Another year

Happy birthday to me.

One year later.

Michael is dead.
Jonathan is in college.
Caitlin is in college and really out of my problem radar.
I am 50 lbs. lighter.

My life is so different from what it was a year ago that I cannot recognize it.

The people are different.
Even the cats are different.

I don't even know how to begin to make sense of what has happened to me.  I sat in a committee meeting today, and talked to other professors, and it was like a different species.  I stopped my career a decade ago, and they went on.  And I have no idea how to be those people. 

I don't know where my life is going, what is happening.  I get sucked into this longing to be with someone else and fear that I will never again have that.  And I get so, so afraid about that, and it's the fear that is the worst thing.  I went around and around on this today.  I almost went out tonight just to see if I could find someone to take home.  Because I feel like no one sees me; that I am more confident and attractive than I have ever been in my life.  But I am... old?  And no one sees me, and no one will want to make the rest of his life with me.

And I don't want to be alone.  That's the truth. 

But I need to learn how to be alone.  Not as a step to not being alone, but because it's the right thing to do.  Because it's the path to happiness.  But I can't seem to find my way to that.  It's like a stepping stone in my head... like a way to get to what I really want.  As if doing that is grabbing the ring, and then I can have what I really want. 

I hate it.  I hate feeling that way.  I just want to be happy.  The kind of happy that I feel when I'm with the man who I should stay the hell away from.  The man who cannot give me what I want.  The man who is probably going to bring nothing but trouble to either one of us.  But when I'm with him, I feel like a real person again.  And that is all wrong.

Spiderweb connections

The trouble is that the only person who really cares about your life is you, and people to whom you are intimately tied... partners, parents, children at little bit.

I miss that connection.

I don't mind my own company.  Sometimes I quite like it.  I have things to do, if I would just do them.  I have a sex life of sorts, and someone who gives me affection, though not nearly often enough.  But I want to come home and share the crappy things that happened in my day.  The car key that didn't work and freaked me the hell out.  The fact that I saw knitting guy at the store, the shawl he was making, and that I thought about asking him about piano.  What happened in classes.  The econ review that's upcoming.  My annoyance with my honors students.  And please, someone, kick my ass about the tax stuff, and what are we going to do about the apartment roof?

No one wants to hear that.  I mean, it's not like they wouldn't listen, but it's minutiae, things that don't matter, the spider-silk connections of day-to-day life.  My son has his own life, my lover doesn't care, not really, my friends have lives of their own.  That sounds pathetic, and that's not what I mean, not the narrative that I'm telling.  It's just true, and it's the thing that I lack, the thing that is making me the most crazy, and the thing that I don't know how to replace.

I have to change the story.  I have to change what I'm doing and how I'm thinking about it.  I have to put actions in here to make this different and better.

six months

If I keep running really fast, I won't notice all the crap behind me.

I miss you.  And I don't.

You are not going to make your truth mine

It's not going to happen.

You tried to destroy me along with you, but it is not going to happen.

I loved you.  I will always love you.  But I am not going to let you take me with you.  I wouldn't do it when you were alive, and I am not going to do it now.

Gloss right the hell over

Don't get me wrong.  People have been incredibly awesomely great to me.

And I know that it's partly that people don't get it, and that they don't know what to say.  But still.

It gets on my last nerve when I say, it's quiet around here, and people say, "oh, you'll find things to fill the time!"  Or, "join some groups!"  Or anything that comes in a cheery perky let's-move-on tone.

It's not easy like that.  You don't just fill in the spaces where people used to be.  You don't just retool your life in 30 seconds.  And you can't just join clubs and get out there and fill time.  Because there aren't those clubs, there aren't those things that just piece in like that.  It's not an instant restart, and even if it was, it wouldn't be simple like that.

I don't mind the awkwardness, the fact that you don't have any solutions for me.  I know that there aren't any quick solutions.  I don't want them.  (Well, sure, if you had them, I'd take it.)  I just want you not to trivialize the kind of pain that I'm in every single day by acting like it doesn't exist, that every night isn't incredibly, awfully hard.  I want you to see that and acknowledge that, even if it's uncomfortable for you. 

Just because you're not suicidal...

...doesn't mean that you don't want to die.

I said to my therapist yesterday that I have never been less suicidal in my life, and that's absolutely true.  But ugh, I just want to die.  And anyone who's had episodes of suicidal ideation knows exactly what I mean.  I just want all this to STOP.  I want to be done.  I want to get off this ride.

I want a different life.  One with someone in it, really.  Yeah, I had to write that, even though I wish I didn't feel that way.  Because when I imagine a happy life, it always contains a partner.  I can't imagine a happy life that's about being alone.  Maybe someday I will be able to.  But I'm not there right now.

Yesterday, after therapy and after it became clear that I wasn't going to hear from Joe, I took myself shopping, and then I went to a movie.  All of that because it was different from coming home and being alone.  And it was, and it was better, really.  But today, I'm alone again, and I'm not motivated to do anything, although I'm really trying to be.  I run through my head, where could I go?  What could I do?  And it all goes to the same place, to finding someone to be with.

I want to unhinge this.  This link that says happy=company.  Male company.  At some point, it can't be all that.  But I feel time slipping away so fast, and like it's a race, a race to find someone to be with before it's too late, and that is all so stupid, such a recipe for disaster and bad choices that I know that I have to find a different way.

I don't know why this all links in my head this way.  Why I crave someone's touch, why I feel invisible and without meaning when I'm alone.  I hate myself for being this way.  I want it to be different, and I have to figure out how to get to that different road. 

Upstream

I can't stand this.

It has been such a bad day.

I just want Michael to tell me that everything will be all right.  Because he would always tell me that, and I would always believe it, even when I didn't. 

I don't think that anything will be all right ever again.  It's just one thing after another, and when I start to feel like things are under control, then the next thing hits.  I can't stand it.  I don't want to do it any more.

Alone

Honestly, I'm not sure how much good it does me to write.  Sometimes I think that this just makes me dwell on things.  Other times... I feel so desperate for something, some kind of observation, maybe, of all of this that there seems to be nothing else to do.  As if typing words on this screen makes me real in a way that nothing else does.  I am here.  I am still here.

Last week was mostly an exercise in excruciating.  The aloneness seemed to drain everything, and I felt all the time this sensation of being an actor on a stage with no audience.  I think that's almost the hardest thing, the feeling that my life, unwitnessed, has no meaning at all.  That I walk through things as if someone were looking at me, and when I lose that feeling, it's like Dumbo without his magic feather, and I fall.

I fell hard.  Friday I was nothing but shattered.

Today... better, a bit, more grounded.  Happier in my skin.  But still.

So much memory.  And I sit here alone, listening to music, trying to work, and it's all surreal.  A year ago... Jonathan, Caitlin, Michael.  Today, me and the cats.  Jonathan happy at college, Caitlin... not my problem, Michael dead.  Michael, dead.  Sometimes that still seems the height of unreal, like when I sat at Tim's last weekend with that pounding in my head.  Michael is dead, and I am still walking around, I am still coasting through my days, I am still alive, I am still sane.  But Michael is dead. 

There is no reality to this life.

I can see, for crystalline sugar-sweet moments, how I might have a life that goes on.  But in between, I think that there's still a reckoning.  Still something that has to happen, still a point where I fall completely apart, when I really admit in a way that I cannot feel right now that I am not all right, that I may never be anything like I was, ever again.