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garoteDear madam.
I saw you on the subway today, as I was heading home from a dinner out. You were staring at a notebook page filled with a block of dense writing, and industriously adding to the bottom of it. You were wearing an odd hat.
I instinctively knew it would be a bad idea to walk up to you and say hello, because of two things. I had no idea how you would react, and, I had no idea how I would react.
Nevertheless the potentiality of the encounter sent my heart rate lurching up into the ceiling. My throat twisted up like a handmade cigarette. I felt faint, and grew a bit of tunnel-vision. My walking became feeble, and I only barely made it into the train car once the doors opened. Why here and now, the night before a big job interview? I guess it had to happen eventually. It's been about a year and a half since the last spotting. (Back then it was Halloween and you emerged from the subway wearing a giant fake spider on your bike helmet, and we both pretended not to see each other.) I guess that's a pretty good record for living in the same city and using the same major transport system. I have definitely worried that it would happen again since the first time, and now it has.
Now I'm at home. I've just finished singing my guts out to some loud music by Bjork, with my head right next to the speaker. Practicing for a karaoke session on Thursday. I've had time to think about exactly what I would say if I spoke to you, and what my feelings are now. It's very difficult because you are a strange combination of intimate familiar and complete stranger, especially after this long silent period, and my feelings are still very contradictory. Likely you will never read this. That's probably best.
I've thought of you, of course, but nowadays it's only been when the subject of my past comes up organically in conversation, or when I'm going through a rough social period in my current life and end up reliving the experiences that led me here, in a kind of post-traumatic fugue. You are in some respects "the one that got away". You occupy that sort of place in my mind. It's aggravating for me to have that space occupied. It has been vacant since the late 90's when I had a ridiculous unrequited crush on my peer advisor at UCSC that haunted me for a year until I fell in love with someone else. Having that place occupied is not pleasant. It's deeply uncomfortable, like having an object rolling around in your lung that stabs if you breathe deeply. I do not want you there; yet there you sit.
And that's the funny thing ... I have actually experienced the joy of falling in love with someone else, since I met you. That relationship had its ups and downs but it is largely responsible for prying me out of the emotionally destitute state I was in a few years ago. I am now in a far, far better place than I was. But even here, apparently I am still vulnerable to the hornets' nest of emotions that seeing you in the flesh has summoned within me today. How can this still happen?
I should have known better than to go strolling around that particular subway platform anyway. Had I grown complacent by forgetting? I was looking at people to amuse myself, instead of just listening to my "60-second science" podcast. (It was a very interesting one about working memory and attention span, actually.) My eyes passed across the shape of each person on the benches, comparing one with another, like a casual walk through an art gallery. Then the sudden and complete surge of recognition turned all the blood in my chest to acid. My steps faltered, then caught up again, as I realized I had to carry myself past your line of sight as soon I could, since the thought of accidentally catching you in mutual recognition, let alone conversation, promised an emotional meltdown worse than I was already undergoing. This was not a lovely hearts-and-flowers sort of meltdown, but the frightening, vertiginous "oh no; what's happening to me?" kind. I had to steady myself against a steel pillar, and then I realized that when your train arrived you would stand up and probably look around as you boarded, so I bailed to the other side of the platform to wait for my train out of sight.
This is really ridiculous. You are one woman out of an infinity. Before - and after - our brief relationship I have met women who were, at least on paper, just as compelling as you were, though obviously individuals in their own right. And yet: This physiological murdering was triggered only by you. Why?
Two short phrases that come to mind, as I grapple with expressing it: Unfinished business ... and ... wasted potential.
But those aren't right. I have wasted the potential of plenty of relationships - potential friends and potential romantic partners alike - and just moved to the next opportunity. They've sailed out of my head and I've let them go. Sometimes by neglect, sometimes by a deliberate desire to be free. Why should you be different?
And unfinished business ... what is unfinished? It's not like you still have any of my furniture, or borrowed a book without returning it. You owe me nothing, and there's nothing I owe you; not even explanations at this point. We covered those all pretty well two years ago. And it's not like there's something about the story I don't understand. I've come to understand it pretty well: I was in a very dark and twisted mental state. Even as we were barely getting to know each other, around the edges of another relationship I was already rooted in, we did things that caused terrible damage to the sense of deep trust that we need to feel for any partner. That trust is difficult - generally impossible - to repair, and almost no effort was made to repair it, and that was how we left things, when it was time to move on.
That is a grossly damaged foundation to use for any relationship - even a friendship - even acquaintanceship. We would have to repair that foundation, and that's hard work; work that can be easily avoided by avoiding each other, and making a fresh start with someone else.
Which, at this point, we've both done. Perhaps more than once.
So why the hell haven't I been cured of this post-traumatic syndrome?
