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Confidential to Miss Jenny-O
Nov. 6th, 2005 09:10 amHAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!
May your next year be a road trip with nothing but blue skies, open roads, and good songs on the radio.
Nov. 6th, 2005
May your next year be a road trip with nothing but blue skies, open roads, and good songs on the radio.
My enemy is my own self.
Nov. 6th, 2005 10:11 amI'm formally seeing my friend L off tonight. She'll be here for another couple of days, but I'll be working late for those days, and so it'll have to be today if we're to spend more than a couple of hours together.
Objectively speaking, I'm taking this a lot harder than I should. She's leaving town, sure, but she's only going to Atlanta. She'll be an hour away, she's in a place I'm glad for an excuse to visit, she's made it clear that she's happy to hear from me. But her leaving town means that the last of my three good friends here in town is gone, and I'll have to start over, and I'm just not any good at the starting-over part of life, or the making-friends part either, for that matter.
I mean, you can say that you like me, and that proves that I'm not the completely shitty friend I think I am. And I bet you think that you do like me! Maybe you see my livejournal posts and smile. Maybe you even miss me when I'm gone. But here's the thing: I doubt you would have much interest in me, in real life. I would get together with you and you would be happy to see me at first, but within a couple of hours, you'd be staring longingly at the exits, changing the subject, biting your lip through the uncomfortable silences, not actually saying that I am boring you to tears, but only stopping just short of that fact. You'd find me tiresome, I'm sure.
People do. I say this not because I am playing for sympathy but because I can think of maybe six people in my life who don't find it something of a struggle to connect with me, and one of those people is my mother and although she does count, she is, I believe, required by law to find me worth paying attention to. Anyway, L is one of these people, and having her around for the last year or so, not changing the subject, not interrupting, asking questions and waiting for me to answer even when I stammer--yes, I stammer--or pause to collect my thoughts, played a huge part in my recently-successful struggle to the surface of life. It's amazing how comforting having someone like this around can be, and I am going to miss that. More than miss it.
What I'm worried about is not the idea of being alone, because I am alone all the time. Solitude doesn't frighten me; I agree with Glenn Gould that the ratio of time one spends alone to time one spends in company is necessarily large. It's isolation that frightens me. The idea of being living in a town where there's no one to call if I want Indian food at the last possible second (to use the most frivolous example I can think of) fills me with a profound anxiety, because the last time I was isolated, here and in New Orleans, the last time I felt as though there was no one I could spend time with who actually liked the same things I did and who didn't seem to mind that I had very little to say for myself and had trouble saying even that, the last time, I say, I felt isolated, I felt as though I were dying. The constant ache in the back of my throat, the struggle to breathe, the struggle to believe that I was worth anything at all. A struggle, to make things perfectly clear, that I came close to losing.
It may not be true, that L is the last thing standing between me and that oblivion from last year. I'm willing to believe that it isn't, and that fact alone--a fact that would certainly not have been true a year ago--is enough to allow me to hope that life will be okay even after she moves and there's no one to see stupid movies with anymore. But it doesn't stop me from thinking, helplessly, What if it isn't enough?
Objectively speaking, I'm taking this a lot harder than I should. She's leaving town, sure, but she's only going to Atlanta. She'll be an hour away, she's in a place I'm glad for an excuse to visit, she's made it clear that she's happy to hear from me. But her leaving town means that the last of my three good friends here in town is gone, and I'll have to start over, and I'm just not any good at the starting-over part of life, or the making-friends part either, for that matter.
I mean, you can say that you like me, and that proves that I'm not the completely shitty friend I think I am. And I bet you think that you do like me! Maybe you see my livejournal posts and smile. Maybe you even miss me when I'm gone. But here's the thing: I doubt you would have much interest in me, in real life. I would get together with you and you would be happy to see me at first, but within a couple of hours, you'd be staring longingly at the exits, changing the subject, biting your lip through the uncomfortable silences, not actually saying that I am boring you to tears, but only stopping just short of that fact. You'd find me tiresome, I'm sure.
People do. I say this not because I am playing for sympathy but because I can think of maybe six people in my life who don't find it something of a struggle to connect with me, and one of those people is my mother and although she does count, she is, I believe, required by law to find me worth paying attention to. Anyway, L is one of these people, and having her around for the last year or so, not changing the subject, not interrupting, asking questions and waiting for me to answer even when I stammer--yes, I stammer--or pause to collect my thoughts, played a huge part in my recently-successful struggle to the surface of life. It's amazing how comforting having someone like this around can be, and I am going to miss that. More than miss it.
What I'm worried about is not the idea of being alone, because I am alone all the time. Solitude doesn't frighten me; I agree with Glenn Gould that the ratio of time one spends alone to time one spends in company is necessarily large. It's isolation that frightens me. The idea of being living in a town where there's no one to call if I want Indian food at the last possible second (to use the most frivolous example I can think of) fills me with a profound anxiety, because the last time I was isolated, here and in New Orleans, the last time I felt as though there was no one I could spend time with who actually liked the same things I did and who didn't seem to mind that I had very little to say for myself and had trouble saying even that, the last time, I say, I felt isolated, I felt as though I were dying. The constant ache in the back of my throat, the struggle to breathe, the struggle to believe that I was worth anything at all. A struggle, to make things perfectly clear, that I came close to losing.
It may not be true, that L is the last thing standing between me and that oblivion from last year. I'm willing to believe that it isn't, and that fact alone--a fact that would certainly not have been true a year ago--is enough to allow me to hope that life will be okay even after she moves and there's no one to see stupid movies with anymore. But it doesn't stop me from thinking, helplessly, What if it isn't enough?