would happen, certain ideal situations that i wsh would work out, but i’m not crossing my fingers. Old adage goes If you don’t have any expectations, you don’t get disappointed, and I guess that it a sensible thing for me to bear in mind. Still, there’s a sense of missing-ness, the strange suspicion that there’s something
more that has somehow fallen completely beyond my reach.
What it is, i really do not know. I’m confusing even myself now. I wonder if its possible to be happy and sad both at the same time. Because that’s how I feel now. And i don’t know why.
0 comments