And damn it, why tonight? Why do I have to write this out of myself the night before a job interview?
I've made a valiant effort to crowbar you out of myself, and slowly met with success. Slowly I've made room for someone else to occupy the massive space in my head that you claimed. More space than you deserved, frankly. You were the focus of some kind of emotional transference, where you came to represent a continuation of all the best elements of the care-worn and steady relationship I was about to leave, plus all the things I thought I was missing. I remember thinking I could jump right from one deep, abiding love directly into another deep, abiding love, and the details would magically sort themselves out despite the timing that was utterly wrong. Instead - of course - I stepped straight out into thin air. Intellectually I knew it would be this way, but my heart wasn't going to accept "no".
This slow recovery is vivid in my mind. For half a year I was a walking disaster area: The one who had to do the leaving, and the one who was left, combined. I went through the same starved-for-attention phase that you did, and did a lot of silly things. My ability to trust was damaged, and I had no desire to get involved in something where that trust was needed, so for a long time, without thinking, I sought out people I would not even be tempted to trust. I kept asking myself, bitterly, "why seek anything more?"
Why co-mingle my life with someone based on the expectation that they will continue to self-actualize, to thrive, to fight to keep what makes them wonderful, when they could so easily drop the ball, and wither in upon themselves, and turn into a burden, reliant on me for support in ways that leave me exhausted and impatient and forlorn? Even a person who is magnificently functional as a single entity could deteriorate into a co-dependent husk when they don't know what they should compromise on, for their own health, in an intimate union. What if they're willing to move, quit their job, give up their pet, take the passenger seat, let me choose the curtains, and they wander into an entirely different life? What if they decide to stop attending their beloved yoga so we can jog together instead, and then silently despair because they hate it? Is that wonderful and generous and flexible of them? Or is it a harbinger of some looming disaster? For a long time, the concept of "co-dependency" hovered over every potential relationship for me, leering like a horseman of the apocalypse, waving a huge bloody flag. Onward, to failure!
Then, I realized I had to make a true faith effort to create a solid new relationship, and have one steady partner -- if that. Only a little while later I fell in love again.
I've been cautious this time, in this new relationship. No big internet-wide gushes of sentiment for strangers to read. No plowing forward into cohabitation. I will keep my own castle, until I'm convinced ahead of time that a joint household would be harmonious. No ignoring the role of friends in my life. I need to keep doing the things that maintain me, keep changing the things that I know are flawed, keep changing in general. No stagnation. No more lingering, insidious belief that if I just met the right partner, all of my own problems will untangle themselves. And, just as important, no future set in stone. "We'll be together no matter how bad it gets, and that will be proof of our resolve," is something that sounds bold and romantic in a church, but in practice becomes an excuse to defer improvement to tomorrow, and let things get pointlessly worse.
So here I am. Why hasn't new love erased this stain of feelings?
Why does seeing you still feel like a punch in the stomach, hard enough that I have trouble standing on a concrete floor?
It shouldn't be that way. You should be a face in the crowd, photos in my scrapbook, words on a page, a good story; nothing more. You should be a coda on the end of the tender, bittersweet feelings I hold warmly in a corner of my heart for the eight-year relationship whose end you heralded. An asterisk. A flourish. I expect that's how you feel about me, so why can't it be mutual? I don't know; I can't find an explanation for these feelings that is even halfway rational. For a long time, when I was sick with a thyroid disorder, I just took the feelings as a package with the disease. As my health improved, the feelings faded as well, and I assumed they were gone for good.
And then ... there you sit, minding your own business, and my body fills with acid. The horseman and his cavalry tumble through the gates and run amok in the village. Buildings burst into flames. God himself drops a deuce in the fountain, screaming laughter.
I do not want this. Unrequited feelings are a menace. I am insane when these feelings appear. That huge, overwhelming surge of fight-or-flight ... I can't even look you fully in the face. Even basic eye contact is impossible. Here I am again, after a peaceful year, beset by demons, trying to cram them back into their graves outside the city walls.
I still have feelings for you: Horrible ones.
I am too old for this. This got old in grade school.
Some funhouse section in the rear of my brain still imagines you as the cornerstone of a deep, passionate relationship. The mind, body, and personality that complements and fits my own. I know it's absurd. It's unwarranted and untested. I also know that a bloodstream full of acid is not the best accompaniment to such a positive-sounding vision. More than anything else, it's all proof that I'm insane, and that something must be done.
Here's what I need to draw from this, on the night before the interview that will cement my new career direction and my new path in life:
You can no longer represent the things I don't have, but want for myself. I need to take those things for myself and have them. That's the only way to drain this diseased swamp. That's the only real way to clean house in my soul. "Moving on" is not really possible when one is not sure what one wants to "move on" to. But I know what I want:
I want to become the person I imagined you were.
