Length *and* Substance?
May. 7th, 2004 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormYes, it may well be. My stomach's settled a bit. I'm sure you wanted to know that, right?
I woke up at four this morning. I'd been expecting to be woken by the guy; he'd especially asked me to clean up the livingroom so he could sleep out there, said he'd be quiet coming in, and asked if it was okay to come in and give me a kiss before he went to sleep. I said sure.
Four am, no guy, no call. I sat there wrestling with myself for a bit: there's part of my mind that says, 'hey stupid, he never calls if he's late or not coming home, why worry?' and there's that other part of my mind that says, 'but he said all this stuff, and this isn't a good part of town at night, and he was bussing...' I watched the sky go from as black as it ever gets here to sunrise blue, that colour before any striping or detail appears. If I'd looked down, the roads would have been shining. They always do before dawn like that. An owl floated past the window. I'd never seen an owl before, they really do float, and this one was so very white. It may have been some other colour, but in the morning when everything's shining it was white.
I called the place where he was, and undoubtedly made someone unhappy by waking them up, and it turns out he'd just decided to crash there. Chalk one up for the 'hey stupid, he never calls' side of my mind. Someday it may overwhelm the worried side, who knows?
I'm thinking more and more about making some sort of a semi-permanent move to the boat until he figures stuff out about moving. On the one hand, yeah, I do pay a bunch of rent here and feel like I have some right to the space and I also want to be with him -- I do still want that. It was really hard, though, first to be worrying about him in the firstr place, and second to know that, well... he was happy over there with everyone else, and he didn't owe me a call or anything. You know, it's not pretty, but that does hurt me right now. I seem to be bottom of the heap for dating priorities in my circle, and I think if I 'need' time with someone and can't get it I'd rather not have it rubbed in my face that everyone else is getting what they want, when they want it, and generally under their own conditions.
I've considered, a number of times, just dropping contact with all of them altogether. I think it would be a shorter, sharper, and less lasting kind of pain, but I would probably regret it. I've tended to run away from hard things in my life, and regretted it.
I know this isn't very generous of me.
I wish I could reassure myself 100% that it's okay to be upset now. Intellectually I do think, wow, what a lot of changes and stuff that could reasonably be expected to make you upset. Still, I don't feel like I have a right to it. I feel like if I'm not bright and cheerful and grateful for anything I get, that then I get nothing. I feel like this is going to be trivialised -- oh, she's just being angsty, or oh, I don't like angst.
I mean, I know things will be okay again later, eventually, at some point. I know I'll have some sort of setup that makes me happy at some point in my life. There are, you know, things to live for. This hurts now, though. Does the fact that it won't hurt forever, that other people might hurt more or also, does that make this matter less? It matters to me.
There's something sort of magical about having someone hold you when you cry. It feels really cared-for, it's someone accepting that you're hurt and offering you what comfort they can. Everyone has that, in the beginning, with their mothers. I'm lucky to have had it with other people in the past. I'm lucky to have it, very on and off, now. I suppose I shouldn't complain that I don't have it this minute.
I've been working myself pretty hard lately. I've been spending a lot of my free time accomodating other people -- volunteer work, mostly, and a bunch of 'sure, I'll hold this time open for a date'. I think I need to take a couple of days off all that and hang out at wreck beach -- I still haven't got there this summer. If I schedule some days off it'll likely rain, but hey, you do what you can. Where's a nice, outside, not-cold place to be when it rains in Vancouver?
I woke up at four this morning. I'd been expecting to be woken by the guy; he'd especially asked me to clean up the livingroom so he could sleep out there, said he'd be quiet coming in, and asked if it was okay to come in and give me a kiss before he went to sleep. I said sure.
Four am, no guy, no call. I sat there wrestling with myself for a bit: there's part of my mind that says, 'hey stupid, he never calls if he's late or not coming home, why worry?' and there's that other part of my mind that says, 'but he said all this stuff, and this isn't a good part of town at night, and he was bussing...' I watched the sky go from as black as it ever gets here to sunrise blue, that colour before any striping or detail appears. If I'd looked down, the roads would have been shining. They always do before dawn like that. An owl floated past the window. I'd never seen an owl before, they really do float, and this one was so very white. It may have been some other colour, but in the morning when everything's shining it was white.
I called the place where he was, and undoubtedly made someone unhappy by waking them up, and it turns out he'd just decided to crash there. Chalk one up for the 'hey stupid, he never calls' side of my mind. Someday it may overwhelm the worried side, who knows?
I'm thinking more and more about making some sort of a semi-permanent move to the boat until he figures stuff out about moving. On the one hand, yeah, I do pay a bunch of rent here and feel like I have some right to the space and I also want to be with him -- I do still want that. It was really hard, though, first to be worrying about him in the firstr place, and second to know that, well... he was happy over there with everyone else, and he didn't owe me a call or anything. You know, it's not pretty, but that does hurt me right now. I seem to be bottom of the heap for dating priorities in my circle, and I think if I 'need' time with someone and can't get it I'd rather not have it rubbed in my face that everyone else is getting what they want, when they want it, and generally under their own conditions.
I've considered, a number of times, just dropping contact with all of them altogether. I think it would be a shorter, sharper, and less lasting kind of pain, but I would probably regret it. I've tended to run away from hard things in my life, and regretted it.
I know this isn't very generous of me.
I wish I could reassure myself 100% that it's okay to be upset now. Intellectually I do think, wow, what a lot of changes and stuff that could reasonably be expected to make you upset. Still, I don't feel like I have a right to it. I feel like if I'm not bright and cheerful and grateful for anything I get, that then I get nothing. I feel like this is going to be trivialised -- oh, she's just being angsty, or oh, I don't like angst.
I mean, I know things will be okay again later, eventually, at some point. I know I'll have some sort of setup that makes me happy at some point in my life. There are, you know, things to live for. This hurts now, though. Does the fact that it won't hurt forever, that other people might hurt more or also, does that make this matter less? It matters to me.
There's something sort of magical about having someone hold you when you cry. It feels really cared-for, it's someone accepting that you're hurt and offering you what comfort they can. Everyone has that, in the beginning, with their mothers. I'm lucky to have had it with other people in the past. I'm lucky to have it, very on and off, now. I suppose I shouldn't complain that I don't have it this minute.
I've been working myself pretty hard lately. I've been spending a lot of my free time accomodating other people -- volunteer work, mostly, and a bunch of 'sure, I'll hold this time open for a date'. I think I need to take a couple of days off all that and hang out at wreck beach -- I still haven't got there this summer. If I schedule some days off it'll likely rain, but hey, you do what you can. Where's a nice, outside, not-cold place to be when it rains in Vancouver?
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emotional
Date: 2004-05-07 09:05 am (UTC)Feeling like you are last on the priority list is a very hard place to be, a very un-special place to be. And relationships are about making people feel special, at least some of the time.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-07 10:28 am (UTC)Strangely enough, I was just thinking last night that life might be better if it was like a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' book - I used to always flip ahead to see if I was making a good choice and go from there. The question is, though that might make some difficult things easier to take, it would also muffle the joys.
Hang in there,
Hugs
no subject
Date: 2004-05-07 03:23 pm (UTC)It was good to spend last night together. I'm glad i got to hold you.
It's OK to be demanding some times; and it's Okay to center your life around yourself.
Next weekend I have free (I think it's weekend after the one coming up) we should go to the beach...