Posts tagged with "pain"

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.)

Thumbnail: Heart in the window

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”.

Diagram for heartbreak: Why won't you let me get over you?

Diagram for Heartbreak: Why won't you let me get over you?

Diagram for Heartbreak: Might as well not even try

Diagram for Heartbreak: Maybe I should be an asshole

Diagram for Heartbreak: Kissing ratios?

Diagram for Heartbreak: Lose-lose situation

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.

  1. 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

Tulip carnation bouquet

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.