Intentions
For reasons that aren’t so clear to me now, I made a point of not calling it a date. It was definitely not a date.
dailyeatings or something, yeah something
If You Ask, That’s What I’ll Say
Everybody tells me I should read this, watch that, do this, distract myself, engage others, take things in, fill up the space, but the truth is, I want to do the opposite—I want to pour, pour out words and thoughts and feelings, empty myself of this thick, sticky, viscous fluid sloshing inside me, memories that I no longer know what to do with, feelings I wasn’t ready to put away, all that I wanted to save and admire later but now have to discard.
It is difficult to be abstract or indirect here. I am at a loss as to what to do with all this, this mental stuff that I’ve accumulated, some of which I’ve grown to love, some of which I’m embarrassed to have, and some of which I’ve tried to throw away already but couldn’t find the heart to do so.
I’m an emotional packrat. I take and file things away for later contemplation, sometimes years down the line. This is where my photographic urges come from: they let me hoard and catalog experience and take in more than I would without assistance and help serve as an external repository for memories that I can recall later and process at a more relaxed pace.
They are, as all memories are, valuable to me, but these—these are particularly problematic in that I had at one point hoped that they would be the makings of a more interesting story than the brief, abortive one that actually occurred. If getting over things involves breaking and throwing things away, this will be doubly difficult: not only do I find the idea of discarding anything difficult, normally, but I find this set of memories particularly excruciating to process because I wanted to keep these, these were ones I wanted to save and smile about later down the line. Now, they’re reminders of opportunities missed and potential lost and all the things that went wrong, mixed in with of all the ways I thought things were great and all the hopes I had built on top of those thoughts.
And in many ways, that’s the worst part of it—the death of my ideas, my hopes and desires and all the things I normally don’t let myself feel, that’s what I’m sad about, more so than anything else: that if only for a moment, I genuinely believed that I had—we had—the possibility for something profound and wonderful and good.
Reflection
I wrote this a while ago, in a fit of anguish, when I thought of all the things that were wrong and all the things I hadn’t ever quite gotten around to telling her. I never did tell her this part, sadly, but nonetheless, it is the one thing I can walk away knowing for sure:
it’s shocking how the life i envy and in my heart of hearts desire is pedestrian, normal and otherwise unremarkable — i long not to make my mark in a blaze of unique glory, but rather to disappear in wave of unremarkable, commonplace, basic happiness, to fade into transparency.
-Sept 20, 2009
500 Days of Summer
For a few weeks now, my brother had been bugging me to see (500) Days of Summer. He was pretty insistent that I watch it, starting from my first big awkward talk with her, when I mentioned to him all the ways I felt confused and stupid and hurt in my relationship, and how I couldn’t ever seem to see eye to eye with her or understand her motives or feelings. “You have to watch this,” he’d tell me.
Is this going to make me want to break up with her? I asked. “No,” he assured me. “Well, maybe. Probably no, though. It’s a good movie. You should watch it.”
Later, I came to find that after seeing it, his girlfriend of two years broke up with him, rather out of the blue. He found it ironic that seeing this movie, which he had sent me as a hedge against things going south in my tentative, difficult relationship, such that I would be okay if it ended, might have have precipitated the end of his own, long-term, stable one. Suddenly, things instantly were flipped, and my problems seemed trite and stupid compared to his.
After a particularly shitty argument last night, the first truly cold day of the year, I stayed home in bed all day, feeling depressed and sorry for myself and worried at what would happen next. I watched this movie from beginning to end, and then in a burst of energy, wrote the post that immediately predates this one. Then my own relationship ended, later that night. Strangely enough, however, though I am absolutely crushed and sad and depressed and haven’t eaten or slept in a very long time, I’m not angry or bitter. Those aren’t feelings I’ve ever had for her, or about her.
And Nick was right: the movie did help. It helped a lot.
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