Batter My Heart

Well, I never.

I just.  I just.  I just.  So tired.  So out of it. So not ready to give you a good post.  It feels perfunctory and so I must offer you my apologies and hope that you won’t give up on me based on this one Monday where I feel like a thousand Mondays have pooled and drowned me.

I will give you some words.  Got home from the bowling tournament.  Had a very sad feeling that I tamped down.  Thought about how it’s been six years in succession that things have been precisely and exactly the same, me sitting in the corner with my tickets trying to relate to things outside of the room because what’s in the room is old people and death and…of course, bowling, and laughter and alcohol and food and friends and young people that I haven’t met yet and a tremendous amount of worthwhile things that could vie for my attention if I could deign to give up any.  Very Amelie.  But Amelie was a better person than me and fictional and she had a destin fabuleux to take care of her in the end.

It’s one of those days where things start to get to you.  Pea-sized little nothings start to pierce through the stack of mattresses.  We start to find ourselves as delicate as onion-skin.  The way people brush past you and forget you and jokingly say to you “Oh, I just flew right past you, sorry!”   So cheerful and unconcerned that there’s no way or reason to explain the sorrow it inspires in you that you are so forgettable.   That’s not what they meant at all, but I invent the slight to trigger the sorrow.  I extrapolate the hurt so that it makes sense to withdraw.  And I smile so that no one ever knows I’m thinking they’ve upset me.  It’s a clever way to punish yourself and everyone around you for drawing breath at a level above some invisible and unknowable par in a game no one knows that we’re playing.

The guy who I think is nice, but who I wouldn’t want to date.  Who is dating someone.  Who would never date me if all things were available and the scales equal.  Who always seems to say hi and be nice so that I have a reason to like him?  Blew right past me.  And I think of the pictures from the past six years and how blobby and terrible and I went into this dark and miserable place where the worst of my demons got me and beat me to a bloody pulp.

And, of course, work is throttling me and I want only to be here in this bed with the flickering candlelight on the books and my guitar I can’t really play, hidden away in my ugliness and fatness and terribleness and this anxious, unmet desire to receive gentleness and attention and I have to get this email from someone on OKCupid.  Who wants to meet for coffee and clever talk.

And I know I have to say yes, because if I literally don’t accept actual opportunities, how can I not blame myself for not finding progress in my life? But everything in me is telling me about how mean it is to show up as I am, how wasteful to try and pass myself off as someone eligible or present or able to connect.  I feel like Cyrano de Bergerac, all my wordplay a gift best given to someone else to speak.  That I don’t want this, I don’t want the work of this, I don’t want this love not handed  to me on a silver platter with me standing there, like in a movie.  I want myself on a pedestal and that, too, is depressing and sickening.  These cross-purposes of self-idealization and self-loathing.  Trying to figure out who to believe.