No worries

He said 'I didn't realize the absolute edges of the problems there.'  I replied, 'no worries.'  I resisted saying, 'of course you didn't, you never have.'  I didn't say 'you've been diminishing my problems for years.'  I did not want to be cruel or petty.  Those are the kind of investments you make in people you really love or really hate.  I don't want him to be either.

True Lies

It is 11 on a Sunday morning. I need to go to the grocery store, to run other errands.  When my dog was alive I would think, if only I didn't have to take care of you first, I could just throw on some clothes and jet out.  I had this parallel universe narrative worked out in my head of what things would be possible if someone else could handle the chore of her.  With her gone, I am exposed.  She wasn't keeping me from getting to work super early, from jumping out of bed and going to the gym, from coming home from work and going out to dinner, she wasn't keeping me from anything.  We had been together so long, I had forgotten what my life was like before her.  That what she required was so insignificant compared to what she gave just by being her.  I have returned to my life before her.  It isn't great.  It is hollow and selfish, and there is no hand at my back urging me forward.  No one at home who needs me, who forces me to pour some of my energy into something of worth instead of staying at work getting fatter and grayer, liking humankind and myself a little less each and every day.  Seeing her healthy, happy, made me feel good about myself.  That I created conditions in which she was enjoying her existence.  Yes, there was hair everywhere, and water spots from her sloppy water drinking, and walks in terrible conditions, and planning needed to deviate from her schedule, and she liked very few other dogs so our circles were small, but she was a mirror of me.  She did not want or need to be friends with other dogs.  I believe she might have liked 5 dogs in her entire life and only 2 of them were her friends.  That's my girl.

I imagine this is how love can be with anyone.  That having to think of them in everything you do sometimes feels like fence, an obstruction, a chore.  If only I did not have to do this, I would be free to do that.  Maybe I am the only one who lies to myself like this, that has mastered the art of binding myself.  Tightly.  That focuses on external obstructions instead of mustering to overcome them.  That doesn't realize that a life without someone you love to be accountable to very easily becomes a free fall, and not the fun kind.  They were never the reason I didn't do something.  It was something I did not manage to do that I blamed my obligation to them as the reason I couldn't do it.

My last birthday with her, I had really wanted to go away, have a break from everything and everyone.  I could not find anyone to watch her and I was so so disappointed.  It was my 40th birthday, which was 'supposed' to be something milestone-y, right? It was just me sitting on lawn chairs and tv trays with my family in my bombed out house eating take out, with my dog no doubt strategically positioned for maximum obseravation of dropped food or invitations for table scraps.  Every important person in the world to me was in the room.  If that was my last birthday, nothing could have topped it.

Big in Japan

Sitting on an air mattress that I swear they wouldn't let a prisoner in the U.S. sleep on, in a house where my voice echoes because it is practically empty, I still look pretty damn good on paper, which is sad, and kind of an insult to paper.  There is some threshold between a complete lack of gratitude for what one has, and enough dissatisfaction with the same to force change, that I have been teeter-tottering with for as long as I can remember.  From time to time I indulge and look at pictures, read cards, emails, look at the various official (and usually wooden) pro-forma official expressions of gratitude and I think, damn, you're welcome America.  I also think, hey, maybe that's enough, you've done enough.

I haven't been capable to date of achieving any semblance of balance and the older I get, the more demanding the work role has become and the more diminished my life outside of that has become.  I was never a big people fan but until now, that was mostly a social thing.  I am almost never going to show up at an optional group gathering over 5 people.  That has never been my jam and I don't see that changing.  Now however, it isn't social, I sincerely don't like most people anymore.  There are people in my life that I think, 'if we were dating, we would have broken up long before now.  Why do we insist on forcing this?'  I find myself thinking in a way I never thought I would which is to keep contact warm in case I need them for something but otherwise let the distance that is already there just settle without insisting too much.  I find myself realizing how little of my life they were actually a part of.  I see myself as the one plugging into their lives, they did not plug into mine or really know much about it.  I want new friends.  I don't think I will find them but I hope to at least build a better circle.  People with whom I actually have intersecting interests instead of a series of lovely people that I essentially explain myself to constantly, who think I am missing something, and that they know what I am missing (a man, a hobby, a god, a workout...).  I am missing nothing.  I am doing the same thing you are doing, making it up as I go along, feeling self-satisfied and smug when I think I've figured something out, and wrestling with it all while looking like I've got my shit together on paper.  

