I always do this. Mess things up. Always is probably not the right word, but it feels like it. I have trouble remembering the last time I met someone new that I liked and didn’t screw things up. Do I mean to do this? Am I intentionally creating problems for myself? I don’t think it’s conscious. I hope it isn’t.
Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck…
So much nothing. that’s what I’ve been posting lately, so much nothing. Little things, non-involved things. look, a dog walked by. Look, I’d like to read some books. Look, I’m begging for your money, because I can’t earn any on my own. Nothing about how I feel. How losing my job and being so incompetent that I can’t get a replacement job and I have to go live off my father’s hard work and move 100 miles away from everything I’ve known for the last 20 years makes me feel. How having every person who finds out I live up here asks me whether I’ve made any friends or what I do for fun, when unless my grandfather has to go get chemotherapy I don’t leave this 1-acre plot of land for more than a couple of hours a week, and how that would be fine if people would just stop fucking asking me about it. Out of sight, out of mind, and I grew up online, so I’m more than happy to connect with ‘the world’ every night on the computer, but when you remind me that there are people out there I could be spending time with in person, when you remind me that my life consists of the same stories my grandparents tell over and over again and the same well-worn paths through the mud on the same lot my grandparents have been living on for over 40 years, it occurs to me that there might be more to life than this.
Until I started falling recently, I was more content with being the lone hermit who didn’t long specifically for a relationship than probably any other time since February 1998, the last time I was ‘really’ in a ‘relationship’ with someone. That I’ve been so single for so long was something I had been able to come to grips with and just settled in to become a normal part of me. I have a Blue Skies comic about 80% done about that very thing, actually. Now there’s this person I’m falling for, but it’s like I’ve never talked to a girl before in anything but a platonic way, I haven’t a clue as to how to behave to pursue a ‘relationship’ with her. Or what that relationship should entail itself. Or how to stop thinking about it.
Fuck.
Something real. Something like these two new scars I have on the back of my left hand from having to heat my room with fire. Something like standing ankle deep in mud trying to get the forklift unstuck. Three times in two days. Something that I know how to describe, that I have words for, that I can speak about to people and they know what I mean. It doesn’t have to be ‘all or nothing’, but it does have to be ‘something or nothing’. And if it’s going to be something, I’m going to want to know … at least vaguely… what that something is. I know what ‘all’ is.
If I start a conversation by explaining what I’m about to be doing and why, and then I proceed to do that thing, does the other party have any right to not understand what I am doing? Fuck. I do it all in fast forward now. Which doesn’t make any sense, since the lifestyle up here means everything moves at a snail’s pace. Did I just do in 6 days what used to take me 6 months? Was that exactly what I said I wanted to do? Find out in days instead of months that it won’t work out, that I’m heading toward heartache. I suppose that solves the problem of a slow descent, but what happened to all the good, ignorance-is-bliss times in between? Aren’t the good times supposed to make up for the bad?
Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck fuckity-fuck. fuck.
I think I began figuring it out as I was doing it. Began seeing it for the first time. That I was playing games. Games! That I was testing her. Pushing her away and at the same time telling her I wanted her closer. Being too intense too fast, then being too critical of myself for it when she said it wasn’t too much too fast.
There are actual problems though, too. There was a conversation we had where she (without saying a name) was describing this guy she knows. She said she had become friends with him and they had a lot in common, and I wasn’t sure, but the tone of her voice sounded like she was setting me up for something, made me think she might be talking about me. And she said she’d been … intimate with him… but that she didn’t want to date him and did that make me upset? And I won’t go into detail, but it still sounded like she was telling me that she liked being friends with me and found me physically and sexually exciting/arousing, but that she didn’t want more than that with me, and I was speechless. I just didn’t know what to say. And she started telling me more, and revealed the guy’s name, and then because she wasn’t saying she didn’t want to be with me it didn’t matter that she was saying she was currently involved with … well, essentially a ‘fuck-buddy’. And because of the brevity of our relationship so far and its total lack of concrete (or flexible) boundaries, I found myself of not being in any position to have a position on the matter. I found myself feeling feelings that I had no right feeling. But I couldn’t say anything for some reason. Something inside me just assured me that no matter how fast or far I think I’ve been falling, I have no right to get upset over her existing relationships. That even if I did, she wouldn’t have to stop them, she’d just stop telling me about them. There’s a part of me that just wants to get right to that relationship that does have boundaries, so I can know whether I should be feeling this feeling, and there’s a part of me that just wants to forget about her forever, and another that just wants to be with her, no matter the circumstances, and another that would be pretty happy being something like this ‘fuck-buddy’ of hers.
Uhg. And there’s the part of me that wishes I could turn off my heart and go back to living and being alone and not thinking all the time about a person I can’t see and how I could see them. Or about being with any of the other people I’ve fallen for and can’t see. I’m so cold, I’m so tired, I’m so … lost.
I’m sure I’ve been rambling. I’m not sure this made any sense. I doubt she’ll read this. Fuck. That’s another thing that … could potentially have become a bigger problem between us; our views of the nature of privacy and the public nature of the web. She has a website that she linked me to and it has diary entries (like a blog) and I went and read them. When I mentioned this to her, she considered it a huge breach of her privacy, like if she had been in the shower and I’d broken into her diary in secret. And she told me that she didn’t like the idea of reading old entries in my journal/blog, either, or anything else I’d written about myself or my past or my emotions in the past, and didn’t understand why I thought it might be useful to her. I mean, I put myself out there for everyone, hoping that by sharing myself in a totally public way like this eventually people who like me and my life and can handle the way I emote will come out of the people who read the site. OR … well, I’m not sure I believe in such a thing as privacy. Anything I do or say could become known without my knowledge or will to keep it secret. Any word I write down could get to anyone at any time. Internet or not, I cannot keep a secret. Information wants to be free. So, since I don’t believe there’s much to this ‘privacy’ myth, I don’t bother being anything but open and honest when I have my wits about me. I post things like this on the internet for all to see and it’s almost not a suprise anymore when the strangest people know the most intimate details of my life and emotions. I seem even to have come to expect that people who care about me, my friends and family, are interested in reading about my life. Except that unless she’s holding me to a double standard (she has a more up-to-date online journal and has explicitly told me to NOT look at it), she doesn’t even want to read my site, perhaps even thinks I shouldn’t want her to. I don’t understand how she can say I don’t want to get to know her enough (because I don’t know what to ask her to get her to start talking) and at the same time tell me not to read her publicly available journal about herself and her life.
I’m getting too cold to type again, and I’m out of wood. I’m going to bed. Fuck. I didn’t mean for it to go this way. I don’t want to lose people before I even finish falling for them. I don’t want to be this way. This is not me.
This is not me.
