The Pit of my Stomach

Listening to the playlist I wrote for you, the one you never understood, I think, even if you intended to take it seriously. 

My how things have changed in only two weeks. My understanding of you, the scale and drama of the barriers between us, how I understand myself in the midst of all of it.

Several days ago—the last night we had dinner to together at East Lagoon—it began to dawn on me, finally, that this isn't and was never going to work. I'm trying desperately not to be angry with you about it; I haven't any right to. But I've always found it challenging not to grow frustrated when a problem lies between me and someone else, a someone, a want, that ostensibly I know how to solve. Only, after all these years, I've learned at last that you cannot make someone see it your way. They have to get there on their own, and if they can't do it in time to resolve it (or, I suppose, if I've been wrong and can't see through it or let it go in time to resolve it) then you've just got to let it go. Yelling, arguing—fighting—someone into your perspective never works. The apology I want and the change in behavior I'd subsequently need to follow won't be coming, especially not unsolicited and sincere, which are the only conditions that mean anything. Oh you'll spray apologies around like a gardenhouse, but they'll be empty, reflexive defensive; devoid of compassion or empathy, sent only to defend you from becoming a still worse person, or perhaps to ensure that you are one.

I fucking hate admitting it, but, you're not her. Like Jitka, like Meagan, you could have been. You were close; you taught me more about who, in the end, I want for me, but alas it isn't you. 

And yet in some respects you were closer than any of them, and that hurts. Especially since, unlike  either of the other two, your future may still hold the promise of the woman I am looking for. But right now... it's unsurmountably far away. 

I am trying to very hard not to be angry with you, because in reality I am simply angry that I didn't get my way, that I got so close and fell so far. I just wanted someone to choose me, and for I to choose them, and for each of us, having chosen, to have been worthy of the one we chose. But you didn't, won't and can't choose me, and so it's time for me to move on. God damn it I ache so desperately to be loved. Would that I hadn't fucked up so much of my life; would that I were a simpler, more asleep creature. But now, at this age, with this world-view, with this me... every time I believe I feel a little more hopeless at the end there there will ever be anyone who understands me and loves that, not what or whomever they've decided I am. I play too many games. Everyone gets confused about who I really am.

I know you are confused about a great many practical things, but in reality, the things about which you are truly confused are barely even on your radar. You blame everyone and everything for your problems and accept no responsibility for them. Oh blame you accept, in spades; and shame to match. But this isn't responsibility, it's just a masochistic kind of masturbation. And I've been there, am there still, but the difference between is us that I'm weary of it, and I see, at last, how fruitless it is.  The difference between us is that I want to be happy, and you, simply, do not. It's easy to stay miserable and blame everyone else. The ride the high-horse one day and to play Judas the next. The melodrama is so exciting, distracting, keeps you from facing reality. 

Culture, work, parents—completely invalid? No, of course now. But history is full of people who shunned these pressures where they needed to if it meant the choice between happiness and not. You complain of your parents, of your boss, of Mihin, of whatever—but what you really don't want to face is that you wouldn't have a fucking clue what do with yourself without them. As long as someone demands of your time and identity, you are liberated from choosing, from being. And  this, this is the one thing I won't see you through, won't wait for, won't stand beside you. . Because it might last forever, and I represent nothing but rupture and destabilization within that paradigm. I will never be your equal if I do, and god damnt I cannot bear to be Dad in a relationship amonst equals again You can't and won't love me, not whilst you refuse to let any love into your life. And that's what breaks me heart about you, Dhanuska, your loveless existence.

Or there are people in your life who'll utter those words at you, but all of them–all–only threaten you with them, control you on pain of it's revocation. And I  could love you for nearly all that you are, but I cannot withstand not being loved, and this you cannot do, because you cannot see past yourself. You, who ironically lives in such fear of being selfish, are magnificently so, only you don't see it. You think making a choice for yourself is selfish. But this is mere autonomy, mere ownership of the body and mind bestowed to you. When you never see my feelings, never appreciate me, spend all your anger at everyone else on me because, ironically, I create the only safe space in which you can express your true feelings but never once consider how it makes me feel (and no, no Dhanushka, your thoughts about yourself and what a "selfiish person you are" have nothing to do with me, they are, and have always been all about you. Your "sorries" are nonsensical euphemisms that just mean "please please don't judge me, if I say this word won't that mean that I know I was bad and you don't have to punish me now?". And all of that is about you. 

"Sorry" is born of compassion, is born in the yearning to create in the wronged party some ammelioration, not mere bargaining for guilt. 

I am angry at you because you never let me love you, and because you weren't ready to love me, and i have no right to it. I wasn't entitled to either, and ought not to have gotten so attached. I am angry at myself for falling for it again, of letting my hunger to at long last be understood get in the way of listening. 

But it's so hard with someone like you. Six months. Six months away from all the blame and pressure and judgement and cruelty and fucking shame and god how'd you'd blossom. I wanted to be there for it, I wanted to be the one who saw it coming, to play perhaps some small part in it, and when it had happened, to have been the one who stood by you while it happened. I wanted you to choose me. 

But until you can choose yourself, you can't choose yourself, and sadly, I don't have means to wait. There's always the chance, of course, that our paths of cross again. In my dreams, in my wildest fantasies, you come and get me. In my wildest dreams, someone fights me for me like i fought for you, someone woos me, someone makes me feel like the special one. But thirty-four years have gone by, at some point one has to stop being foolish.