("Since you started considering me the problem, and stopped being someone I could talk to.")
How did it get to be October anyway? It isn't that time is flying, it's more like I'm flying head first through the days. And in the mean time, the reality of my life has converted to virtual, and the digital age is our heartless/brainless/unwilling accomplice. It's been exactly 2 months now, and so far somehow we're still holding on, aren't we?
This evening my plane will land onto a journey of 2 more hours of public transport before I make it home. Meanwhile, I imagine you're standing perfectly straight, but itchy in the rented linen of a groomsman's tux. After the succinct choreography of the outdated ceremony, I hope you can now revel in being gosh-darn done with a good deed, and maybe even drink a bit in the goodly company of the sweet folks we befriended yesterday--who will be joining you even as I cannot. And all the while I'll continue the journey back to my adopted home: mercilessly far from you, but mercifully lacking in absent memories of the us we used to be, and have.
I told you while we drove together--top down, basking in my father's mustang's borrowed freedom--that if you decided that we should see other people, keeping in touch all the same, that I would be at a disadvantage. I tried with all the articulation I had in me, (whatever was willing and able to be mustered at my beckoning,) to explain to you that the difference between being jealous and not, (and I mean real jealousy here, the knee-jerk, pure bodily kind,) seems to lie in the visualization of your lover's other choice (of lovers). To you, anyone I might meet would be a stranger; for me, there'd be a damn good chance you would fall into the company of a woman I already know--or at least know of. And i know it's similar to the way that you are still living there, while I'm safe in a brand new place. How you're in proximity to the places we loved so well together, littered as they are with our own sweetly shared experience. But the other side of that sharp-ridged coin says that I will suffer the same cruel familiarity if you let yourself love someone i could see whenever i close my eyes--knowing both that she wasn't me (hard enough), but also that she was her, and still managed to take my place.
I shudder at the thought, and hope truly that your being where we once were is not a pain to you, but rather an occasional relief, in that we have christened those places you still haunt, home--in ways that are secret to anyone else--and with a warmth that my present life lacks completely. Like everything, these swords have but two opportunities (not) to sever so cleanly.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/11/09)
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"And other things..."
...like what if my brother's plane were to crash, now that I've convinced him to come? Spur of the moment, on the eve of his very first child, already loved more than I realized an unborn soul could be. What if I were the proximate cause of that tragedy? AND had to live to see what it did to our sweet grandmother, who we're all flying out to see? (The old woman doesn't even know we're on our way--she never would have asked us to come, let alone expected that we would...she probably wouldn't even have allowed it, had she known. And if we don't make it, good lord forbid!, I hope with everything in me that nobody ever tells her. How utterly ridiculous that would be!)
Then, that final little nothing, which could suddenly swallow a survivor up with its difficult, nihilistic summons: what about all of my stuff? My stupid, absurd, mountain of STUFF!? And my beautiful dog; and my reliant roommate; and my unfinished plan; and my abandoned school; and my bills & purple truck? All of it's stacked suddenly without keeper on the other side of the country, forever waiting for me to come home. Because if I don't, it all scatters--I'm the glue that brought & holds all of it together. But someone else will have to go there to collect, divvy up, discard & keep track of so many things which are utterly without meaning, without me. Without history, once their record keeper is lost. None of it's valuable (to anyone else)--and yet it would need to be "handled" by somebody. Who would take on that burden? My mother? My dad? Would i have him bury his mother and daughter--both born and dead in the same month of different years--on a whim? To God, the universe, and EVERYTHING, I ask that the answer to that last question is 'no'.
Because it's true. Besides all of these negative reasons not to crash, the positive one is simply the sweet fact that i still need to be alive. I love life, and mine entirely/especially. (Even when I'm beating my body with a pillow of exhaustion, all the live long day! :-)
I saw a woman on the train this morning, maybe my age, sitting abreast a stroller and cooing earnestly to the content baby boy slowly staring around him. (A little 'stare bear' indeed...) His mother couldn't seem to stop touching him--his cheeks here; his foot in the miniature sneaker there; adjusting and re-adjusting his sleeves, blanket, jacket, knit cap; pushing his stroller out, then rolling it back in again, unlocking and locking it in place. At one point, she leaned over to put her face right near his and kissed his nose, (startling him only slightly as he took all of it swiftly in stride,) whispering words on her breath to the effect of: "I love you more than life itself. You know that, baby? I love you so, so much..." And another little kiss to brush his cheek, unbelievably soft--as much her kiss as his skin.
