Pretty sure they make no songs that say: I dated a good (but "wrong") guy for 5 years, treated him like hell, broke up with him 19 times, wanted him but didn't, wanted to be alone but couldn't. Mustered the courage again and again to walk away only to slink back when loneliness and grief consumed me. Then turned the tables on him, when he finally manned up and started dating someone else, begging at his feet to not be turned away, as he closed the door (I mean, the text?) in my tear streaked, guilty face, and went back to fucking his model, runner, freelance writer (FML), moving-on girlfriend. And the best part: he isn't a jerk. Not even a little bit. Not even at all. We didn't fight, we didn't explode apart. We faded away. If only he'd been an asshole.
How do you reconcile the pain you caused someone, and the pain that their pain caused you? What do you do with the emotional fallout and the not-metaphorical ball of hurt that you're left juggling, knowing that this is what you "wanted" so you can't even pass the blame? What happens to our pain? So we mask it, or we cope with it -- which, what does that even mean. We release it? Does running pound it into the pavement? Does journaling scribble it away? Does yoga zen it back into the universe? Does releasing our pain mean injecting indelible sadness into the atmosphere? Is it a zero-sum equation? If the pain isn't within us anymore, is it somewhere else? Energy can't be destroyed, but can it be transformed?
I've looked to everyone else for answers: friends (who want to gouge their eyes out with a spoon), family (who just want their daughter to find a nice boy and get married already), co-workers, books, therapists, religion, occasionally in fits of paranoid frenzy checking my horoscope on 7 different websites until I find one I like. I've tried to just sit quietly with my pain. I've talked about it until people have literally fallen asleep. I've laid awake for entire nights; I've slept through many days. I've gone a week without eating, and days compulsively stuffing my face in an effort to physically fill the gulf of sorrow. I don't know why I've allowed this to tear me apart. (Pretty sure it's not tearing him apart.) I don't want to find some random guy to fill this void. I want to get to the bottom of my own void and stand there, feeling the lower limit under my bare feet, and breathing in, in that place, that this is my very own, very personal experience of the charged reaches of who I am. Who I've been. How far I stretch in directions in which I want to be fully aware, and not just stumble into realizing when something else forces me there. They may be dark corners; they may be horrifying. They may be what hell is like -- when you're face-to-face with the worst about yourself. And not that there's nowhere to run, but that you don't let yourself run.
Since the canon of American pop music is failing me, I feel like the most (least.) appropriate way to wrap up this mess is with my daily horoscope, which I swear, was the first one I pulled up:
"Today, Capricorn, you'll undoubtedly ask yourself a lot of questions.
You tend to be rather introverted, and you typically need a great deal
of freedom. You're usually an energetic person, but with the current
astral energy [no idea wtf that is.] at play, you may feel lonely and doubtful of your
abilities. Take time today to analyze your commitments to others."
