Some Days

 La Bourrasque (The Gale) by Lucien Levy-Dhurme

It's creeping up
crawling up inside of me
ballooning disappointment.
I am closing my eyes and clenching my fists
I am hoping
he will answer
that I've not lost him.
What have I done?
My carnivorous longing
spilling out
destroying.

Legs shaky and heavy as I swing them over the side of the bed and make the trek to the downstairs bathroom of my parent’s home. My back aches, a persistent dull thrumming and there’s the ever present invisible corset around my torso. My body is racked with pain on a daily basis. I say that it’s the supposed arthritis but this is not something I actually believe. What I believe is that I have slowly been turning to stone in an effort to keep myself together. 

My hearing is so sensitive today, the first sign of a bad mood. The voices of co-workers sound much louder than they should. I want to tell them to shush (shut the fuck up). Here I am waiting for yet another, different man to answer my outreach - to connect to me. The cycle to which I am fiercely addicted goes like this: I see a glimmer or shadow, experience some ephemeral whisper of what I want and chase it to the ends of the earth. As the feeling of rejection grows and days go by, a fog descends upon me. I am weighted by the knowing, "He doesn't want me. I am not loved nor appreciated. I am no one.” Like forgetting your cast iron skillet on the open flame and your whole hand gripping tightly before you can pull away, burning. All over someone who I don't even actually know, someone I connected with temporarily; someone whose story I took bits and pieces of, filled in the missing parts and am now holding tightly against my chest.

I was beginning to curl around the imaginary comfort of someone I spent less than 24 hours with. He was visiting America for one week. I liked his accent and enjoyed how I could make him giggle. My friend later told me he’s been going through a rough break up. I am a dot on his life spectrum and yet I want him to feel moved by our connection, to want to keep it solid and whole. I hunger and yearn, like a toddler I am inconsolable, reckless in my desire, throwing myself around. Even when I met him, I could not stop myself from forcing the resolution of that tension. My little caged beast needed soothing before it erupted.  

I want to be healed. I want to be healthy. What was a fun and friendly hook up has resulted in the awakening of my wound. Modern dating, and dating in general, is so fucked. Hook up culture is good for no one. You want intimacy? Have sex. This is our mistaken equation. It ignores everything about who we truly are. We are forced to become caricatures of ourselves. How good are you at presenting the best side of yourself?  I remember watching an episode of Maury in my pre-teens one summer break. A man was being introduced as wanting a woman with no baggage – I swear to God this was the description under his name. I remember thinking he wasn’t handsome. At the time, I wasn’t clear on what constituted baggage and also somehow aware that I was on the precipice of having a shit ton of it. Years later, when the word baggage was understood, but I hadn’t yet encountered my own - I thought he was mean in an objective way. Now, after having rolled around in suitcase, after suitcase, after suitcase, I will randomly recall this stranger from The Maury Show, and whisper, “Asshole” to no one at all.

 My therapist tells me that my top need is really two amalgamated into one. I need love and connection as much as I need to feel significant. I cannot have one without the other. Make me feel special by showing me love and connection. I will feel loved and connected if you make me feel special. I want intimacy with every fiber of my being and I feel surrounded by so many, so terrified of it. I have never, not one time succeeded in ‘playing it cool’. I never even understood what the fuck that was. I have forever misunderstood and resented the framework of what makes someone desirable. It always felt like: “Don’t be yourself and everything will work out. Act cool. Act like you don’t care.” I do care. I’m not cool.

Things have been pretty good lately, though, and I don't want to go down this self-lacerating, hateful, dark and lonely road today. For years I have fought against the current of grief and anger. Some days, like today, it is so strong and I find myself caught up, being pulled under. I have good days though, consecutive ones even, sometimes even weeks. I wallowed in self-pity for a long time, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I like this?” Not until years later, Election night 2008, drunkenly sobbing in the passenger seat of my brother’s Volvo as he shouted, “WHAT HAPPENED?” did I begin to see.

Imagine you are a big, beautiful planet. Layer upon layer, whole oceans and land masses, volcanoes and cracked tectonic plates. You are accustomed to being frozen, to thawing out, to raging fires. You take these things in stride, you never stop turning or making your trip around the sun, not even when its light burns as you get too close. And then, in a sudden but not unexpected event, the whole of your being implodes.

Do you see how slowly your pieces and particles float away, how long it takes to come apart?

 Can you feel yourself separating?

There is no more center of gravity.

There is the only the vacuum where your heart once was.

Try and fill it.