A Typical Wednesday Night

Someone asked me today what I would do if I could do anything.  "Write," I said.  She didn't tell me to find a way to do it, or to abandon everything else to make it work, or to squeeze it in between crackless commitments that intentionally distract me from despair.  I filled in those things.  Silently.  At the exact time as the words left my mouth and before her non-response counter-intuitively validated how I don't need anyone to validate this.

So here I am.  Writing.  About who knows what, or for who knows who, and until who knows when.  I am 2/3 of a bottle of wine in, on a weeknight, at my apartment, alone, again, as per usual, and it's almost bedtime, and the loneliness is yet again palpable and consuming.  

These are sentiments that are not acceptable from a 28-year-old progressive woman.  Be strong, be enough, be impermeable, give single feminists a good name.  I am crying because I miss him.  My soul misses him and his love for my holes.  And for what he loved of was left in the spaces where there weren't holes.  And, now that there are black holes between us warping time and space, and he is filling another woman's holes which are glaringly similar to my own, I am left with the agony of pouring sand into a riverbed.  My holes were created by a man -- although not him -- and they will be filled by one.  And in the meantime, I can pour sand into my soul, but I ache for someone to devote their presence to shovel alongside me.

Time heals, I suppose, but it also renders one more undesirable and eroded.  Life's toll is not without scarring, and as we progress, we develop more disclusionary criteria for whose weathering most closely mimics our own -- or perhaps compliments in a jigsaw sort of way.  It is defeating to saunter alone.  It's not even particularly comforting to know that others also walk a solitary path; the only comfort lies in the elusive hope that another isolate soul may sync beside you in your walk, and snug their bucket into your sandpit, and eventually enable your pouring to find a limit.  And then the pouring will transform into a pointy, pouring climbing pile, above the surface, and towards the heavens.  And it will no longer be a charge into the void, but a collaborative upward push.  Maybe all that binds us moment to moment is this fated hope.  But I want to be okay with the hole itself.  Because a hole by definition is what holds it up, and what and who holds me up is . . . everything.

It's always weirdly therapeutic to find just the right song to listen to on repeat when you're going through some kind of shit.  Like, you comb through iTunes and YouTube like a crazy person, feeling like if only someone in the history of popular music has sung about it in just the same way that you feel about it, it'll totally validate the crap out of your situation.  Plus then you can act all badass, dancing around your living room naked with a hairbrush, empowered by screaming out in all likelihood piss-poor lyrics.  But it's cool -- somebody prominent (and the American population, by default) gets you.

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."