Forever Things

Unusual for me these days, I woke up this morning in a vitriolic rage that gilded the edges of the morning with contempt for any kind of God who could allow a sick world like ours to exist.

But I'm feeling much better now.

I wonder if part of the aggression I felt this morning was due to not going to the gym in so long that my hair has grown back and my beard is getting scratchy again in the interval since I last donned a duffel bag and a tight-fitting pair of shorts. As we enter into a do-or-die period at work, I find it harder and harder to fit in all the ritualistic steps needed to enjoy a visit to the gym that doesn't end up with me forgetting something important. Like my asthma inhaler.

I spent the day dawdling around the house, primarily at the behest of my boss who asked me to stay available should anything occur while the team is short-staffed in Winnipeg today. I let myself get talked into a run to the local farmers' market and a trip to the AT&T store this afternoon anyway.

I can't find a new phone I both a) like and b) want to pay to have.

While not slacking off, I rewired my mail server's internals a bit to see what will happen. What will happen? We'll see.

We've rented a carpet cleaner for the weekend, so naturally the cats are flipping out over the change of furniture and the loud noises that periodically emanate from a device that looks and acts just like the evil, dreaded vacuum cleaner, only somehow a hundred times worse.

I sit and I watch Spaz as he perches precariously on the stairs. He watches the cleaner go back and forth, up and down the room, his eyes a mix of fascination and fear. He stays alert, ready at any moment to turn tail and bound up the stairs to a safer place where the noise is lessened and he at least can't see the damned thing right in front of him.

On the complete opposite end of the coping scale, Vivido lounges eight feet up where she knows nothing can get her.

I've realized that the reason I haven't come to terms with what's happened is that it's most likely something I can never fully resolve. Like death and amputations, this is just going to be one of those "forever" things.

I'm not really sure where to go from here. My therapist wishes to dote upon my anxiety issues and just get me used to being around people, but that isn't the quick fix that I'll continuously be searching to find. I dread the first next relationship, since it will undoubtedly end up being some new kind of terrible that I've never even thought of before.

Then again, I probably shouldn't be wholly terrified of something I can't even contemplate yet. I'm still figuring out who I am as a single person, so there's really no telling what I'm capable of as a halfling. I hope to hell I've learned something from all of this. I hope to hell I don't fall into the same pitfalls as before.

I suppose I need to evaluate the pros and cons of being in any kind of couple. I enjoy making my own life decisions and not having to adapt them to meet the needs of someone else. I found a new home, a new job, and a phenomenal new city all because I was free of any kind of binding commitments to someone else, and every single step of this whole adventure has been affirming. The only negative point regarding this is that I am kicking myself for having been duped into waiting so long to finally reach for and take hold of what I've always wanted and, with some small humility here, what I've always known I could accomplish.

I certainly regret the path that got me here. Every step of it. Oh, sure, it didn't seem so bad at the time, but there is a grievous pitfall in thinking that one's perception is one's reality. I wonder how much of my life has been spent feeding into someone's delusion that everything was fine and things were going to be OK. All of the parts of the old relationship that I miss seem now to me to be part of an act we played that, from two thousand miles and many many months away, seems so sick that I can't believe I didn't see the cracks in the foundation until the house was already coming down on my head.

And wouldn't you know it, I miss those parts nonetheless. This too, I'm sad to say, is probably one of those "forever" things. I've hashed and rehashed the recent and blessedly less-recent events of my life and I don't have any good answers for how to deal with telling people that my last girlfriend acted for all the world like either a cat, a child, or both.

It doesn't speak well of me, either, to say I didn't mind in the slightest. It was endearing. Of course, this goes back to that "feeding a delusion" thing. Not that I think she thought she was actually a cat, mind you, but that we were both comfortable with her purporting to be something she was not. It was more convenient to play the part and pretend than to look at the situation with eyes wide open and try to fix what was already clearly irreparable.

It keeps me up at night to think how I contributed to my own horrific downfall. If anything, I can strive to not make those same mistakes again. That as well will have to be one of those "forever" things.