Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal.
—Anatole
Sometimes it feels like I’m being punished for a crime I never committed.
remainder
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old habit
- Rob: Sometimes it still hurts. You know how it is, man. It’s like, you wake up every day and it hurts a little bit less, and then you wake up one day and it doesn’t hurt at all. And the funny thing is, is that, this is kinda wierd, but it’s like, it’s like you almost miss that pain.
- Mike: You miss the pain?
- Rob: Yeah, for the same reason that you missed her… because you lived with it for so long.
—Swingers
I’m in my last days of high-school again. Pretty much this. Feeling like I have the rest of my life ahead of me with so much to look forward to, but only cause I’m trying to shed everything that happened in the final disastrous year.
I remember writing a lot back then in this black notebook. It was filled with all these verbal scribbles, short passages of text, words, lyrics, emotions I couldn’t contain. My thoughts were a jumble, lost somewhere between the pain and the love of how it made me feel alive.
That’s how I feel now. Old habits break hard.
About once every two years I unceremoniously threw it out and bought a new one, because I hated everything in it. I never wanted to think of myself as the person who wrote all the things in there. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll look back on these entries one day and think the same.
Lover/Dreamer
(+5 bonus points if you get the album reference.)
I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it!
—Quiz Kid Donnie Smith, Magnolia
Okay, I’ll admit it.
I need to love. I need it, the way I need to eat.
This is the same part of me that notices the faint outlines of hearts drawn in car windows. Also, the same part that marvels about that adolescent point in life, when one would draw something so simple and insignificant because the only worry was whether or not someone liked you back.
So when I don’t have someone to love, it fucking kills me.
Diagram For Heartbreak
I love making these little diagrams. It’s so cathartic. I remember reading this xkcd comic (Do you know the functions? Answers in the footnote1.) a long time ago, and thinking, “Yeah, I don’t get it either”.
I’ve always been a visual person, but I never realized that doing something like this would make things so much clearer. All those years earning a degree in computer science — learning Venn diagrams, flow charts, and the like — have finally come in handy.
- From left to right, top to bottom: square root of love, cosine of love (trigonometry), derivative of love (calculus), matrix multiplication of love (linear algebra), and someone help me out with the last one, it seems like another calculus equation with some constants thrown in the Fourier transformation of love (Hat tip to Edd Sowden for this one). [↑]
Goodbye, Love
On our last day together she brought me a bouquet of tulips and carnations, and a Joe Hisaishi CD — a childhood memory of mine she ordered from Japan. I had mentioned it in passing on one of our walks as the only album I’ve been unable to find for download or purchase, and there it was, in my hands.
We watched Before Sunrise, and afterward, we laid next to each other on the couch, silent, unsure of what to say, because there was no comfort to be had. Soon, I was kissing the tears from her face, over and over again.
She asked what she was going to do without me. How long it was going to be before we saw each other again. Whether a simple phone call was allowed. I could say nothing, because I understood the necessity of it all.
So she said she was being reduced to an observer, and I grew cold and distant. It was the first time I had considered my own feelings, when I had felt reduced to much more than that, and she wasn’t making it any easier. With her lips on my neck and her hand through my hair, she comforted me in turn, and our passion took hold of us one last time.
Before she left, I hugged her, felt her tears grow cold on my shoulder, and kissed her once more on the cheek. Thank you, she said.
My heart has been filled with a calm sadness ever since. A struggle between the pain of being away from her, and knowing that it’s for the best. That we would be stronger, and more stable when it was all over.
In the days since, I’ve remembered the things I wanted to say to her before she left my back porch, running to car without looking back before the emotion could overwhelm her. Things that didn’t come to my head because I was too focused on keeping myself together.
Don’t stop creating. Take care of yourself. I love you.
Pain Is Better Than Emptiness
I’ve come to realize that I cling to pain and yearning because they give me inspiration. They may not be the sole source, but certainly a great deal. I always listen to Leonard Cohen and Elliot Smith during such moods, as they have the ability to intensify and deepen the sadness.
I can tell it’s something of a destructive habit. It’s almost like I subconsciously choose to dwell on things that have been resolved for the sake of something to write about.
It makes me think of the last lines from King Missile’s song Ed:
“Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it’s better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this.”
Is this how I feel alive, a way of bringing significance to my life? Or is this the way I truly feel, and I’m simply a slow healer, and too much of a thinker?
Or perhaps the better question is this: does happiness inspire me just as much?
Life Is Pain
Sometimes, you stab yourself in the hand with a point, but it’s not sharp enough to break the skin.
Sometimes, the blood comes to the surface, and this is as much of yourself as you can show the world.
Sometimes, the pavement is covered in snow outside, and you can drive over 100kph in one spot before the traction kicks in.
Sometimes, you scare yourself with your recklessness.
Sometimes, you realize that life is pain.
Sometimes, you have nothing left but numbness and resolve.
