When Words Fail

I suppose that is an ironic title for what will probably be a fairly long entry, but it will make sense at the end.

As I've mentioned in some previous entries, there's been a lot of shit going astray in my life recently, and it was a week ago that 3M told me that she didn't want to continue exploring the possibility of a romantic relationship. There is a reason that I write it this way, which should become apparent over the course of this entry, as opposed to some of the things I've said previously.

When this went down, I was upset more with the way that the message was delivered than I was with the message itself, but after a bit of initial indignance, I realized that I didn't actually feel anything. I wasn't sad. I wasn't angry. Quite literally I just felt nothing, as if the event had not had any emotional impact on me at all. That's been my story on repeat lately:

One of my cats died three weeks prior to 3M's revelation, and it was because of my conscious choice to end his time on this planet. Watching him slowly degrade and decay and become barely able to move was ripping my soul to pieces, and so I had to choose the least wrong of two wrong options. I cried quite a bit when the vet came to do the injection, and I cried when I buried him, but if I think about all the time I had with that cat and how much I loved him, I kept wondering why I wasn't more upset. It is weird to feel bad for not feeling bad.

Same thing with my recent work-related drama. My co-worker and I had our airing of grievances, in which he gave no indication that he was taking any responsibility for anything, and I was somewhat flabbergasted at first and then I just stopped caring.

So let's back up one week from today. My cat is dead. My job is stressing me out. The girl that I am really into has just said that it's not happening. Oh, and I have already signed my lease to stay in SF for another year, so I can't even change plans and leave in December as I was originally going to do. I made the comment to 3M that the situation with her has confirmed a that a growing concern of mine has come to pass, which is that I'm way more broken than I ever expected. My intuition is not working. My ability to gauge situations and make good decisions is not working. I don't feel anything - or, as I described it to R, "it's like the dynamic range on my emotional amplifier has been turned way down. I can have fun. I can laugh at things and enjoy them for the moment. I can get annoyed or temporarily bummed out about something. Then it just goes away." On top of that, my motivation to actually do anything about any of this is nonexistent, and all of that general grayness and disinterest just feeds into itself. I can't count the number of times I've overslept and either just skipped work or called in sick during the last couple of months because I just didn't have the fucks to get out of bed. Nobody has said anything to me about it, and it helps that it's the time of year when we don't have a lot of project work going on because of holiday change freezes and such, but still, I know it's a problem that I need to wrangle in short order.

How do you fix something that you know to be broken while also not giving any shits that it is broken in the first place? How do you get yourself to feel something when you can't seem to feel much of anything? Like I told R, I'm still motivated to go to the gym, and I've got motivation to do this journal project, because I'm hoping to find some clarity / answers / insight in my writings from years past, but as of right now I'm only on 2004 and won't be done with that for another week or so.

I noticed a few moments last week where I felt oddly detached from everything; in one sense this is nothing new for me but the level of detachment was absolutely new. I'm not sure how to describe it other than it almost seemed like for a brief moment there was a part of me that was watching me and evaluating all of this stuff and effectively discounting it all as immaterial and meaningless as opposed to me just being me. I don't know if that's the best description, but watching myself in 3rd person vs. being myself in 1st person is the most accurate thing I can think of.

Fast forward to two days ago, Wednesday. 3M and I had talked briefly on Monday in person but a lot of things still needed to be said, and I had questions to ask. We'd generally agreed that we were going to meet after Thanksgiving and talk further, and I was thinking that I'd go skiing for Thanksgiving because, well, what else am I going to do? The hope was that a little bit of powdery white stuff (no, not that kind of snow) would at least give me something fun to do even if most of the mountains weren't open yet.

Then she invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner. Initially, I was going to decline the invite. I hadn't made any specific plans, but I had a general intention to go skiing, and my immediate reaction was that the timing of the invite was suspect. Prior to last Friday, I had thought that there was a possibility that she might invite me over, but then after last Friday, I figured that Thanksgiving at her house would be the last place I should ever expect to be on Thursday. Went back and forth in my head a few times and ultimately said yes, thinking in my mind that it we were going to be friends that this would be a good way for me to sort out whether or not it felt weird to be around her, or if the whole situation was weird. I also made the mental note to leave the relationship conversation for another time; I was going to go into it with the "let's eat some turkey and then eat some more turkey and go into a tryptophan coma" mindset.