And i thought of them--not dead at all, like the rest of this morbid monologue. But alive. Very much alive, and living for years and years. I projected them into the future: in ten years they'd be about 35 and 11...another ten, 45 and 21...and maybe then a new cycling life would come into play, soon thereafter. Like a child of mine one day--how I , too, would fly that child across the nation with a hardly a day's notice, were I to be sitting gently with my dad on his deathbed. So these two, mother and son, now forever a part of each other's lifetimes.
And how beautiful that is--and impossible to truly imagine, if still somehow the easiest thing to believe. The natural simplicity of such cycles, even as i artificially look at them from outside, because of course I never could be (separate).
Even here, sitting on the same plane--still awaiting take-off almost half an hour later. I am listening again to the mantra of how the 'software issues' the pilot has been having are not resolved, but will be ignored for the sake of going forward. Yet I'm not scared in the slightest--even while the children in first class scream heartily for several minutes at a time, perhaps feeling the risks everybody convinces themselves that they aren't taking. After going on & on about pummeling aircrafts bringing unthinkable tragedy, it's hard to explain why I'm not worried now...actually, I feel more like that lovely little boy: ready to take it all in stride, since there's no choice in the matter anyhow.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/9/09)
Then, that final little nothing, which could suddenly swallow a survivor up with its difficult, nihilistic summons: what about all of my stuff? My stupid, absurd, mountain of STUFF!? And my beautiful dog; and my reliant roommate; and my unfinished plan; and my abandoned school; and my bills & purple truck? All of it's stacked suddenly without keeper on the other side of the country, forever waiting for me to come home. Because if I don't, it all scatters--I'm the glue that brought & holds all of it together. But someone else will have to go there to collect, divvy up, discard & keep track of so many things which are utterly without meaning, without me. Without history, once their record keeper is lost. None of it's valuable (to anyone else)--and yet it would need to be "handled" by somebody. Who would take on that burden? My mother? My dad? Would i have him bury his mother and daughter--both born and dead in the same month of different years--on a whim? To God, the universe, and EVERYTHING, I ask that the answer to that last question is 'no'.
Because it's true. Besides all of these negative reasons not to crash, the positive one is simply the sweet fact that i still need to be alive. I love life, and mine entirely/especially. (Even when I'm beating my body with a pillow of exhaustion, all the live long day! :-)
I saw a woman on the train this morning, maybe my age, sitting abreast a stroller and cooing earnestly to the content baby boy slowly staring around him. (A little 'stare bear' indeed...) His mother couldn't seem to stop touching him--his cheeks here; his foot in the miniature sneaker there; adjusting and re-adjusting his sleeves, blanket, jacket, knit cap; pushing his stroller out, then rolling it back in again, unlocking and locking it in place. At one point, she leaned over to put her face right near his and kissed his nose, (startling him only slightly as he took all of it swiftly in stride,) whispering words on her breath to the effect of: "I love you more than life itself. You know that, baby? I love you so, so much..." And another little kiss to brush his cheek, unbelievably soft--as much her kiss as his skin.
And i thought of them--not dead at all, like the rest of this morbid monologue. But alive. Very much alive, and living for years and years. I projected them into the future: in ten years they'd be about 35 and 11...another ten, 45 and 21...and maybe then a new cycling life would come into play, soon thereafter. Like a child of mine one day--how I , too, would fly that child across the nation with a hardly a day's notice, were I to be sitting gently with my dad on his deathbed. So these two, mother and son, now forever a part of each other's lifetimes.
And how beautiful that is--and impossible to truly imagine, if still somehow the easiest thing to believe. The natural simplicity of such cycles, even as i artificially look at them from outside, because of course I never could be (separate).
Even here, sitting on the same plane--still awaiting take-off almost half an hour later. I am listening again to the mantra of how the 'software issues' the pilot has been having are not resolved, but will be ignored for the sake of going forward. Yet I'm not scared in the slightest--even while the children in first class scream heartily for several minutes at a time, perhaps feeling the risks everybody convinces themselves that they aren't taking. After going on & on about pummeling aircrafts bringing unthinkable tragedy, it's hard to explain why I'm not worried now...actually, I feel more like that lovely little boy: ready to take it all in stride, since there's no choice in the matter anyhow.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/9/09)
There are ROCKING CHAIRS in the Charlotte, NC airport!!
