It’s all gone quiet. The music that set my blood on fire only stirs small eddies, now. My day-to-day is normalcy, projects and schedules and a variety of engaging tasks to distract me from the dangerous occupation of contemplation.
No, instead of the deafening screams now I’m left with whispers.
Tonight I toss and turn, knowing everything’s not quite right.
I think about my friends in San Diego, how we’ll never be as close as I need someone to be, how they’re not what I need, how trying to make them turns good friends into painful disappointments. How I need to stop and let go.
I think about Sean and all the years of silence between us, the fossilized emotions and grief. I act out a conversation in my head, trying to find the right words for reconciliation. Trying to figure out how I’d explain or what I’d explain. How I’d get past the fact that I think he’s a fucking idiot for being with the girlfriend he’s planning on marrying. How we could ever have anything like the close friendship we once played at with something like that between us.
I think about people. In the abstract, general sense. What makes people like other people or not. What makes someone a friend or an annoyance. What a person really is, what I am, how I relate to all these other people. What it is, exactly, I want from them.
It’s nice to have friends, you know, but sometimes it isn’t enough to just have people you can go to. People who will put up with your crises, people who will do stuff with you when you’re bored, people you can drag into your life if you need them.
It’s a lot, really, to have people who you can enjoy being close with. Being close to other people is hard. It’s messy. There’s just so much of them, and it gets everywhere.
But who would worry if you fell? If you changed, if you broke, if you turned into someone a little different. Who would come looking for you if the person you were disappeared behind facades and affectations?
Really, to whom does the tangle of qualia that makes you up matter? Who’s glad that someone like you actually exists, and wants to keep you as you are?
It’s a helluva thing to ask of another person. I don’t think I’ve even met many people who think that about themselves. I wonder sometimes if they’d chose to be someone else if they could, and sometimes I hear them wondering the same thing aloud.
I think about my friends.
I don’t know that Ben and Eric really think about people like that. I think they mostly see people as they relate to themselves, and not as things unto themselves. I think if you’re not in the same metaphorical room with them you don’t really exist anymore.
It’s not a bad thing, really. It’s very personal. Friends are forged through shared experiences, and enemies the same. I think it’s true to some extent for everyone. A person’s place in your life has to be important to how you think about them, but sometimes it’s not the only thing.
Sean… I used to know him much better. I know that a person’s nature matters to him, not just his experience with them, but I don’t know how much. He’s trapped in his own private hell, and I don’t know how much time he has free from his own personal demons to even think about other people. I know I’ve seen it, when he does think about them some of it gets through. But it’s a luxury, and I don’t know how much of it he can really afford these days. Maybe he’s doing better, I wouldn’t even know.
I know at least in my case, the personal nature of what’s gone between us far outweighs what he might think of me as person outside of that. Which is fair, it’s the same for me. I wouldn’t spare him a second thought if it wasn’t for all the shit we’d been through together and done to one another.
My ex is a strange one to think about, but inevitable. Once upon a time it seemed like she was the only person who saw me at all, but now… I mean, I know her crush on me was never really about me. Except now we’re friends. And I don’t really know how much of that’s about holding on to the fantasy each of us once represented to the other, and how much is out of a genuine appreciation for the other person as, you know, a person.
If I was less of a cynic I’d say that of course I’m friends with her because I care about her as a person, I’ve put everything from the past aside. It’s a big part of why we’re friends, yes, it would have to be for me to even be willing to get past all the shit in the past. But there’s always the niggling ‘what if’ worming it’s way through. So who knows for her.
…
There isn’t really a point, you know. I have to say that, before I try to force one.
It’s just what it is, as boring and ugly as that is. I’m lonely. I want to be wanted, and in just the right way. It’s empty complaining, venting. Description without leading to deeper insight.
I’d erase this, except then what’s the point? I don’t like the way it makes me look but that’s the problem, it doesn’t matter if someone likes the who they think I am if it’s just the appearance. It doesn’t matter if someone likes me because I wrote something which affected them in some way, because it’s not about me, it’s about their experience of me.
It feels good for a moment because that’s the lie, that it isn’t about that, that it’s about me, that someone knows me and sees me and likes that I am who I am. But the lie is a poison, and when you swallow it you start to think that what they see is who you are, and you rot from the inside.
So this is me, bitching pointlessly and unironically about how no one really gets me, how no one understand me, how no one really cares about me. Because apparently there’s still an angsty teenager buried in here somewhere, and he was always a bit dramatic and emo.
Loading comments...