I saw you on the subway today, as I was heading home from a dinner out. You were staring at a notebook page filled with a block of dense writing, and industriously adding to the bottom of it. You were wearing an odd hat.
I instinctively knew it would be a bad idea to walk up to you and say hello, because of two things. I had no idea how you would react, and, I had no idea how I would react.
Nevertheless the potentiality of the encounter sent my heart rate lurching up into the ceiling. My throat twisted up like a handmade cigarette. I felt faint, and grew a bit of tunnel-vision. My walking became feeble, and I only barely made it into the train car once the doors opened. Why here and now, the night before a big job interview? I guess it had to happen eventually. It's been about a year and a half since the last spotting. (Back then it was Halloween and you emerged from the subway wearing a giant fake spider on your bike helmet, and we both pretended not to see each other.) I guess that's a pretty good record for living in the same city and using the same major transport system. I have definitely worried that it would happen again since the first time, and now it has.
Now I'm at home. I've just finished singing my guts out to some loud music by Bjork, with my head right next to the speaker. Practicing for a karaoke session on Thursday. I've had time to think about exactly what I would say if I spoke to you, and what my feelings are now. It's very difficult because you are a strange combination of intimate familiar and complete stranger, especially after this long silent period, and my feelings are still very contradictory. Likely you will never read this. That's probably best.
I've thought of you, of course, but nowadays it's only been when the subject of my past comes up organically in conversation, or when I'm going through a rough social period in my current life and end up reliving the experiences that led me here, in a kind of post-traumatic fugue. You are in some respects "the one that got away". You occupy that sort of place in my mind. It's aggravating for me to have that space occupied. It has been vacant since the late 90's when I had a ridiculous unrequited crush on my peer advisor at UCSC that haunted me for a year until I fell in love with someone else. Having that place occupied is not pleasant. It's deeply uncomfortable, like having an object rolling around in your lung that stabs if you breathe deeply. I do not want you there; yet there you sit.
And that's the funny thing ... I have actually experienced the joy of falling in love with someone else, since I met you. That relationship had its ups and downs but it is largely responsible for prying me out of the emotionally destitute state I was in a few years ago. I am now in a far, far better place than I was. But even here, apparently I am still vulnerable to the hornets' nest of emotions that seeing you in the flesh has summoned within me today. How can this still happen?
I should have known better than to go strolling around that particular subway platform anyway. Had I grown complacent by forgetting? I was looking at people to amuse myself, instead of just listening to my "60-second science" podcast. (It was a very interesting one about working memory and attention span, actually.) My eyes passed across the shape of each person on the benches, comparing one with another, like a casual walk through an art gallery. Then the sudden and complete surge of recognition turned all the blood in my chest to acid. My steps faltered, then caught up again, as I realized I had to carry myself past your line of sight as soon I could, since the thought of accidentally catching you in mutual recognition, let alone conversation, promised an emotional meltdown worse than I was already undergoing. This was not a lovely hearts-and-flowers sort of meltdown, but the frightening, vertiginous "oh no; what's happening to me?" kind. I had to steady myself against a steel pillar, and then I realized that when your train arrived you would stand up and probably look around as you boarded, so I bailed to the other side of the platform to wait for my train out of sight.
This is really ridiculous. You are one woman out of an infinity. Before - and after - our brief relationship I have met women who were, at least on paper, just as compelling as you were, though obviously individuals in their own right. And yet: This physiological murdering was triggered only by you. Why?
Two short phrases that come to mind, as I grapple with expressing it: Unfinished business ... and ... wasted potential.
But those aren't right. I have wasted the potential of plenty of relationships - potential friends and potential romantic partners alike - and just moved to the next opportunity. They've sailed out of my head and I've let them go. Sometimes by neglect, sometimes by a deliberate desire to be free. Why should you be different?
And unfinished business ... what is unfinished? It's not like you still have any of my furniture, or borrowed a book without returning it. You owe me nothing, and there's nothing I owe you; not even explanations at this point. We covered those all pretty well two years ago. And it's not like there's something about the story I don't understand. I've come to understand it pretty well: I was in a very dark and twisted mental state. Even as we were barely getting to know each other, around the edges of another relationship I was already rooted in, we did things that caused terrible damage to the sense of deep trust that we need to feel for any partner. That trust is difficult - generally impossible - to repair, and almost no effort was made to repair it, and that was how we left things, when it was time to move on.
That is a grossly damaged foundation to use for any relationship - even a friendship - even acquaintanceship. We would have to repair that foundation, and that's hard work; work that can be easily avoided by avoiding each other, and making a fresh start with someone else.
Which, at this point, we've both done. Perhaps more than once.
So why the hell haven't I been cured of this post-traumatic syndrome?
And damn it, why tonight? Why do I have to write this out of myself the night before a job interview?