(White ones, in fact.) The whole sprawling thing is a shopping mall, being circled by low-flying aircraft. It's a dizzy ballet, but the Bally's around the bend will keep you fit in body if the five Starbucks will take care of your soul. (Wow, this is already sounding kinda dark...)
But I'll knock it off. I only have things to be grateful for, even if they sometimes exhaust me. See six hours ago: I'm sitting on a plane in North Carolina, waiting for my layover to come to its un-intrusive end. The floatation seat cushions are looking very much attached, and it's another reason why I hope we don't crash. But the real reasons would shame me to my core, so tiny and unnoticeable they are, (just) before departure.
I'm thinking of the reason for this trip--to see my tiny grandma sleep peacefully upon her death bed. My presence merely waiting, on the off-chance that she wakes up--maybe wants to say hullo. I worry about how horrible she'd feel if my flight doesn't make it where it's supposed to be going, but crumbles like seasoned croutons on its way over Memphis, instead. Why so pointless a thing is possible, I have no idea. But I pray I don't become the bearer of the blame for that guilt that would grow inside her--or the anger--there on the door-step of eternity where today she talks freely to God.
"And other things..." (Which I'm determined to come back to later!, but at a decent-er hour.)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/8/09)
But I'll knock it off. I only have things to be grateful for, even if they sometimes exhaust me. See six hours ago: I'm sitting on a plane in North Carolina, waiting for my layover to come to its un-intrusive end. The floatation seat cushions are looking very much attached, and it's another reason why I hope we don't crash. But the real reasons would shame me to my core, so tiny and unnoticeable they are, (just) before departure.
I'm thinking of the reason for this trip--to see my tiny grandma sleep peacefully upon her death bed. My presence merely waiting, on the off-chance that she wakes up--maybe wants to say hullo. I worry about how horrible she'd feel if my flight doesn't make it where it's supposed to be going, but crumbles like seasoned croutons on its way over Memphis, instead. Why so pointless a thing is possible, I have no idea. But I pray I don't become the bearer of the blame for that guilt that would grow inside her--or the anger--there on the door-step of eternity where today she talks freely to God.
"And other things..." (Which I'm determined to come back to later!, but at a decent-er hour.)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (10/8/09)
Remember, it's mind over matter: if you don't mind, it don't matter!!
Blue Moon reveries and the sound of unfinished business. Still, even unfinished, often content. Like now, sitting cross-legged in this striped armchair, not thinking about time.
My love shared this nice thing with me: "Time is an insult to the present, mockingly saying that over there and then is somehow better or more important than this now," -Bucky Fuller. Don't know who Bucky Fuller is, except that the name sounds likely to have fit somebody, at some point, and I'm apt to think he may have been worth talking to. Something about Rubik's cubes comes to mind...?
Well, then. Just thought I'd process here for a moment. It's been a while since I have, and in the backwards way that most things are, much has happened in the 'down time'. For starters, cuz you know I'm a lover of lists: my lovely grandma has cancer in the form of tumors all over her organs; last weekend i drove a round trip of 24 hours to see my brother for 8, in a sort of family reunion after five years of blind silence on both sides; my mother must deliberate over the question of whether or not she'd be willing to lose her uterus, to beat the wicked odds; another brother--seen more often than the other, and yet further from my heart than anyone else i love--unexpectedly gives enough of a shit to work our issues out, all of a sudden, after several years of bitterness wasted, and the unexpected joy that arises from a once more normal conversation...; my great love, sending me off but left behind in an acidic mixture of willingandunwillingness; another brother's first baby, still just barely on the way, and coming full speed ahead into a life where you're not there; new place, new people, new priorities popping up in every which way and going any direction allowed; old faces, appear and disappear in mind's or mine-own eyes; exhaustion, sometimes, and endless study-sessions, too; the aches and pains of refusing to grow any more than absolutely necessary; gratitude, whenever one can remember to feel it...
Sheesh, it always happens like that. After the list, we realize just how much we're up against (and for), and realize that just the process of naming the things, and getting them out there... It's more than enough to relieve the soul of its shiny burdens. I hope i don't sound too dry--i love everything, really-truly.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (9/19/09!)
