04.08.09
It’s not going away, in fact it’s all oscillation
I begin to worry that, instead of protecting myself from the vulnerability inherent in close relationships to other people, I’ve put myself more in the line of danger.
All of a sudden it seems very real. He wants to come here, to New England, to meet me. He’s moving out of the house – or, rather, they’re both moving out of the house – that he shares with her. Things moved in a way I didn’t think they would. He was supposed to be safe: he lives on another continent, he was part of a partnership. And suddenly, he’s not safe anymore and I find myself in an even more vulnerable situation than with G.
On the other hand, I do, genuinely, love him.
I really don’t know what to do. I so crave the day to day closeness of a relationship. I crave the support he already gives me in a more tangible form. He’s the last thing I think about at night and the first in the morning.
I haven’t been careful enough with myself.
12.31.08
On what he did to me, or on what I let him do
I will not get sucked into reading that woman’s blog when I have writing to get done. I will not.
In all fairness, I like C. I do. I always have since I first met her. I like her despite her inclination toward the sentimental in every instance.
What I don’t like is the reminder of how arbitrary it all is. Here she is, this other woman, who filled my shoes so quickly. I know that I am not living that life because, in part, I was not willing to make the sacrifices that she was to make it possible. But that doesn’t change the fact that the way he abandoned me when I said I couldn’t move across the country for him was cruel.
The break-up, the dumping, the subsequent replacement: none of those would have mattered if he had just thought me worth keeping in touch with.
The part that – still! – wounds me a year and a half later is that I was significant enough to date, to fuck, to invite to uproot my life, but I wasn’t significant enough to chat with every once and a while.
How could I be so stupid all the time?
This is the first image that appears when one searches on "inclined to be sentimental."
12.30.08
On longing, or at least a very specific instance of it
This is what comes up first when you do an image search on "stupid longing"
It is actually stupid to miss him this much.
Stupid.
I started dedicating a post-it note message to each individual moment of missing. They each start “I miss [First Last]” and continue from there. Initially, the group of post-its (one on top of the other) were stuck to the wall by my desk. Then they fell. Now they are leaning against a book.
I just tagged this entry “unrequited love” – so strange to actually fess up to what it is. (But, then, I also tagged it “post-it notes,” so it can’t possibly be that dire!)
Oh lord, I am stupid.
I’m not sure what I would even want to happen. I deeply suspect that I even allowed this kind of affection to begin because I am (still!) incapable of forming an actual relationship with a person. But it doesn’t mean that I read his letters any less frequently or that I feel a twinge of delight any less fully each time he writes something publicly that I know relates to me.
I miss [First Last] so much that I am writing a secret blog post about it.
12.15.08
On guilt
These days, I’ve felt guilty about most things.
I took it as a total endorsement of my own experience of life the other day when my brother scoffed “we were raised by post-Catholics, of course we’re addled with guilt.” For me the connection between our parents’ upbringing and our own seemed a little tenuous, given the fact that they both renounced – firmly – Catholicism. But this is the beauty of having siblings, they can confirm or deny your individual, subjective experience of the world.
So, to wit, I’ve felt guilty about:
- asking teachers and mentors and advisors for letters of recommendation
- asking A for advice (after all, as he points out when he’s angry or drunk) it was I who left him, not the other way around
- not having enough time to write
- not having enough time to research grad programs
- wondering whether I do enough for my employer
Guilt is awful and I feel it palpably. It stops me doing things. Ruth is quick to point out that there’s no One Right Way to do things, but whenever I indulge another way, I end up feeling quite paralyzed.
I really don’t know what to do about school. The sixty-hour work weeks I’ve been putting in make it hard to maintain friendships and research programs. I’ve compiled a list of the MFAs that offer the most funding – I need for my degree to be fully funded. I’m not in a position where taking on more debt is viable. I have no partner with whom to share expenses. I whither up and go catatonic when I live with roommates (hardly ideal circumstances from which to create). So the funding and, by extension, the time to write are the most important factors for me as I’m thinking through my options.
But I feel as though I don’t know enough about the people at these programs.
Maybe I just need another year to think about it and read everyone’s work.
12.11.08
On doing foolish things even when you realize they’re foolish
What is it about the very things I know I shouldn’t be doing that makes them so difficult to avoid?
The last almost three years now have been, for me, a slow process of ossification. When I was living with A, it was, for all intents and purposes, as marriage. I was ushered into that world in which people treat you seriously, as an adult. I was responsible with myself and others. I cared for him – I mean to say that I actually took responsibility for his well-being.