I'm Good

I really am.  I don't know who to credit for the above but I do know how it resonates with me.  It means don't invite me to the christening of your children or their birthday parties, don't tell me to call you if I need help moving heavy things, don't put yourself on the hook for heroics at all.  Just be the valued aquaintance you are.  If you insist on having a label that doesn't fit our relationship, we won't have any relationship to label because I can't take the strain of having obligations to people that I don't even know that well and who I don't feel get me on any level.  If these relationships were marriages, we would have long parted ways, amicably. I don't hate you or even dislike you but sincerely, we're taking up space in eachother's lives that could be filled with something more meaninful for us both.  We go more than weeks, we go months, and it's fine.  Our lives and interests don't naturally intersect.  So let's go a couple more weeks, a few more months, and see if it isn't just fine not having that obligation to check in; to ask questions like a reporter, to get invested in whatever is the current event so you have something to reference a few months from now when we talk again.  Let's let it slip to Christmas and sometimes birthdays (when we remember).  1-2 times a year; nothing in betewen, staying in a hotel when in the same town, seeing you for dinner, hiting the highlights.  Always so lovely to see you.

Is Wayne Brady going to have to have a baby?

Crap.  I did not see this coming.  I am hopeful it is just a confluence of ovulation, bleach fumes, and Facebook-itis (when you think everyone's Facebook life is both real, and better than yours).  That she had a baby isn't a surprise.  I knew she was pregnant, knew when she was due, even knew that she had the baby.  She isn't the first of my friends to have a baby, either.  Still, when I got the email, I felt...I don't know.    It's a little like I'm rooting against her happiness, against further, tighter bonds with her husband.  I am still struggling to reconcile how her being with him challenges what I think I understand about who she is.  

There is a more significant component to this though.  That email, introducing the product of their union reminds me of our plan.  That we would go to Vegas when we were 40, find some sturdy young men, hopefully get pregnant, and raise our children together on our commune in Colorado.  She just turned 41, and I just turned 40.  She's in Colorado.  

I'm incredulous, sincerely, that I feel anything at all akin to sadness, jealousy, envy, wistfulness, whatever this is.  I have never felt this way before about anyone's joy.  I've even thought it odd that I don't envy anyone's life, because so many people act as if I should.  That I should want what they have, or want what they think I need.  But I haven't.  I still don't envy or want her life, but I am surprisingly emotional about her having a child.  I may have really wanted that silly notional Vegas plan, or at least the part that saw me not waiting for or needing to be part of a couple to be a mom, but still having someone to do it with.  I read her email and thought, oh crap, is this where and when I stop being ambivalent about having a baby?  I suppose there is no such thing as good timing for something as life altering as reconsidering having a child, but with the year this has been, I will consider nothing that life-altering seriously.  More than anything I'm reeling that her standard, 'hey everyone, we had a baby' email rocked my world like it did.  I do still smell bleach in my nostrils, so it is possible I just need to crack a window and my brain will recover.  Worth a try.

That's when they lost me

When she said they loved me.  I had to bite my tongue.  Love me?  You don't even know me.  And please don't refer to me as "Auntie" to your children.  It is offensive to their actual aunt(s) and to me, being patronized with a familial title.  We know so little of one another, there is no way I am a close friend.  I have never had anything beyond a table top philisophical discussion with you.  It is easy to confuse shared confidences with friendship.  A similar thing happens with sex all the time (being intimate versus intimacy).  Don't get me wrong, I think you are lovely, but it is offensive and insulting to me when you say you love me and I have no evidence of that in my life.  I sincerely do not resent that you do not actually love me, really I don't, though I am clearly angry writing this.  I resent the hollowness of the sentiment of love expressed by you.  It does not match up with what we are to one another and I do not like that word flung around, especially in times of despair, like it means something between us.  I talked to a near stranger because I knew I could not count on you to respond to an email--that radio silence, though it might have been benign and filled with intention to respond, did not erase my need for a safe space to vent.  And that is why I get so angry when again my life is around my ears, I am now in the same time zone and within driving distance and I might as well be across the ocean.  I expected more from you because you insisted we are more.  I will now treat our relationship how it is in practice which means I will see you when I see you.  I will not extend myself to be a part of your life as I did in the past, responding to your sentiment and ignoring your inaction.  I do not consider us enough to even invest in this discussion with you.  I would rather it be a benign extraction that naturally works itself out over time until we are down to 2-3 times a year greeting.  I welcome that.  I look forward to no longer having to endure your sentiment absent of action without alternatives.  I will have genuine friends and I will be one as well.  One day...