When I got in the car to go to the grocery store to get stuff to make a dessert, I started cracking up laughing, because as I said in the previous entry, a surprising number of things that went wrong in my life around this time last year were happening again. It was at that point that I kinda realized that if I weren't able to laugh at my own misfortune and go all the way down the gallows humor rabbit hole that I'd probably have caused massive amounts of organic damage somewhere. Not that I felt any better about the overall state of life, but at least I could mock the absurdity of it all.

Thursday rolls around, I head over, and ultimately it ends up being her, her roommate, me, and her friend W, who was one of the people that was there on the group outing which ultimately torpedoed the Lusitania. Everything went really well during dinner. Nothing was weird. Conversation flowed without issue between all four people. After dinner, 3M and I are sitting in her kitchen talking about the kinds of things that we usually talk about, none of which have anything to do with relationship stuff, and this, too, is flowing just as easily as it always has.

Eventually we do get to those topics - I really hadn't intended to go there, but we sorta went there a little bit and then I literally said "fuck it" and broached the subject in a more direct fashion. I made my case why I think the whole "fuck yes or no" line of thinking is bollocks, and I also explained why I said that I didn't believe her on Monday. I would say we probably talked for at least 90 minutes, and maybe longer, about this stuff, and here is where my ability to explain the situation is going to break down.

I am trying to describe this feeling that has been the overriding emotion of the last 15 hours, and it's such a strange mixture of things that I have no word for it. Even some of the components of it are without label. R asked me about it earlier today, and I said that it's a bit of melancholy, a bit of loss, a bit of understanding, a bit of knowing, a bit of hope, a bit of protectiveness. I also said that it seemed like there was a love (I really don't want to use this word, but I need a better one) element but not in a romantic or platonic sense - and not a sexual one, either. It's like I feel like I've lost something that I never had in the first place, but at the same time I've gained something that I was not expecting, and thus I have a weird feeling of sorrow mixed in with a feeling of "something else." It's not a bad state, to be clear, nor is it a gray state. But it is also something that is quite foreign to me, and I don't know what to call it or exactly what it means.

About the only thing that I know is that there is some kind of connection between the two of us. We aren't dating. The odds are very close to zero (nothing is impossible - look at the kind of bizarro universe that we have to be living in where Donald Trump can become President - if that can happen, then I don't think anything can ever be categorically ruled out) that we ever will be dating. However, there is still something here. (It is unfortunate that for all the many thousands of words in the various languages of the world, there seems to be such a lack of good words which describe connections between people that aren't the traditional romantic/sexual type but are also something other than garden-variety friends / acquaintances. The only thing that comes to mind is that 3M is one of us. There are not many of us.)

She made the comment that all the synchronicities that have occurred since we've known each other mean that we have come into each other's lives at this point because there's something we have to do or show/teach the other person. I think that is probably accurate, and I know it sounds kinda woo woo, but my universe has plenty of room for woo woo, and even woo woo woo at times. Something similar happened when I met S a few years ago.

I also realized something on the drive home with respect to whether or not my intuition and guidance systems were completely fucked up: they aren't. My intution never specifically said anything about the two of us having a romantic relationship - it only said that there was the potential for something wonderful to happen here. Hell, "wonderful" could have meant that the two of us were going to co-select some lottery numbers on a whim and win Powerball. That would be pretty damn great, but it wouldn't mean we'd be making out on the roof of my office building. The monkey mind sees what it wants to see.

Figuring this out has actually been a big deal in terms of manufacturing motivation and creating some fucks to give, because while I can't say that my mental state has completely turned around and my brain has repaired all of the damage and dealt with all of the accumulated bullshit (it doesn't happen that quickly, even when you're a blackbird), at least I have the wherewithal to keep shoveling, and maybe even trade that shovel in for a bulldozer, and some things are starting to make sense again, even outside of all of this recent chaos.

The lyrics below are from a song by Elysion, and although the song itself holds no particular meaning for me, these are the words that I would have etched on the inside of my soul. Maybe in the next non-LiveJournal entry I will explain why.

Should the sun not dawn again
I will burn the sky
Should this world come to an end
I will make it right
Should the stars all lose their shine
I will light up mine
Should your angel drop his wings
I will help you fly....