My love shared this nice thing with me: "Time is an insult to the present, mockingly saying that over there and then is somehow better or more important than this now," -Bucky Fuller. Don't know who Bucky Fuller is, except that the name sounds likely to have fit somebody, at some point, and I'm apt to think he may have been worth talking to. Something about Rubik's cubes comes to mind...?
Well, then. Just thought I'd process here for a moment. It's been a while since I have, and in the backwards way that most things are, much has happened in the 'down time'. For starters, cuz you know I'm a lover of lists: my lovely grandma has cancer in the form of tumors all over her organs; last weekend i drove a round trip of 24 hours to see my brother for 8, in a sort of family reunion after five years of blind silence on both sides; my mother must deliberate over the question of whether or not she'd be willing to lose her uterus, to beat the wicked odds; another brother--seen more often than the other, and yet further from my heart than anyone else i love--unexpectedly gives enough of a shit to work our issues out, all of a sudden, after several years of bitterness wasted, and the unexpected joy that arises from a once more normal conversation...; my great love, sending me off but left behind in an acidic mixture of willingandunwillingness; another brother's first baby, still just barely on the way, and coming full speed ahead into a life where you're not there; new place, new people, new priorities popping up in every which way and going any direction allowed; old faces, appear and disappear in mind's or mine-own eyes; exhaustion, sometimes, and endless study-sessions, too; the aches and pains of refusing to grow any more than absolutely necessary; gratitude, whenever one can remember to feel it...
Sheesh, it always happens like that. After the list, we realize just how much we're up against (and for), and realize that just the process of naming the things, and getting them out there... It's more than enough to relieve the soul of its shiny burdens. I hope i don't sound too dry--i love everything, really-truly.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (9/19/09!)
1/19/09: The past being curiously relevant...
You do not conquer things. Not possible. You may get to know something for a while, spend your time with it, keep it near you until you think you recognize it. But when it's gone, it becomes someone else's thing to change. And it leaves you behind. Whatever you knew about it--all of it will change. Be them relationships, or simply those facts told to you in a classroom. The closest you get to keeping something static and close by is through the change you yourself embody by having known it. The only thing you get to keep--how much it has conquered you.
For my part, I appreciate being changed by things. This change attests to the effect of this thing upon me. It speaks strictly of its importance to my life, and I feel i can gauge my progress somehow in this way, by evidence of the things i have both lost and have become.
The point of my entire delusion of existence is again unclear, evading me. I feel myself as a vague presence in the world. When I sit still, I feel my loose clothes flutter around me, moved by an air or another human being. When i move, I sense the world around me moving too, sometimes with me, and yet sometimes against. I feel a certain agitation has been abating for quite some time, so that I'm no longer moved to make arbitrary adjustments in a violent right of way; a screaming light winning out behind my eyes, now no longer overpowers the glow of either night or day.
I find myself taking ridiculous risks. Feeling uneasy about them, as uncomfortable as a freezing stone wall--lost from sunlight and pummeled eternally now by icy waves. Still, i choose to step into their uncertainty with enough regularity to worry the people around me. Or rather, the ones that seem to love me. These risks are small but many. Taking them feels wrong and natural, and so far I'd say they've yet to get the better of me.
I'm always spilling things on myself, so I suppose I still presume the existence of 'self', 'things' (outside of the presumed 'self'), and the possibility even of all my fuck-ups. I still like to close my eyes tightly and intentionally focus on the blindness, to the soundtrack of the world unabated/unrelaxed/not on pause. I still want things that I do not really want at all, as though bodily desires, or even those of the soul, operate on a separate sphere than the faithful demands of myself named 'self'. But to derive a point from any of this? To find a center? Summarize my sum of all desires into a project worth a lifetime? I don't possess this degree of ingenuity! I don't even know where to begin...
Listen: Rock-climbing, and the way my forearms look afterward. Barefoot feelings in the instance of carpet, versus the shock of concrete. Eyes that look my way or away from me, with specificity. Eyes that peek, and glance, and give and plan and take apart or put back together again. Hands that hug strongly, seen pressing solid against an envied back. The name of those hands; being blank but not empty, you're sure. Making lists--how we're doing--and how doing so fills your mouth full with the words your hand is writing. Thoughts of "travel", false as that cornered plant, but places other than your own made so vibrant in your memories, so much more real sometimes than here, or there. But you hope not--you even fear it. And how by now, your frantic handwriting shows it all....
