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Issues So...let us examine if you will... For the past month and a bit, things had been kind of...strained between me and Helen. Why did this come to pass...I guess in a way, it was just two things. While there are undoubtedly more factors that I could name, there were pretty much two main ones. One, the smaller of the two was that yes, she HAS been fairly busy lately. More projects and little things that just kind of cropped up which obviously lead to less time to talk. Perfectly understandable right? Well, right...to everyone but me -.- which leads me to the second factor... This second was my own insecurities I guess, colored by my bad experiences with Carol. Going through what I did with her...it ripped me apart. Here, a quote. Because everyone likes quotes and there's always someone out there that can say it better than I can. "I'll be all right," I said. He nodded. "That's what we say, anyway, isn't it?" "We?" "Guys. 'I'll be all right.' And if we're not, we try to make sure no one knows it." He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. "If you're not all right, Mikey, and you don't want to call your brother-I saw the way you looked at him-let me be your brother. For Jo's sake if not your own." "Okay," I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I don't call people for help. It's not because of the way I was raised, at least I don't think so; it's the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It's not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, "Are you alright?" I can't answer no. I can't say help me. And in a nutshell, that was me. Just about the asking for help things, I couldn't do it. I would do everything in my power to suffer alone. Nobody really knew me...friends were always just people to chill with and have some fun with when you're bored...not really for confiding in or deriving comfort from. Obviously...this doesn't really apply to me now eh? I mean, after all, look at this site. About half of it is just me bitching away about stuff. I've come a long way from the close-mouthed bastard I used to be... This all changed when I met Carol and started talking to her. There was someone in my life that I could just, open myself up to and so on and so on. You guys know all of the crappy, cliched terms that follow something like that so I'll spare you them, but suffice to say that this was the first person that I totally opened up to. In all practical ways, the first person that I actually made a conscious decision to put my trust into. I'm not going to bother going over all of the details of how much I trusted her and how that ended again...if you're interested, you can go and take a look at the earliest 3-4 of my logs in the Darkness for how I felt and what happened. In a sentence or two, it was as if the basic foundation of the world had been pulled out from under my feet. For a time...I was left adrift and lost a lot of my faith in people in general. Eventually, I moved on from that...as we all do from any problem that comes our way. During it...I thought like...that was it you know? That I wouldn't be able to move on from it and just end up a cynical, depressing bastard for the rest of my life but it was more as if meeting Carol was like, opening a door somewhere in me. Losing her...the door swung shut a bit, but it still remained open. From then, I asked for help from the people around me and the whole whoop-de-do, but that experience left an imprint in me. An emotional footprint? No...more like a crack in the walls that I had up inside me. It left me scarred in a way, making me extremely wary and alert for any possible reincarnations of the same situation. And signs that the same situation was brewing were noticed by me a month or two ago. This time, with Helen instead of Carol. She became busier and it became harder and harder to find time to talk to her. And the thing was, the less that I talked to her, the more uncomfortable the times that we DID talk become you know? Partly because the less I talked to her, the more I fell out of the practice of talking to her...but also because the less we talked, the more similarities I drew between the situation now and the one that happened with Carol. So, being the way I am, I started to draw myself away. My reasoning was...I dunno, maybe just that feeling that things were heading towards the same eventual end, that I didn't want to end up being ripped apart as I was back when that whole thing with Carol ended. I didn't want to hurt as much so I started to draw away and shield myself with indifference and a coldness whenever we did talk. You can imagine how much worse the occasional conversations got... I was kind of blinded by my fear of what was happening. So afraid to be hurt like that again, I saw but didn't realize that as little as we talked...we were still talking. While nobody can see down the path of 'what might have been,'I'd like to believe that maybe if I had accepted her conversational gambits with better grace, if I had responded as I always did when she tried to talk to me instead of just brushing her off all the time, that things would have slowly gotten back to the way that they used to be. That the incident would have passed by without any big bang or mention...but perhaps...things are better this way. Eventually...there came a time when she tried to apologize for not having too much time to talk as she used to...I really don't know what I was thinking but even that, I just brushed it off with a "whatever..." Looking back on it now...I have no idea what the hell I was thinking. No wait, if I'm honest, the reason is made up of two things. One...building up an indifference so that I would hurt less...and the second, there was a part of me that wanted her to hurt >.< It's a small part of me...one that I wish wasn't there, but it is...and I won't lie about it just to make myself look better... -.- Soon after that...I received an email from her. In it, she addressed several issues...among them, why she was finding it hard to talk to me, and how I was making people feel with all my talk of trust and promises. That while they showed that I trusted someone...they could also make them feel like they were tied down, chained to me by them. If any of you reading this feel that way...I can't stress this enough, please, let me know. I won't know if you just keep it to yourself in some effor to avoid confrontation or some misguided effort to spare me pain -.- I can't try to fix what's wrong unless I know that it's going wrong... That letter hurt...but it hurt because it was so...right you know? It's never a very good feeling when you're confronted with something bad about yourself that you slowly realize is nothing but 100% truth. You just take a step back from that automatic defense that pops up and think, REALLY think, 'could this be true.' And when you realize that it is...when you suddenly realize that you've been acting fucking HORRIBLY towards your friends...well, let me tell ya, it's not a very good feeling >.< I spent a couple days offline, just to be alone with my own thoughts to see what they had to say about everything that I had learned...to see if I had any justifiable excuse...or it it was just all on the mark. It took me some time to think it through and a sleepless night or two to write a response to that letter...but in the end, I did get around to realize that she DID still care about me... It was a tremendous relief...a weight that had been building up for the past month or so just lifted off. I can't really put it into words...just...it's along the same lines as relief. Think of an ice cold drink when you're dying of thirst...or air to the drowning man. Or maybe finally paying off that last big debt, and the relief you feel when you suddenly realize that you're completely debt free. Like I said, it was a good feeling...she sent me a response to my response a day later...and while there were some things in it that...slightly disturbed me-like when she pointed out that I was still kind of in denial about the whole thing with my dad-overall, I think that the relief was the dominant emotion. So things...went relatively back to normal between us. She's still busy, but at least, now I don't doubt the fact that she cares about me as a friend you know? So I was thinking 'great', things are back to normal and for the first time in the past month or so, I was feeling relatively okay and human again. A day passes...then, someon else...draws away from me because she's been feeling superfluous and unneeded by me... So right on the heels of a problem that arose from needing someone too much...I have another that stems from apparently, not needing someone enough >.< It's enough to drive a guy nuts...I honestly don't see how I can show her that I need her more... Sigh...wheeee, after a month of feeling like shit, I get a day of being worry-free before...back into a hole =.= I swear...it's enough to drive a guy nuts... So peace out...I'm sleeping...if I can. |