[Fuck you. Yeah, you. You are the voice that stops me from saying what I want to say, making me delete and repeat, so fuck you. I don't know how you became such a nemesis of mine, but I will tell you this, I don't miss you and I never really did, do you understand? I know you don't understand why (because you are the opposite of me, because you hate everything for no good reason and I just couldn't do that too). I know it burns you up and pisses you off that I not only lived my life, but I didn't miss you in the process, well, I'm sorry about that.]
As I learn to undo the bindings I imposed on myself, one of them, a big one, a difficult one is saying no to offers of friendship that just don't suit me. I said yes for so many reasons, I didn't want to say no, I didn't know how to say no, I thought, meh, why not? I didn't have a lot of friends. I didn't know what friendship was. As you get older, your tastes get more nuanced, and your hopes for complete understanding begin to fade. At least mine did.
So along the last seven or eight years, as I was learning what I liked and didn't like, what I cared for and what I didn't, I realized I had acquired friends that didn't really suit me, but I still tried to keep them on, like an ill fitting item of clothing, out of some deference to their liking me, out of some strange obligatory feeling, despite the fact that my initial reaction was one of repulsion. I suppose it is so rare that I immediately like someone and get along with them that I tend to discredit my intuition. Every so often, it does turn out that I was wrong about a person. Usually it gets muddled as it grows more intimate, so it is harder for me to really say how I feel about someone.
Lately, time is reconciling the balance of these tiresome relationships in my life; it seems every year after that initial massacre of my friendships (three close friends hacked out of my life in one summer), then came the serial killings (a calculating measure of everyone and gone were two of my good friends), and lastly, there was the perfunctory expulsion of some people who I never really understood why we had friendships in the first place (sometimes being a raft means I get boarded by desperate drowners). The pace was abruptly halted from its steadily declining maliciousness (I may have turned into an absentee friend or faded from consciousness like normal people end friendships) because of that shock, in which I have spent the last two years endeavoring not to hurt anyone the way he had hurt me.
Except in not saying no to people who have run the gamut of wasting my time, stressing me out over unnecessary things, making me feel shitty for not being whatever it is they thought I was (despite my protests and attempts to be exactly who I am), I am finding myself in the misery of not having trusted my instincts.
Some of them are huge drains (they decried my assessments of her and time has told me that I was not wrong, yet daily I am forced to be offended by her in one way or another), others are slight annoyances (she still likes me, oh praise the lord, I didn't know how I was going to get to sleep without her affections validating me; me, the woman who is ten years her senior and twice as experienced in life), while still others are tangled in intimacy and the threat of love (he claims, but never settles over me; he is here, but is vacant; he is a joy and a delight, but he scares me sometimes with his needs).
Strangely, fending them off, especially backed with a rap sheet as long as my legs (so many emotional crimes I've committed against them), they have resisted so mightily that twice I've been forced to question myself, something I haven't done in a while because I was fairly settled back then. I long for those days when I kept resolute and firm, despite the anger it provoked. With them, I cannot be so sure, because I don't know if I can trust myself about them.
Those rest who have stood with me now for years and years, they are mine and I am theirs. I see in them gladness at my arrival, pleasure in our company, a smile rests on our lips and the conversations between us are both languishing and accelerated, a magical feat I realize has more to do with who they are rather than how I view them. My eyes may be shrewd and observant. My tongue may be critical and lacking tact. They are people who can withstand me because they have no guilt, no shame, no worries. Rather than inspire queries, they inspire awe. I find that the more time I spend with them, the less I need those who confound me.
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