How shut down you manage to feel sometimes, even by the absence of a blank page, or the present imminence of a blanker stare. How utterly entranced and loving you become by the music making your day come alive. How crazy you really, really are. To fall head over heels for a well-built chair, means that eye contact with said chair must needs become forbidden. And so the concept of "forbidden", too, is real, and taken seriously.
How you subscribe to such ideas (with profound loyalty). You vest in them, bet your life sometimes, unwittingly. And still you stay reluctant to admit your life to be something possible to wager on, likely to be bartered at all. Ah, the things we think we believe!, and more particularly do not--how they have nothing to do with the things we're acting upon. Everyday! Accidentally, almost, and letting the wind decide. We fancy ourselves to be free, after all, and freely led. And frank with life, but even so, riddled with these moments of anti-life.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (8/28/09)
For my part, I appreciate being changed by things. This change attests to the effect of this thing upon me. It speaks strictly of its importance to my life, and I feel i can gauge my progress somehow in this way, by evidence of the things i have both lost and have become.
The point of my entire delusion of existence is again unclear, evading me. I feel myself as a vague presence in the world. When I sit still, I feel my loose clothes flutter around me, moved by an air or another human being. When i move, I sense the world around me moving too, sometimes with me, and yet sometimes against. I feel a certain agitation has been abating for quite some time, so that I'm no longer moved to make arbitrary adjustments in a violent right of way; a screaming light winning out behind my eyes, now no longer overpowers the glow of either night or day.
I find myself taking ridiculous risks. Feeling uneasy about them, as uncomfortable as a freezing stone wall--lost from sunlight and pummeled eternally now by icy waves. Still, i choose to step into their uncertainty with enough regularity to worry the people around me. Or rather, the ones that seem to love me. These risks are small but many. Taking them feels wrong and natural, and so far I'd say they've yet to get the better of me.
I'm always spilling things on myself, so I suppose I still presume the existence of 'self', 'things' (outside of the presumed 'self'), and the possibility even of all my fuck-ups. I still like to close my eyes tightly and intentionally focus on the blindness, to the soundtrack of the world unabated/unrelaxed/not on pause. I still want things that I do not really want at all, as though bodily desires, or even those of the soul, operate on a separate sphere than the faithful demands of myself named 'self'. But to derive a point from any of this? To find a center? Summarize my sum of all desires into a project worth a lifetime? I don't possess this degree of ingenuity! I don't even know where to begin...
Listen: Rock-climbing, and the way my forearms look afterward. Barefoot feelings in the instance of carpet, versus the shock of concrete. Eyes that look my way or away from me, with specificity. Eyes that peek, and glance, and give and plan and take apart or put back together again. Hands that hug strongly, seen pressing solid against an envied back. The name of those hands; being blank but not empty, you're sure. Making lists--how we're doing--and how doing so fills your mouth full with the words your hand is writing. Thoughts of "travel", false as that cornered plant, but places other than your own made so vibrant in your memories, so much more real sometimes than here, or there. But you hope not--you even fear it. And how by now, your frantic handwriting shows it all....
How shut down you manage to feel sometimes, even by the absence of a blank page, or the present imminence of a blanker stare. How utterly entranced and loving you become by the music making your day come alive. How crazy you really, really are. To fall head over heels for a well-built chair, means that eye contact with said chair must needs become forbidden. And so the concept of "forbidden", too, is real, and taken seriously.
How you subscribe to such ideas (with profound loyalty). You vest in them, bet your life sometimes, unwittingly. And still you stay reluctant to admit your life to be something possible to wager on, likely to be bartered at all. Ah, the things we think we believe!, and more particularly do not--how they have nothing to do with the things we're acting upon. Everyday! Accidentally, almost, and letting the wind decide. We fancy ourselves to be free, after all, and freely led. And frank with life, but even so, riddled with these moments of anti-life.
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (8/28/09)
...
Iron bar skims softly down my bare foot. Skin keeps imprint of its presence one moment at a time. Sesame seeds dot barren along the fake stained burgundy of table-top red. False plant in the corner, too scarred to turn back now.
