Tis the Season

"…that love is watching someone die.

So who’s gonna watch you die?"

I wrote before that I wish I was mute.  It was an incomplete thought.  I wish I was mute instead of what I am right now.  I wish I was mute instead of floundering for the right words which seem to be imprinted on my heart but unspeakable.  I feel just as strongly as I have ever felt about everything….passionate, convicted, all that jazz…but I…I have no idea how to communicate anymore.  Perhaps I never did, but for awhile I at least felt like I was capable of an eloquence that matched the feelings echoing in my soul.  But…I’m going to try again….I know already it’s going to be a rambling mess, mostly because my thoughts are all over the place about so many things. 

I don’t have a photobucket so I can’t post a photo of Kristen.  But only a few people read this and they all know what she looks like so.  Imagine a picture of her, would you?  Thanks.

You see that girl?  She has nothing to fear.  Nothing in this world.  I love her madly.  I love her deeply.  I love her to death.  I think about things I’ve never thought about before with more clarity than I’ve ever thought about anything before.  The part of me that dreams of a family, of daughters, of life going somewhere doesn’t feel like it’s dreaming anymore.  It feels…very practically, like it’s prepping itself for that eventuality to all come true.  That sounds a lot less romantic than I could have phrased it, but it’s the truth.  She doesn’t just make me feel love like a red haze of ecstacy, she also manages to make my brain comprehend it.  A future.  The best inevitability ever.  That life will be exactly what I’ve wanted it to be.  Probably more than someone like me deserves.  I don’t really know why I say that…I guess I just feel….damaged goods.

And I am that.  I am.  Kristen, that girl you’re still picturing…she has to deal with scars on my heart.  Scars that are going to take awhile to heal and that will never be gone for good.  When I love…as Kate said once and so well and so wonderfully at the time….I love ferociously.  I do.  I always have.  There is always an intensity there, though the degree of it has changed from person to person from time to time.  I still very much love my exes, but I’m not IN love with them.  I love most people in this world…the ones I know at least.  I love them, because I feel people deserve to be loved.  I want to love them cuz I feel most people aren’t loved enough.  Or more accurately, I feel like I spent a lot of my life feeling unloved. 

Defining what being loved is is a tricky thing.  A lot of people think that they love others.  For me…to love someone…you have to give them what they want.  A lot of people think it’s giving them what they need.  But the truth is…it’s no easier for you to determine what that is than it is for them to.  And it’s denying them a faith and a trust and a respect that they know what they’re doing.  Sometimes….sometimes they don’t.  And the thing is that you really only have two good choices in my mind….you stick with them anyway, you accept that you can try and help them find what it is they truly want while not telling them it (they’re not going to listen anyway), or you can just decide that there can’t be a homogenous relationship between their desires and your pride.  Neither decision may be satisfying and neither is wrong…or for that matter perhaps right…but that’s the only thing that can be done.  Most people think that you’re supposed to give people what they need….parents do that.  They know better than their children.  Sometimes this may be right, a lot of times perhaps…but you can’t just decide for them.  You have to let them learn, help them learn…and not….I’ll quit this ramble.

I only give people what I think they want.  I love them but I don’t know if I make them feel loved.  I hope I do.  I have a feeling a lot of people don’t concern themselves with thinking about that as much as I do.  But I don’t feel loved by most people.  There are some who make me feel loved.  My roommates are actually good at this…some of them.  They make me feel wanted.  Kristen is good at this…no…she’s great at this.  I feel necessary rather than just…something in this world without real purpose, left to define myself in order to try and justify existence.

Kristen wonders sometimes if Stephanie is a threat.  I think she knows Stephanie isn’t for a multitide of reasons.  But the most important one, the one that I feel is most important at least and perhaps I’ve failed to communicate it clearly…is that I just don’t love Stephanie.  I don’t love her like Kristen.  All my love comes from a single place, a deep sympathy for people, a desire to heal them and make them feel wanted and needed in this world.  And I want to be good to them, even those who have been cruel to me whether accidentally or purposefully, because I don’t see any good in not.  Actually, because I see the pain in not.  I know it.  I feel it.  It haunts me.  For Kristen, in some ways, this is how it all began. I found the thoughts and dreams and part of a life of someone whose heart had been broken, perhaps lost…only she can really define it.  But what I saw was all the shining promise still in her, all the beauty, all the amazing things that I just wanted to nurture and give support to.  And then, over time, I came to need her.  I fell in love with her.  I loved her for what she was, even the parts we both think might be bad, and for what she made me feel about myself.  How good she made me feel.  How the pieces of me that I wanted to feel were the right pieces to love felt…loved….and right.  It’s so much more than that too…things I can’t explain.  And my inability to communicate it makes me feel inadequate and sad…and so I don’t try to cheapen how deeply I feel by rambling on about it generally.  But she wants me to communicate so I’m trying my best….I feel like I’m failing 100 times more than I’m succeeding.  The only way I ever seem to feel satisfied with communicating a point is by putting it into a story, a novel, a play…and avoiding dealing with the fact that it’s mine.