It’s hard to step away from such a life.
I told him when I left that I felt stifled, that I didn’t feel as though the relationship was allowing me to experience my identity in a genuine way.
That was only partly true. I was, in truth, petrified. I was so frightened by the prospect that this was all there was to it. I was scared that all there was to me was my mediocre ability to care for others.
A entered into another relationship almost immediately, even if he didn’t call it that. He slept with other women immediately. He did those things and I find that very difficult to forgive.
I find it even more difficult to forgive myself for falling out of significance. It’s very tricky to stake your claim in this life without another person to vouch for your significance to them. So, what I’ve been feeling lately is that lack.
I can’t date in real life. It’s far too humiliating and base. The idea of giving myself over to another relationship at this moment is so dreadful that I can feel my face flush. And yet…and yet, I miss caring for people. I miss loving another person.
I watched that film about Zizek tonight. In it, he discusses how the act of love – both the act of saying to someone “I love you” and the actual act of love – is fundamentally violent. This struck me as undeniably true. So, perhaps I long for a little violence. I suspect that I long for that at the same time as I’m repulsed by it. Pretty simple idea, really.
So, the thing I’ve done instead of engage with people in ways that could potentially result in real relationships – you know, the kind that involve personal risk and, hence, are rewarding – is to attach myself to people who are unattainable. They’re either far away or rock stars or very much older or in serious relationships.
I end up getting wounded in each of these instances, but perhaps the impetus behind it is to be less wounded than I was by A.
Up with foolishness, I say, then!
11.28.08
On disjunctions
Thanksgiving was fine. Thanksgiving was lovely. Seeing my cousin and meeting his girlfriend were both fine and lovely.
Here’s the crux of it: there is a significant disjunction between that which gives me anxiety and that which actually occurs. And I know that’s the case even as I’m responding to the stressor, whatever idea it is.
I would think that, as a poet, I would be particularly well-equipped for coping with this kind of overlapping of multiple and simultaneous perspectives.
• • •
My grandmother fell this morning.
Each time I see her, her skin looks more and more like tissue paper through which I can see her blood and corpuscles and all of those sundry things that make her physically herself.
She fell and hit her face and my aunt Karen (the unmarried only daughter of the family – the one who takes primary care of my grandmother) dropped meal preparation and brought her to the hospital. She got stitches on the bridge of her nose. It was strange looking at her today with it swollen and pressing the skin tight. My nose (the most delicate in my immediate family) comes from my grandmother and looking at hers, suddenly so different from mine, was very jarring.
She has bruises on the backs of her hands and a leg brace. It was a bad fall, but she was not on pain medication (other than that which they gave her for the stitches), so there’s a lot for which to be grateful.
But there is part of me that is seriously considering putting off my application to St. Andrews. It’s hard to consider being 3,000 miles away instead of 30.
I want to be hear for her. More than that, though, I want to be around her. Remarkable woman.
11.27.08
On holidays and feeling hackneyed
I have prided myself on not being like this.
I had always thought that it was silly – all those girls who were concerned about whether or not they’d get married, about how they’d answer up at the dinner table. I thought it was silly and beneath me.
I ought to have noted that, like most things in which I take pride, this feeling of superiority was likely to pass.
So, here I am, unable to sleep in the wee hours of Thanksgiving day, thinking I should get up and clean house, but instead creating a blog.
Typical.
So here it is, the whole boring lot.
I love Thanksgiving. I get to see my grandma Jane, who is my favorite person. I get to gather with my family and be thankful for things and think on the people we’ve lost and not worry about gifts. I get to eat ridiculous amounts of glorious, autumnal food.
But this year is different. This year my little cousin from the other side of the family – the cousin who, when he was six and his parents were getting divorced come to stay with us. That summer, he told me he was quite glad that he wasn’t a girl “since girls have to pee and poop out of the same hole.”
Remarkable. This boy is now a homeowner, and engaged to a woman who is getting a PhD in some admirable subject or other. His house is furnished with new things that he bought.
And me? I have reverted back from, essentially, the same position he occupies to be that horrible, hackneyed mess: the single woman, almost thirty, who lives in too small an apartment (furnished with her friends’ cast offs) with two cats. Oh and I weigh about two stone too much. And I have a job where my boss is incapable of recognizing any paltry accomplishment I might make.
I feel hamstrung.
I feel hamstrung and the prospect of my little successful cousin and his fiancée showing up on my doorstep to go to Thanksgiving with me is absolutely filling me with dread.
Gobble, gobble!
