Monthly Archives: June 2012

hay. been a while.

You must be sav­ing the world as I write this, mak­ing it a bet­ter place for the ones like me who nev­er seem to care enough to make a dif­fer­ence. Aside from the easy things like recy­cling and sav­ing my laun­dry for large batch­es, of course, but that’s what you’d con­sid­er bare min­i­mum, and it always felt like you used some­thing like that as excuse to keep us at a dis­tance.

Maybe that’s why I’ve nev­er felt as in the way as when I was with you. It hurt to think I was only slow­ing you down, when I’d already planned so much. There were more shots to take, more cheeks to pinch, and parts of the world to explore togeth­er.

I know you need­ed a fight­er to match your heart, but that’s not why I chal­lenged you. Not cause I was a skep­tic either, but because I want­ed to be con­vinced. I want­ed to be edu­cat­ed. I want­ed you to change every pre­con­ceived notion I had of agri­cul­ture and cor­po­rate farm­ing and sus­tain­able growth with strong argu­ments and sound log­ic. But instead, you mis­took it as apa­thy and con­flict, and just gave up.

That’s why I won­der why you tried to kiss me last time, when things had already fall­en apart. And whether I should have turned around; if you would have seen you get­ting in your car and dri­ving off, or whether you would have lin­gered to see me wave through the glass. But I could­n’t look back, cause I’d had enough of you hav­ing enough of me.

The only things you left me with were a huge pur­ple bruise and three songs in my col­lec­tion, but I still need to thank you for some­thing rich and ful­fill­ing. Something that made me stronger, cause you were the only per­son to ever call them beau­ty marks, the only one to tru­ly make me feel impor­tant and desir­able and val­i­dat­ed.

That’s prob­a­bly why I think of leav­ing some­thing in the Dropbox fold­er to find one day. Something sweet and nice and com­plete­ly hope­less. But I real­ize it’s not cause I still like you. It’s cause I miss the idea of lik­ing you, the idea of hav­ing some­thing oth­er than all this mis­spent love.

the right ones

Before my ther­a­pist starts talk­ing, he has this habit of repeat­ed­ly purs­ing his lips when try­ing to find the right words. It always makes me won­der if I have any habits too, and whether some­one could do a rea­son­able impres­sion of me by mim­ic­k­ing some man­ner­ism I’m unaware of. The only thing I can think of is this par­tic­u­lar way of clear­ing my throat out loud that Bronwen used to tease me about, some­thing I’ve since real­ized that I picked up from my dad.

The ses­sions are get­ting abstract and philo­soph­i­cal, a sign that they’re focus­ing less on details and issues and more on root caus­es. He’s been chal­leng­ing my think­ing, but he always does it in a gen­tle and encour­ag­ing way by let­ting me explore ideas myself, giv­ing me a lit­tle nudge in the right direc­tion if I need it. Most impor­tant­ly, he always makes it clear that I’m the one in con­trol, that I make my own deci­sions, and that he won’t judge me whether he thinks they’re healthy or not.

The thing I’ve learned most recent­ly is that some peo­ple are sim­ply nev­er meant to fill a cer­tain role in your life. Getting upset at them for not being more is like get­ting upset at your cat for not being able to play LittleBigPlanet with you. It’s a hard real­i­ty to come to terms with; not only am I faced with the sud­den real­iza­tion that some peo­ple aren’t who I want or need them to be, it means they’ll like­ly nev­er be that as well.

But that’s the way the world is, and I’m learn­ing to let go, and to not hold every­one to the same stan­dards I hold myself to. The best I can do is con­nect with the right peo­ple, the ones who can be what I need because that’s who they are, not because they’ve tried to change for my sake.