This next part, this paragraph is one I don’t know if I should write, it’s short and brief, but…I’m trying to communicate.  I don’t like thinking poorly of Stephanie even though she hurt me horribly.  She poisoned my hurt.  She’s made me paranoid.  Kristen mentions some random guy from Canada and immediately I’m filled with dread and sorrow and sickness.  She gets her haircut and it looks nice and I feel guilty for liking it cuz it happens to look a bit like Stephanie’s old haircut….I feel a bit paranoid because it looks like someone else’s haircut (a bit) and I think about all the bad things that have been said about her, all the reassurances…and how all this is just like the time before.  I’ve been poisoned by someone who lied to me blatantly.&

nbsp; Who told me that this other person was all sorts of crap, lazy, stupid, just….pretended to dislike the person intensely and think poorly of them…and then left for that same person…it was a purposeful and deliberate betrayal later punctuated by multiple repeated attempts to do….who knows what.  Try and prove who was the better man.  I want to forget this ever happened and move on, but I can’t forget it happened because I don’t want it to happen again. 

It is so poignant a haunting memory to me that it has a temperature, a smell, a taste, an image…a feeling against my skin.  I remember not having a bed then, the house filled with the smell of the heating system trying to keep me warm cuz I was under a thin sheet sleeping on my couch, curled up under meager blankets…unable to buy more bedding for fear I wouldn’t have the money to pay the full rent on the whole house so that we could keep it, so that we’d have a place to live for the upcoming year, so that Neetha, the wonderful owner, wouldn’t be screwed on the upcoming Christmas.  It was the taste of a wonderful New Years banquet that Greg and I enjoyed alone.  Greg and me on New Years…and it was a sweet, nice, wonderful New Years.  I love my brother dearly…I do…I love him but for the most part, I don’t feel any importance in his life.  So I feel greatful when some importance is given me. 

To me I feel like I’m the family morlock.  I feel that way in this house now, living upstairs cut off from everyone.  They want to include me sure, but I don’t really feel any desire to be included.  Not without my belle, who I want to give everything to.  I’m torn between trying to satisfy roommates who think of me as just that extra guy who lives upstairs and sometimes comes down and giving Kristen everything…which is what I want to do.  And for me, I hope that Kristen can forgive me the fact that I can’t stop trying to make other people feel like they’re important to me.  Cuz once again, I’ll repeat myself to death, I’ve felt like a speck of dust forever.  But that’s not who we as human beings are.  I don’t believe it and I have felt at times so much unlike it….and it feels so right and so good that I refuse to believe that that’s the delusion and the speck of dust part is the truth.  I’m the brother that they’ll take or leave, the son they don’t concern themselves over as much (though they’ll brag about my accomplishments), the friend you pick up and you put aside when you feel like it, the lover who when the time comes, you tell them you never loved them at all.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell her what I want or not.  Whether I’m supposed to let her just do what she’s going to do and see if it fits.  I dont’ want to change her at all.  It’s not like it’s a huge change.  It’s really this stupid childish folly…a game that we as humans play it seems where we try to see if the person fits our life and our desires without giving them any help.  So here goes abandoning it.  I just want someone to support me.  To give me what I want and not make me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, or that I’m confused, or that there’s a better way.  I don’t want to be fixed in any way but the way I want to be…..so i want someone who will support me.  One of the greatest hatreds I have cultivated towards my parents was how they spent their entire lives tearing each other down, they hated each other’s ideas and beliefs…but they wouldn’t separate.  They stayed together and it wasn’t touching, it was repugnant.  Because they didn’t accept each other.  They just stood, yelling and belittling each other expecting the other person to eventually break down and give up and sometimes my mother would succeed and sometimes my father would.  My father would insult her until she was silent, my mother would nag him until he flew into a rage at anything and everyone my mother wanted him to just so she’d stop nagging.  It was no way to live.  It was no way to grow up.  My mother coming to me and telling me how horrible my father is but we just have to deal with it….no.  No.  You don’t deal with your father telling you to get out of the house when you disagree….calling you worthless….being a drunk….hating everything….just….damaging everything with his own misery and anger and resentment. 

He’s a different man now.  And part of it is that I don’t have to deal with him everyday.  He misses us, I know that.  He loves us, I know that.  So does my mother.  But he only loves us the way he wants to.  He doesnt’ give us what we want.  He gives us what he wants to give us.  My mother too.  And it’s a horrible impenetrable wall, because I bet if I told them what I wanted, they might in desperation give it to me just to try and make amends or to prove they love me.  But I don’t want to tell them.  I screamed it to their faces when i was a kid and they ignored it.  They missed their chance.  If that means that I don’t love them, then I don’t.  I won’t. 

The whole point of this entry is that I love you, Kristen.  I love you so much.  So much I see you in every poignant movie moment and every single thing I do.  I want you near me all the time.  I want you to hold me and let me know that it’s ok…that you will stay by me and hold my hand and hold me and just lay quietly with me until the ghosts go away.  That maybe the nightmares will never stop…that maybe I’ll never succeed…but that it doesn’t mean I’m a failure and horrible person.  I want to be able to come home to you and take off all my fake armor, all the pleasantness and kindness that I spend my life wearing…and I"m good at it.  You don’t see it as well cuz I’m trying to take it off for you….but I’m afraid I’m just going to get struck again when I’m not looking.  I love you.  I know it’s unfair to think these things are going to happen…you don’t deserve to have to deal with my fears.   I wish I was shining and new and beautiful for you…and not a beautiful little tragedy, self-loathing and bizarre.  But I am that.

I don’t know what else to say now….I’m going to end this here.