This Is What Life Is…

The happy, sappy words, the words that deny the despair, the words that are meant to pull me up by my bootstraps and proclaim to the world that no one else - goddamn it! - can take away my joy, the warm fuzzies that had settled into the pit of my stomach, filling it with the beginnings of hope…those words are bullshit. They are lies, they are denial, they are flat out untruths.

And I knew it when I wrote them. Knew them to be false. Knew that my pathetic little attempt to stop the descent into despair was not going to work, that I was a failure. That I didn’t have the goddamn strength to keep his words from dragging me down, could not stop him from reaching down into my gullet and ripping the fledgling hope right out, leaving the usual crushing depression, victorious and stronger even than before, to settle in once again, familiar and smirking. Leaving me so tired and defeated once again.

Even after the realization on his part, the knowing, the regrets and self-recriminations, still, my hope is gone. Oh, it will come back, although when I don’t know, but likely as not, it will be crushed as well, whether by him or yet another shoe crashing into the ground.

I try, please believe me, I try so fucking hard. But the eternal optimist has been replaced by a sad, bitter and hopeless pessimist. Leaving me to wonder when, no, to wonder if, I can ever find my happy, silver lining self again.

Intimacy.

Can I live without it?

Do I have a fucking choice? No.

So the answer to the first question is: Deal with it, honey. Face the fact that your happinesses, your successes, your small baby steps and especially your big gigantic leaps, will be flatlined. There will be no happy response, no kudos. Fishing only makes it worse. What will happen when my friend moves out and I have no one to come home to to share these things, to get at least a modicum of appropriate responses?

But there is no one else. Not yet. I need another friend. Please. After my closest one chose a mean way to abandon me years ago, I am left bereft, with not a prospect in site.

And where shall I find such a friend? In a doctor’s office? At a goddamn support group for us gimps once a month so that we can share our medical woes?

At least the latter is a possibility; these people will understand me and I them. I just need to watch out for energy leeches and look for someone with some sense of self-awareness. Sigh, so hard to get out, though.

But back to happiness! Such happiness, such joy today. Two children, two conversations, one a catharsis of sorts, an acceptance of flaws, closure, truth.

The other casual, with some serious truth mixed in. An friendly exchange of information; although I hope I was selfless enough.

I cannot let his apathy, his withholding, ruin the bliss. I will let it wash over me tonight. Regardless of anyone’s reaction, I will continue to have my own reaction, my own joy.

I will not let his lack of intimacy tarnish my feelings of intense intimacy. That is me. I have been him for far too long…

…Sadness, that I never enjoyed what I had, because I never knew that it/they/fucking everything would be taken away so suddenly, so arbitrarily: Health, cognition, feeling pain free for even just a moment. Being able to run, be tough, play foosball, eat a piece of fudge, write a fucking article, read a fucking book, write a song to ease my pain and work out the riffs on my beloved guitar. Be with my children, which is the hardest of all.

If I would have known that each time was the last (say, playing bouncy ball in the street, singing on a stage, not having pain) I would have savored it, I  would have soaked up the joy and the sheer tactile sensations and stored them away so that I could have tried to remember them.

On the other hand, knowing me, I might have just wallowed at the fact that they were being taken away, who knows.

It’s just that so many things have been taken away, and I keep trying to stay hopeful, but hope keeps slipping away. The other shoe keeps on dropping, only now they’re boots, and I am so tired of trying to dodge them.