Sunday, August 26, 2012

Late-night: Another song about rain

tink tink tink

The sound of the rain on the window is cited in books, poems, and songs. But I've never personally met someone who shared a fondness for it quite like I do. Never came upon a lover with their head against a window, tears of rain rolling down the other side. Never looked for a friend in the house, only to find them outside, with a drink or cigarette, enjoying the coolness, just looking out. I would be that person, if anyone ever came looking for me when I slipped out. Maybe, like many other things, those are affectations only found in movies.

I used to think I wanted someone like that. But if one has to have my baggage to appreciate the rain this way, then maybe i'd rather not.

I can hear the rain come down, I can listen with my heart
I can see with both eyes closed in the dark
Sleep will come in just a while but till it does I choose
To listen to the rain, it's the rhythm of the blues


I walk along these streets of home that once belonged to us
And now baby I walk alone and I am lost
In the sound of my own footsteps on the avenues
I guess I'm only walking to rhythm of the blues

I don't wanna hear another word spoken, I don't wanna see another tear shed
I can't seem to fix what's broken, like this record baby in my head

Lonely looks as bad on me as lonely looks on you
And still we keep on moving to the rhythm of the blues

I want a place to call my own, where you have never been
I wanna look around and know you won't be coming back again

On some pretense paper-thin that I can see right through
You come and go baby, like the rhythm of the blues
You come and go baby, like the rhythm of the blues
You come and go baby, like the rhythm of the blues...


Friday, August 24, 2012

Everybody Leaves

I can't seem to help other people without also digging into my own life, my own past, my own motivations, my own soul. In our current situation, where everyone keeps asserting that I did nothing wrong, even the person who did me wrong asserts it, it would seem like it would only be that person who's soul would be laid bare, but I can't help him, help us, if I don't understand him, and I can't understand him until I grasp the differences between us. 

One of the big issues in this whole thing is lying. Look, I've watched enough soap operas and tv dramas to know the reasons that people lie. But on a personal level, it's much more difficult for me to understand. Maybe it's because I am so familiar with those soap operas and tv dramas and I know what the results are of lying and secret-keeping. 

For those who don't know, I've been struggling with mental illness for as long as I can remember. What sticks out most in my mind is the sadness. From the time I was 12 or so, I remember that, unless I was secretly reading under the covers, I cried every night. I felt like I couldn't tell anyone. I knew that when I cried but couldn't explain why, hell even when I could explain why, I was told to get it together, that I was being too emotional, looked at like a freak. As if I didn't already have enough that made me feel like a freak. But I longed to tell someone. I played out the conversation over and over again in my mind. When my uncle and I had to share a room when my family visited, I laid awake at night going over and over what I would tell him when I woke him up and told him how overwhelmingly sad I was all the time. I never did though. 

I was never very good at keeping secrets or having much of a sense of privacy. A lifetime of watching those "very special episodes" where a secondary character comes out of the closet with the help and support of one of the main (straight) characters taught me that the shame was in it being a secret, not what the secret was, and that anyone who made you feel differently should be kicked right the fuck out of your life. The only other kind of secrets, or things one lied about, were when one did something wrong, knowingly transgressed, and that seemed to have an easy solution- to not do wrong. 

In the recent troubles, this other person told me that he was very afraid of disappointing people because then they would dislike him and then they would leave him. So he lied. But the lying isolated him from any help or support he might get from those he loved and was so afraid of disappointing. While I could technically understand that, personally it feels completely foreign to me. 

My biological father left my life when I was five. By the time I was nine, I knew that it was absolutely his choice that he was not in my life. Right around that time, a few other people in my life also died. Not people I was terribly close to, but people I knew. My friends started to move away, their parents choosing to move them to even farther, and thus safer, suburbs as they entered middle school. This is when I realized that everyone leaves. Whether they choose to or not, everyone leaves. 

