dragonflies

It’s so not me. Not my way. Not my style. I’m just not like that. It’s a stereotype for other people, not me. Anyone would tell you the same thing, I think. Stable as stone, they say. Lots of fun at parties. =)

Depression. Loneliness. Bitterness. Anger.

The four fingers I fold under my thumb: Perspective.

A fist of Frustration.

I guess it’s been a long time coming. There are hints going all the way back to that tall blonde bombshell and the emotional wreck she left behind. Not like I hadn’t felt heartbreak before then, or depression, but that was such a landslide event that it makes a vivid bookmark. For the first time I was powerless, and worse than that- anything I did just made it worse. A two-month long slide into quicksand that I can still feel clinging to me, years later.

So that ended badly. Before then- always in control, always maneuvering, full of affection and love and enjoying long relationships, and open to pain, but never, never for long. The fires, you see, burned bright. After…

After her I was rocked. Such a revelation of powerlessness can only be properly appreciated from a Hollywood perspective. The superhero turns out to be just a guy with a magic ring. A likeable guy, sure, but just a guy.

Wrap that thumb over the fingers though. Can’t lose perspective (even when I’d love nothing more). I still have to laugh. When it happened, Pat said to me my Dogma just got ran over by my Karma. He wasn’t wrong. If there’s a wheel it was overdue to come around. I’d broken a plenty fair share of hearts along the way, and I was still learning what that meant.

Girlfriends no longer overlapped. Girlfriends became pretty far between, in fact. In a way I’d turned turtle. Suddenly there was risk. If I loved, I could be hurt. In retrospect it seems like from that point on I became a lot harder to get close to, although I’m sure it didn’t happen right away. I probably started developing a library of little defenses. I was still a very flirtatious dj, and there were still plenty of interested women, but something had changed. My abandon had abandoned me.

I’ve been so very lucky in my life. I’ve had relationships with some beautiful girls, and they were pretty too. My life didn’t stop at that point, like I said. But I became more cautious. When that wheel comes around it will level you.

Realizing what you’ve done to others is something that gets trivialized in entertainment all the time. It’s a one minute revelation at the end of the show. You realize the error of your ways and live happily ever after.

What happened with her wasn’t just a heartbreaker. It’s not just that I got hurt after opening up to someone. It’s that a thunderbolt shredded me right through, and I was made to understand not merely that I could get hurt, but the torture of my indifference to some precious people in my past. How could I blithely go forward from that? How could I bounce? There would be no more bouncing, ever. I had been made to understand cost and consequence.

I spent most of the next six years single. Girlfriends, yes, but not really for longer than three months or so. I was impossible to touch and made no secret about it, and I came to realize I didn’t really want to let anyone in. After a decade of being part of various pairs, I wanted to get myself straightened out. If the bombshell had shelled me, and replacement wasn’t working, then maybe I’d better try something a little more fundamental. I went to work on me. Not like a construction project. Just being an individual. It wasn’t a particularly hard choice. Whenever I needed to feel close to someone I would go ahead and do that, as far as I was able. And about three months later it would come to an end. Not in indifference, but in futility. She would come to realize that this was a nut she wasn’t going to crack. A rebel that wasn’t going to be rescued.

Time passed and I got to know myself a lot better. I became far more sure of myself, with a much better understanding of who I was, who I wanted to be, and what the world meant to me.

A crazy thing happened. Where I used to have tempestuous sweat-soaked romance I now wanted real, loving, full-time, planning-for-the-future romance. I wanted complete reciprocity. I wanted to give as much as I was being given. I wanted to fill someone’s life with light, and be filled with it in return. The fairy tale.

But no, that’s not the crazy thing. *smirk*

It’s this: the girls just want sex. No strings, no risk, sex-based playtime. I had a girl leave me because we’d been seeing each other for a month and I hadn’t put out. Another wouldn’t consider getting serious, but was happy to tell her friend that she (her friend) just HAD to get me into bed, because that tongue had to be experienced to be believed. Somewhere along the way, I had traded emotional places with the other sex. At least I had a good reference…?

After spending years bringing myself to a point of wholeness where I could legitimately offer myself to someone, they didn’t want a fairy tale. Just a piece of tail.

Just a piece of tail. Well-meaning friends tell me to go out & get laid. I think most of them know better, and that’s not really what they mean. Sex is not the problem. There are volunteers. There are always volunteers happy to get a piece of tail. I once looked down on an ex (newly exed) because she so obviously traded sex for love, and the sinister similarity of my own motivation is not a little unnerving. The need to revel in pure physical human contact is so intoxicating as to be vampiric. And the need to trust is a flat, gray wall insurmountably high and impenetrably thick. You can pretend it’s not there, but you can never forget.