I've made a valiant effort to crowbar you out of myself, and slowly met with success. Slowly I've made room for someone else to occupy the massive space in my head that you claimed. More space than you deserved, frankly. You were the focus of some kind of emotional transference, where you came to represent a continuation of all the best elements of the care-worn and steady relationship I was about to leave, plus all the things I thought I was missing. I remember thinking I could jump right from one deep, abiding love directly into another deep, abiding love, and the details would magically sort themselves out despite the timing that was utterly wrong. Instead - of course - I stepped straight out into thin air. Intellectually I knew it would be this way, but my heart wasn't going to accept "no".
This slow recovery is vivid in my mind. For half a year I was a walking disaster area: The one who had to do the leaving, and the one who was left, combined. I went through the same starved-for-attention phase that you did, and did a lot of silly things. My ability to trust was damaged, and I had no desire to get involved in something where that trust was needed, so for a long time, without thinking, I sought out people I would not even be tempted to trust. I kept asking myself, bitterly, "why seek anything more?"
Why co-mingle my life with someone based on the expectation that they will continue to self-actualize, to thrive, to fight to keep what makes them wonderful, when they could so easily drop the ball, and wither in upon themselves, and turn into a burden, reliant on me for support in ways that leave me exhausted and impatient and forlorn? Even a person who is magnificently functional as a single entity could deteriorate into a co-dependent husk when they don't know what they should compromise on, for their own health, in an intimate union. What if they're willing to move, quit their job, give up their pet, take the passenger seat, let me choose the curtains, and they wander into an entirely different life? What if they decide to stop attending their beloved yoga so we can jog together instead, and then silently despair because they hate it? Is that wonderful and generous and flexible of them? Or is it a harbinger of some looming disaster? For a long time, the concept of "co-dependency" hovered over every potential relationship for me, leering like a horseman of the apocalypse, waving a huge bloody flag. Onward, to failure!
Then, I realized I had to make a true faith effort to create a solid new relationship, and have one steady partner -- if that. Only a little while later I fell in love again.
I've been cautious this time, in this new relationship. No big internet-wide gushes of sentiment for strangers to read. No plowing forward into cohabitation. I will keep my own castle, until I'm convinced ahead of time that a joint household would be harmonious. No ignoring the role of friends in my life. I need to keep doing the things that maintain me, keep changing the things that I know are flawed, keep changing in general. No stagnation. No more lingering, insidious belief that if I just met the right partner, all of my own problems will untangle themselves. And, just as important, no future set in stone. "We'll be together no matter how bad it gets, and that will be proof of our resolve," is something that sounds bold and romantic in a church, but in practice becomes an excuse to defer improvement to tomorrow, and let things get pointlessly worse.
So here I am. Why hasn't new love erased this stain of feelings?
Why does seeing you still feel like a punch in the stomach, hard enough that I have trouble standing on a concrete floor?
It shouldn't be that way. You should be a face in the crowd, photos in my scrapbook, words on a page, a good story; nothing more. You should be a coda on the end of the tender, bittersweet feelings I hold warmly in a corner of my heart for the eight-year relationship whose end you heralded. An asterisk. A flourish. I expect that's how you feel about me, so why can't it be mutual? I don't know; I can't find an explanation for these feelings that is even halfway rational. For a long time, when I was sick with a thyroid disorder, I just took the feelings as a package with the disease. As my health improved, the feelings faded as well, and I assumed they were gone for good.
And then ... there you sit, minding your own business, and my body fills with acid. The horseman and his cavalry tumble through the gates and run amok in the village. Buildings burst into flames. God himself drops a deuce in the fountain, screaming laughter.
I do not want this. Unrequited feelings are a menace. I am insane when these feelings appear. That huge, overwhelming surge of fight-or-flight ... I can't even look you fully in the face. Even basic eye contact is impossible. Here I am again, after a peaceful year, beset by demons, trying to cram them back into their graves outside the city walls.
I still have feelings for you: Horrible ones.
I am too old for this. This got old in grade school.
Some funhouse section in the rear of my brain still imagines you as the cornerstone of a deep, passionate relationship. The mind, body, and personality that complements and fits my own. I know it's absurd. It's unwarranted and untested. I also know that a bloodstream full of acid is not the best accompaniment to such a positive-sounding vision. More than anything else, it's all proof that I'm insane, and that something must be done.
Here's what I need to draw from this, on the night before the interview that will cement my new career direction and my new path in life:
You can no longer represent the things I don't have, but want for myself. I need to take those things for myself and have them. That's the only way to drain this diseased swamp. That's the only real way to clean house in my soul. "Moving on" is not really possible when one is not sure what one wants to "move on" to. But I know what I want:
I want to become the person I imagined you were.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-03 03:14 pm (UTC)