Early, 7 February 2007

Gonna try and enlighten y'all...

...in the way that I feel I've been recently affected. I'm also going to try cohesion, which is something I'm oddly having trouble with over the past few days; it would seem that two-point-five weeks of the shot isn't long enough to balance one completely, so I've entered into the fog that is PMS, although I will get no period. Ever again. Atrophied ovaries and whatnot.

I've touched before on being a bridge burner, I've proudly called myself a loner for most of my life and have been mostly satisfied with this title out of little more than an extreme fear of confrontation and conflict that naturally accompanies all relationships, romantic and not. In other words, if I become your friend and we conflict in some way, I am more likely to pull away from the relationship -- slowly or abruptly, depending on the situation and geography -- than I am to stick around and find an aggreable end. It's painfully immature, stunted and cowardly, if not sometimes completely valid and warranted, and it's my second-to-most-hated compulsion that I am determined to conquer, the first one being the Carrot Of Which We Will Not Speak.

Resolution Not Dissolution. Someone make me buttons. Or stickers. Or a t-shirt. Ain't too proud to beg....

There are a handful of folks who will never again get my attention, who have either shown me exactly who they are (ah, Ms. Angelou: When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them...), who have proven themselves intolerable in this particular camp and are permanently expelled; there are those who have inflicted physical, emotional or sexual violence on me, those whose mere prospective presence can propel me into a fit of anxiety and perspiration, and there are those with whom I have half-heartedly attempted resolution but have been stymied by my nasty flight compulsion.

Flight Not Fight. Not sticker/button/t-shirt-worthy at all. Begging.

I have been actively trying to not leave Brian every time we've had an argument in the past almost-six years. Go ahead: Ask him. He'll tell, and how; breaking your own heart by virtue of your own weakness and chipping away at someone else's love and trust is a fine art that I highly recommend not taking the 101 on -- if you're not already fucking up someone's life (or on the road to repairing your own damage), don't start. It's like smoking, I imagine: You'll never know if you're an addict or an habitual user until you try and stop, which is when the challenge comes in. Either way, give a holla to Sisyphus when you pass him on the hill because it's a struggle and a half.

So I have this friend, who may or may not read this blog, with whom I had an argument last week and it was painful: I lost sleep, I cried, I raged to a whole bunch of people and I came to a whole bunch of conclusions as to how it was all going to pan out and not one of them was resolution. Actually, all of them were dissolution, complete separation, emotional write-off, finito...I actually convinced myself for several days that I truly hated this person, that everything I thought about him was wrong and that he truly was what he portrays on the surface (which is not who he is at all, not in the very least, and I feel honored to have always been able to see through that shell and into his heart even though I frequently feel like I'm one of the few that can do so) and that he was disposable. I was on the cusp of a breakup, again.

Oh my darlin, oh my darlin,
How can you forget
All the love we had between us?
Now it's like we've never met.

Then he surprised me with a phone call, an olive branch, a meek-but-sincere plea for resolution that melted me and snapped me back to reality, which is that I deeply care for this person and I cannot afford to lose his friendship -- it is very, very dear to me. Make no mistake: I was angry, justifiably so, and I let him know and he let me let him know and he heard me, I'm sure, and he came to my home and ate my food and perused my library; we hugged and kissed many times and I was filled with so much joy over this revelation that I was high at the end and a strange thing came of this dual resolution: I was able, then, to truly love and appreciate everyone else that was present at the time -- so much so that I was full to bursting and had to take a whole sleeping pill to lay down my head, it was so overwhelming.

So I made a birthday resolution of resolution, at most costs, and dissolution at some. I highly recommend this path; it is fragrant and flat and made from that spongy playground material that's ecofriendly and absorbs all shock and there is enlightenment at every turn, not just at the end. I figure I've put in around a quarter-mile toward the rest of my life.