(Oh, god, this is hard! How I wish I knew where I was going with any of this... But a story takes so much more of myself away with it then maybe I have to spare.)
(Oh, god, this is hard! How I wish I knew where I was going with any of this... But a story takes so much more of myself away with it then maybe I have to spare.)
Shit, man! My life has just taken a nice complete U-turn--
So Jesus Christ. Seriously. And here I am sitting in a Motel 6 in Salem, MA, wondering where the last two months went, and how the hell I managed to get here without really recording a mere minute of the endless time it took. Tomorrow I officially move into my new surrogate home in the Bronx, and I'm feeling rather out of body about the whole-crazy-hidden Truth of it all. And what else? The Law School of it. And the Absent Family Life of it. And the Abandoned Lover of it. And yes, the godforsaken invisible circus where the time already is counting down to the countdown--since really nothing has yet begun.
In the mean time (always), the Road Trippin' it from the West Coast to the East Coast and then some has seen its share of good and lesser wakeful days. Cuz shit, see where the game of association shall take us?: Taos and Dixon and Prescott and pool and The Rio (un)Grande and not NiagaraFallsGrandCanyonRockyMountains and Louisiana banjos and Wagon Wheel and hot springs and Colorado Springs and BIG CITIES and Syracuse and small cities and Omaha and carcarcar with dogdogdog and Sierra and meeting-the-mother-for-the-first-time and not Boston and gas stations and their coffee but not their food and 'jesuschristo we're tired!'s and feeling like you could go all fucking night long and the somehow stopping anyways...
And anyway, it could've gone on much longer, and in fact actually did. But as for my memory, only the bits and pieces of it serve as balm to the massive black absences of the rest, and I'm not sure if that's good enough yet. But hey, i haven't an alternative either. So that yes, in-the-mean-time i suppose I'll just have to allow in the content of all of it, even before I've earned the wisdom which bespeaks of its form with any sense of clarity. Until then, I guess I'd better go get whatever-it-is i can get, eh?
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (8/19/09!)
In the mean time (always), the Road Trippin' it from the West Coast to the East Coast and then some has seen its share of good and lesser wakeful days. Cuz shit, see where the game of association shall take us?: Taos and Dixon and Prescott and pool and The Rio (un)Grande and not NiagaraFallsGrandCanyonRockyMountains and Louisiana banjos and Wagon Wheel and hot springs and Colorado Springs and BIG CITIES and Syracuse and small cities and Omaha and carcarcar with dogdogdog and Sierra and meeting-the-mother-for-the-first-time and not Boston and gas stations and their coffee but not their food and 'jesuschristo we're tired!'s and feeling like you could go all fucking night long and the somehow stopping anyways...
And anyway, it could've gone on much longer, and in fact actually did. But as for my memory, only the bits and pieces of it serve as balm to the massive black absences of the rest, and I'm not sure if that's good enough yet. But hey, i haven't an alternative either. So that yes, in-the-mean-time i suppose I'll just have to allow in the content of all of it, even before I've earned the wisdom which bespeaks of its form with any sense of clarity. Until then, I guess I'd better go get whatever-it-is i can get, eh?
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (8/19/09!)
Rants...
So last night, he leaves me a message that says, "When you get here, lets spend 16 hours together, since that's how long it would have taken me to drive there and back--or rather, let's spend a couple hours since that's almost equivalent, when you get here. So that's what i was thinking, all that time I would have spent alone, let's spend it together..."
Okay, so I have some problems with this. For one (though it took me longest to think of it, for some reason), if we're gonna say it's all for the best, than let's say it because it's probably better that he's not here distracting me to no end by being around when I'm supposed to be moving. (Because of course I'd rather spend time with him than fucking move.) Or even, let's say that it's best that he's not here so that he can't stress me out when he's feeling uncomfortable in my transitioning house, or by himself dwelling and regretting the 8-hour drive up that might not have felt leisurely to him for whatever reasons. Point being: if it's hypothetically better this way, let's consider how it was in my best interests, not his--considering we're talking about my neglected birthday, here.
Secondly, the "16-hour drive" note is just a statement that says it would have taken effort to get his ass up here. Great! Effort shows by action the worth you feel something has. In this case, his making the effort to drive up here oughtta be outweighed (or even serve to value) by the occasion of my birthday party. And yes, he should have wanted to show me that the effort was worth it to him, just like he should have wanted to see me, especially on my birthday, enough to make an effort to that end.
