Dear Diary,
I’ll break my heart as many times as it takes. My words. To live, we’ve got to die a little each day. To risk a little each day. To give and receive. To connect. Does a broken heart always hurt? Can it be healed? Can it be made whole again? Should we sew on the old, atrophied bits of ourselves or trust that we will grow healthy new flesh in time? I keep sewing the rotten bits back on and then I ask myself silly questions like why does it hurt so much? Why do my wounds keep getting infected? Why does it hurt every time I breathe? So maybe it is okay to have pieces missing sometimes. Maybe a heart can grow back.
I am emotionally invested in someone. It is a parody of a relationship. It’s a relationship which camouflages and masquerades and assumes a different level of meaning/significance every day. It’s CHAOS. It’s real. It isn’t real. It’s reality adjacent? Get me? If you don’t understand then YOU ARE NOT listening. Sorry. Yes where was I? I am emotionally invested in someone. He loves me. He loves me not. You know the deal.
You know what hurts the most? Resistance. My own resistance to a person, a situation, my emotional states. I’m a fighter/a survivor. I’m strong. I am also lonely and panic-driven. I am fleeting, mood based. A phenomena. As humans we make things solid through definition. Freedom sounds beautiful but freedom is soft and vulnerable. And if observation tells me anything people don’t want to be soft and vulnerable. Maybe what we really want is a luxury prison cell.
We are all connected. To each other. To the planet. To the universe. You get it? I sometimes think there are no individuals at all just a kind of ubiquitous hunger. People tell me I should set boundaries. I have tried to set boundaries but boundaries make me feel constricted and small. I want to explore. To invade other countries. Countries being people. I want to know everything there is about being human and I can’t very well learn everything there is if I have a wall between myself and everyone I encounter. Maybe boundaries aren’t walls, maybe they are bridges. I don’t understand. Enlighten me.
I have always felt that in order to be worthy of love I needed to accommodate my partner’s needs, however unreasonable and repress my own. I am too stubborn to really give myself totally over to the will of another and yet I never quite manage to find my own voice either. I end up living in a weird kind of limbo. Not quite myself. Not quite somebody else. Not enough of this or that. Too much of the wrong things. I am clingy, especially at the beginning. For some reason that surprises me every time I enter a new relationship. It doesn’t even have to be a romantic relationship but it’s definitely more intense when there is some romantic interest. I only have one romantic interest but he is kind of infuriating, kind of sweet.
I sometimes wonder if I can be myself in a relationship, any relationship. If the desire to fight/resist and the desire to please might not just be too strong within me. There’s a war inside of me. A hunger which cannot be fed or starved. A hunger like a void. A hunger which is both there and not there at the same time. A hunger which is probably born of self-rejection. That dreadful state which keeps me vacillating between panic and delirium.
The more I think about relationships the less I seem to know for certain. I fed my marriage and my husband starved. I guess maybe I am like celery by the time you work through all the fibrous bits (survivor’s skin) you’ve depleted your energy reserves. I don’t mean to be so difficult but I am difficult to know, to love. I am not unlovable, I am just resistent.
The thing is deep down maybe I don’t want a relationship but a childhood. I want to go on adventures. I want to have a single person be the totality of my existence when present. I want to crawl under the covers with a flashlight and talk in excited whispers for hours about beautiful and terrifying things. Things I have never spoken out loud before. Minimal censorship. Free. I want to be innocent. To feel innocent I want something playful. Volatile. Creative.
I want to touch another person as if I didn’t know what it meant to empty one body into another. I want to be organic. Orgasmic with life. To have reality and fantasy permeate my being at the same moment. I want to discover a person and take them whole even the parts I can’t really fit into my life but I am scared. I have so many memories of rejection, of heartache, of loss. So when I am with someone I think of all the ways I might lose them and then I am not so much with them as I am against the clock, against a whole history of personal failures and character flaws, and faulty belief systems (theirs and mine). That’s not how I want to be. How I want to feel. I want to be open and curious. I want to enjoy myself. Freedom scares me I guess.
Maybe I just want a friend I can touch. A savior. A sentient teddy bear. A provider. A stalker. A mentor. A therapist. An admirer. A playmate. A lover. A priest. A partner. An interrogator. A sloppy crush. The love of my life. A twin. A spouse. A madman without criminal tendencies. All the things I should want and all the things a strong woman should never want much less say out loud.
mindlovemisery 