failures

tell me a story she says

sometimes my wife just wants to talk to me.  about anything.  talking is a way of showing love and attention.  it is about the act of sharing words more than it is about what is said.

but this sometimes feels unimportant to me.  what do we talk about.  should i tell her about how i want time to myself?  how the world is overwhelming again, and how when i talk, i want to talk about this feeling, and how i know she won’t understand.  so i don’t say anything and she tells me the same stories again and again.

i know i am doing badly when everything exhausts me.  here is a story about my day.  i woke up and couldn’t wait for you to leave.  once you were gone i felt glad in my heart.  not because i dislike you but because i am bored and irritable.  i don’t want to hear about your friend konstantina anymore or your coworker erin or about how the library is understaffed.  your needs press in but i want to press out — i want time to not consider you.  i want time to hear my own voice again, i want to fill my own skull with me and myself and i and nobody else, total occupancy of brain:  one.  when i try to tell you i can’t do this today you just keep going instead, as though i haven’t said anything at all.  i wish i didn’t feel this way — i wish i felt love all day every day for  you, for us, for this marriage.

but i don’t.

—

when i sit and try to write, i want  something incredible to happen — i want to put it all on the page.  the result is never what I felt, never what I was aiming for.  when the words come out they reveal me, my thoughts, my life, the whole of everything, to be trivial and unimportant, breathtakingly normal and banal.  it is like when you ask high schoolers to write a paper about something in their life that means something and three quarters of the class writes about a love — a crush — a breakup — and they all use the same words and phrases, the commonality between them all so astonishing it makes you feel that individual humans are perhaps not so unique after all.

i am going through what so many middle aged men have gone through before me:  workplace ennui, the ebb and flow of a marriage, coming to terms with aging, figuring out how to manage the decline, how to come to terms with certain facts of my own life which define the quality and texture of existence itself.

i try to appreciate my life for what it is.  i am what i am through my own making and choices.  i chose my current incarnation, more or less.  i see this sometimes:  myself, an object designed by an engineer.  Then I put the image away, baffled that becoming the sum of my choices still results in days of complete misery.  i wanted a boring, normal, safe life, a life with love and an okay career.  now that i have it, i want to blow it up, it seems intolerable and stifling, although if you asked me what sort of life i want instead, i would be unable to articulate it.  i was tempted to start drinking again over the weekend, tempted for the first time in a couple of years.

i know that this is what people are — contradictions, changing attitudes, inconsistencies.   i know what the human condition is — struggling, suffering, striving to integrate your life with the lives of others, to balance work and play and love, striving for joy and if joy cannot be achieved then at least attaining occasional happiness and satisfaction.  i know this is me, and i’m just as likely to wake up tomorrow happy again as not.  i know the struggle never ends.

sometimes i just seem to be unable to bear the bad days though.  sometimes it feels like the bad days will be every day from here on out and i don’t know what to do with the feeling that rises up when that terrible vision of sameness clouds my eyes.

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here is a story about In Vitro Fertilization.  cycle 6 failed for us.  we will attempt the transfer and implantation of our single blastocyst in about two months.

now let’s never speak of it again.