And finally, along that same line: "16 hours together" instead?! (I'm not even gonna go into his immediate back-tracking that shrinks that number down to 2 the same minute he offers it.) Well, hell. Why couldn't we have spent that much time together either way, if he wanted to? I am going to be down there for a week, after all. Driving up for my birthday shouldn't/wouldn't have canceled out future time spent together. Frankly, the quantification is vaguely insulting--again, sounding like a quota he evidently feels he needs to meet for our relationship. Fuck that. See me if & when you want to see me. DO NOT fulfill imaginary quotas, or meet arbitrary expectations, that will make you feel like shit later either way. I do not hold on to my disappointment now, any more than I resent him for not showing up. But the only reasonable way to let go for me is by coming to peace with the fact that HE DID NOT WANT TO COME. Do not down play this. It is what it is. And yes, I have a right to be disappointed about it. But the fact that we value romantic gestures very differently (especially here and now, when I'm merely weeks from leaving California, regardless of the fact that he'll start my journey with me) is okay.
And this is how I'll make peace with my disappointment. NOT by saying it was best for him not to exert effort, or that he'll make it up to me later at his own convenience, once I make the drive all the way down to him--first to SoCal, and then to his neck of the woods in Encinitas. Because yeah, I'll do that--but no, it doesn't make up for the past, any more than it's much related to the fact that he didn't come. I'll do it because I want to see him. Because I always want to see him. And that's just the way we work.
(Besides girlfriend, don't forget that you've been thinking about it for a week and he didn't start until it was too late to take it back--or how you knew it would be that way. Sigh.)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (7/23/09)
Okay, so I have some problems with this. For one (though it took me longest to think of it, for some reason), if we're gonna say it's all for the best, than let's say it because it's probably better that he's not here distracting me to no end by being around when I'm supposed to be moving. (Because of course I'd rather spend time with him than fucking move.) Or even, let's say that it's best that he's not here so that he can't stress me out when he's feeling uncomfortable in my transitioning house, or by himself dwelling and regretting the 8-hour drive up that might not have felt leisurely to him for whatever reasons. Point being: if it's hypothetically better this way, let's consider how it was in my best interests, not his--considering we're talking about my neglected birthday, here.
Secondly, the "16-hour drive" note is just a statement that says it would have taken effort to get his ass up here. Great! Effort shows by action the worth you feel something has. In this case, his making the effort to drive up here oughtta be outweighed (or even serve to value) by the occasion of my birthday party. And yes, he should have wanted to show me that the effort was worth it to him, just like he should have wanted to see me, especially on my birthday, enough to make an effort to that end.
And finally, along that same line: "16 hours together" instead?! (I'm not even gonna go into his immediate back-tracking that shrinks that number down to 2 the same minute he offers it.) Well, hell. Why couldn't we have spent that much time together either way, if he wanted to? I am going to be down there for a week, after all. Driving up for my birthday shouldn't/wouldn't have canceled out future time spent together. Frankly, the quantification is vaguely insulting--again, sounding like a quota he evidently feels he needs to meet for our relationship. Fuck that. See me if & when you want to see me. DO NOT fulfill imaginary quotas, or meet arbitrary expectations, that will make you feel like shit later either way. I do not hold on to my disappointment now, any more than I resent him for not showing up. But the only reasonable way to let go for me is by coming to peace with the fact that HE DID NOT WANT TO COME. Do not down play this. It is what it is. And yes, I have a right to be disappointed about it. But the fact that we value romantic gestures very differently (especially here and now, when I'm merely weeks from leaving California, regardless of the fact that he'll start my journey with me) is okay.
And this is how I'll make peace with my disappointment. NOT by saying it was best for him not to exert effort, or that he'll make it up to me later at his own convenience, once I make the drive all the way down to him--first to SoCal, and then to his neck of the woods in Encinitas. Because yeah, I'll do that--but no, it doesn't make up for the past, any more than it's much related to the fact that he didn't come. I'll do it because I want to see him. Because I always want to see him. And that's just the way we work.
(Besides girlfriend, don't forget that you've been thinking about it for a week and he didn't start until it was too late to take it back--or how you knew it would be that way. Sigh.)
Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (7/23/09)
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