This thing right now is mostly a trust issue, I think. It’s partly unhappiness with my physical condition, which I’m working on. Partly the overwhelming desire to DO something with all this affection. But trust is the thing.

The most recent ex is the trust thing, in a nutshell, and if by my choice of words you decide I’m saying she’s nuts, then so be it, but you said it, not me.

We’re both affectionate people. We both love taking care of others. We loved taking care of each other. I relaxed my ice-cold grip on my heart and slid right into it. There I go sliding again, I can see you saying now. True. I slid. Contact. It was warm, and sweet, and safe. We took care of each other. For five months I thought I was at the beginning of forever.

Our lives changed. She enrolled in college. I worked days at the Mill and nights at the club. Time became a precious commodity. I wanted to spend at least a day or two a week with friends. As much as she liked them personally, they worried her a little, with some of their modes of entertainment. I didn’t really relate to her friends. Not for more than a couple hours at a time anyway, preferably with alcohol involved. I was 31. They were 23. Normally I don’t think about age much, but sometimes it grabs you around the throat, you know? Not that we didn’t get along, although maybe we didn’t. We had a great time at their place, but when they went out I didn’t tend to go along. Of course, part of that is because I’m shy. Also a true story. But that’s another post.

What I’m slowly getting around to is that we both lost trust. As time became an issue I think she became afraid that I was drifting, mostly because of work and time spent with friends. And when I sensed her pulling away I tried the wrong way to pull her back, by warning her that if she kept pulling away and not talking to me about it I’d just start pulling away too. How clever is that? I’d try to make myself available and cultivate situations where she could talk if she wanted to, but what she needed was for me to ask her about it. To show some investment. Some interest, I guess. She needed to be drawn out & I needed to be drawn in.

But we were both afraid of being left, of being hurt. And as a result, we left. We got hurt. I cut her off after all hope seemed lost, and that was that. Or at least it should have been.

She decided she wanted to spend some time on her own, figuring herself out. She acknowledged to herself that she had some things to work on, and she wanted to do them by herself. At least that’s what she told me. She also said she wanted very much to keep me in her life. How I was supposed to do that after having my heart broken I have no idea. But she kept calling. Once in a while. To see how I was. After a couple months we actually hung out, and of course it went entirely too well. We’re both affectionate, and we both love taking care of people and feeling loved.

But with my ages-long history and all I’ve learned, I no longer have the ability to ignore feelings like that. Or maybe it’s just that she recovered faster than me. Or maybe she was never really in as deeply as either of us thought she was. She’s not in love now, and I don’t have the omniscience to know if she ever was. Maybe she just isn’t there yet. Not like I am. Maybe I just torpedoed it myself. I don’t really expect to ever know the answers. For whatever her reasons she won’t be open with me now, and as a result I can’t be open with her. Frustrating. She wants me in her life, to call on more or less at her convenience, and somehow expects me to be fine with that.

But. Who am I to judge? That was me, at her age. Life on my terms, without risk.

I got hurt, and I’m at least partly to blame. And all that should have been over more than half a year ago. But I was in love, see. And these days that dies hard, apparently. But what’s this? The thumb, wrapped helpfully around the fist? I know we wouldn’t have worked out over the long term. Not only are we not in the same place emotionally or in maturity, but we have different needs. I need to be able to talk about books, philosophy, the mysteries of the firmament. I love debating theosophy and sociology and I love stretching my brain in new directions, whether or not I might agree at the outset. In time I just don’t think I would have been content. I’m looking forward to her leaving town. It’ll hurt, even after all that’s happened, but then it will be done, and there will be a safe distance between us. I can get on with it.

Damned opposable thumb!

Yes, I know I’ll surge out of this phase. I know I’m a good person and I know that will be recognized and valued by someone who has the ability to trust and can be trusted. I even know that if that didn’t happen I’m surrounded by people that love me, and I have a lifetime of adventure ahead of me. I know how lucky I am. I know I have almost limitless options. I can do anything.

But for now I feel, sometimes, like a different person. Somebody else’s stereotype. Like my hands are tied. Like my world is resistant to change. Like I’m supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else, sharing and loving and reveling. Maybe most people feel like that- like they were somehow planted just slightly in the wrong way. That’s not supposed to be me, though. So while I am thoroughly Me almost all the time and I’m still loving my life and most of the people in it, I still have moments that spawn posts like this. Four fingers bound, trapped, protected, shielded and chained by a thumb.

That’s it. That’s the post I’ve been wrestling with. It says way more than I ever wanted to share, and at the same time doesn’t really come close to covering it. Some people won’t be at all surprised by it, and I love them. Others will wonder why I had to go and ruin a perfectly good day with all this reality. And one or two will be surprised. I guess that’s why I wrote it, in the end.

Because I bring my own light in.