I Found Her
The woman I’ve been looking for my entire life.
Her name was Christine. She was thin lipped. Frail limbed. Not the least bit camera shy, as she pulled her shirt up to expose a breast, like she had fallen on the grass this way and the folds in her clothes rearranged themselves on her body.
Here she is on a horse in the night. Here she is, grim-faced, cradling her son. There was a scar on her neck from a suicide attempt years earlier, and through a series of photographs, you could see the scar heal.
For seven years she was married, before she successfully jumped to her death from the 9th floor of an apartment in East Berlin.
A blink in my eye, a snap of someone else’s shutter. A muse of flesh and blood. The Jane Birkin to Serge Gainsbourg. The Olga Ivinskaya to Boris Pasternak.
This is someone who understood his art, his morbidity, his need to capture her suicide in a frame, then publish the image of her body on the pavement, looking down from the 9th floor, along with insouciant pictures of a teacup, a playground, a tank, three plants.
And as soon as I had found her, she’s gone.
Should I be happy that she existed? Should I be sad that she’s gone? Should I be punished for comparing the women I’ve had to her?
Is this painful, or beautiful, or both?
Love is a Bohemian Child
Quand je vous aimerai?
ma foi, je ne sais pas,
peut-être jamais, peut-être demain,
mais pas aujourd’hui, c’est certain.
One day, he discovered that she loved him just as much as the day she left, and that every new man she sought for comfort was just another attempt to replace him; he was unlike anyone she had ever met before. But there was nothing that could be done; the pain had left him cold and unmoved.
So enough about love, he said, for love is often fickle and unrequited.
And it’s only being on both sides of such an idea that allows him to accept this.
Time vs. Forgiveness
John figured out that I don’t forgive people because my memory is too good.
And it’s true. Not only do I remember experiences, but emotions. It’s like I can relive every moment I’ve been hurt down to the smallest detail1. The pain remains strong and salient, years after the incidents have passed.
I’m sure it’s a defence mechanism of some kind. Harm avoidance, my therapist would call it.
While time may heal wounds for most, it doesn’t for me. I’m generally fine with this, since I believe that it should be actions and apologies that breed forgiveness, not time.
It’s only hard when I want to forgive someone, but I can’t.
- This works with the other extreme too; for me, being happy is just as vivid. [↑]
My Mom Keeps Calling
And I keep hanging up.
The first thing she asks, nonchalantly like nothing has happened, is whether I’ve eaten yet. This is something thing she used to say at the beginning of every phone call. One of her old habits, to make sure I’m eating enough.
I didn’t answer her question, but asked what she wanted. She told me she just wanted to see how I was doing.
She doesn’t get it. I don’t want to talk to her. I never want to talk to her again. Every call is a reminder of the wounds that haven’t healed.
It’s like having your rapist show up at the door with flowers.
A Difference of Love
“Love doesn’t end, just because we don’t see each other.”, she told him
“Doesn’t it?”, he asked.
“People go on loving God, don’t they? All their lives. Without seeing Him.”
“That’s not my kind of love.”
I realize that on days like this — when the wind is cutting through the seams of my jacket, when my stomach is so cramped that it twitches, when I’m uncontrollably nodding off to sleep on the bus, when my transfer expires before I can use it, when incompetence isn’t keeping my appointments — that I can’t call you. It just wouldn’t help.
You abandoned me when I needed you the most. I’ll never trust you with anything important again. Including me.
You may say you love me, but I don’t love you. Not anymore.
This is how I realize that love is defined differently by different people.
My love is (was) boundless.
Yours is of convenience.
A Test Of Love
So I deleted your numbers off my speed dial. I took down your pictures. It was an in-the-moment thing.
I’m calm now, seeing things objectively, yet still undecided.
Part of me wants to believe we can still be friends. That we can still hang out without me depending on you for anything. But I’m not like that, and I don’t stay friends with those on whom I can’t depend.
I put aside my issues for my friends, and I needed you to do the same for me.
I cried, not only because you weren’t there when I needed you, not only because you had a responsibility to my friends as well, but because I never allow those who hurt me so much to be a part of my life. Our friendship may be lost, and this is what upsets me the most. Perhaps it hurts so much because you were so important to me. I don’t want to lose that, but I’ll never forget what you did and I’ll never trust you again.
And if I can forgive you, you’ll know that I truly love you.
The Cut-Off Defence
Through all this, I’ve come to realize that I cut people out of my life as a defence mechanism.
When someone hurts me, I distance myself from them so they mean nothing to me.
And if someone means nothing to me, they can’t hurt me.
Often it’s an easy choice — just one wrong word or action — but not all the time. Cutting off my mom was by no means a rash decision; it took years of consideration and plenty of chances before she finally went too far.
What surprises me the most is that even though I now know that I have this defence mechanism, I don’t see a problem with it.
I’ve been hurt by enough people, and I don’t want to be hurt any more.