I'm learning that some of the crazy behavior that bpd's exhibit within relationships stem from abandonment issues. When bdp's manipulate, lie, bareknuckle it to keep a person in their life, it's because we are so afraid that they are going to leave us. But, as crazy as it seems, on the flip side, when we do things that we know will push people away, we are doing it because we are so afraid that they are going to leave us that we do the dirty work for them. 

As I grew up, of course, I was afraid of disappointing the people that I loved. I worked my ass of in school to prove that I was worthy of the love of my parents and to not disappoint them. When I got a new friend, or wanted someone to be my friend, I would learn as much as I could about what they liked so that they would like me, or like me more. I tried to always be the friend who was there anytime they had a crisis, because then it was even more important to not disappoint. But if someone was going to leave me anyway, they should at least know who they were leaving. I might have learned about stuff that they liked, but I also tried to be me as much as possible, often as loudly and even offensively as possible. I often made it downright impossible to love me and stay with me. But if a person did stay, then I felt like that meant that they really did love me and accept me, all of me. Still, there was always the irrefutable truth that they would eventually leave, even if it was not their choice.  That knowledge can be very freeing, though. It allowed me to do all kinds of things, be all kinds of things, fuck up in all kinds of ways, because, unlike my friend, I wasn't overwhelmed by a fear that those  I loved would leave me. 

My friend had an intact and functional family. One of his sets of grandparents lived just down the street. His family lived in the same house from his early grade school days. Other than a beloved grandparent, I don't think he's lost someone close to him from his life that wasn't his choice to this day. While that's a place I'm very envious of, always have been very envious of, it also means that he doesn't know what it's like to live through those kinds of loss and come out on the other side, to know that you can be left and survive. And it's not a lesson I was able to bring myself to teach him this time.

I don't know if it's like this for everyone, but I suspect that for most people it is. When I met TyRoy, the marriage he would have done anything to keep together, did everything he could to keep together, was ending. He told me that he wasn't going to change for anyone and that if someone wanted something different they could keep walking. He was blatantly boldly honest about who he was, what he wanted, the things he knew he couldn't do for others people, for a relationship, and didn't care if I or other people thought that made him a bad person. Before writing this post, I asked him a little lying that he did in his past. Though the reasons he gave for lying in previous relationships were his own, different that what I might have assumed, he did write "most people are more afraid of the loss not the lie." I'd still posit that he couldn't be as honest as he is now if he hadn't gone through such a great loss and come out on the other side of it knowing that even even losses that great, that painful, do not kill you. 

Monday, August 20, 2012

(Not) Running

But if I weren't leaving you, I don't know what I would do. But the more I go, the less I know- will the fire still burn on my return? Keep the path lit on the only road I know. Honey, all I know to do is go.

I have hazy memories of either singing this to you, sending you the lyrics, or at least thinking it in reference to us during a period when I was moving so we could be together, ending the year we'd spent in a long-distance relationship. I remember wanting to express to you, a young man with no desires to live anywhere other than the metro area where you grew up, the restlessness I had always felt.

Coming back from our whirlwind Vegas wedding trip, I played this for BT, feeling like I'd finally found someone who understood that desire to go.

Looking back at it all now, I'm not sure if what I thought was a desire to go wasn't really just the impulse to run away. But, as the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are.

I'm not sure if it's age or experience or the therapy, but I feel that desire receding. I still want to see so much more of the world than I have at this point. I still want to live in other, bigger cities, not just visit them on rushed tourist-y vacations. But if I got offered the chance to live in the city I was born in again, even if I knew I'd never live in a different city again, I'd jump at that chance in a heartbeat. But because I love it, not because I'm running to or away from anything.

I'm about a month into a new job and I don't feel like running yet. Don't get me wrong. I don't see myself doing this job forever and I'm already looking to what the next goals I might set for myself could be. But I'm not frustratingly wondering when I'll be able to move on to a different, better career. Hell, when I'm on the job, unless I have something really special planned, I'm not counting down the minutes. I feel good about being there, in the moment, and doing this job, right now.

Yesterday, things kinda blew up between us. There was a part of me that screamed that I should just toss you out on your ass, "ok, it's done. He fucked up in the one way you said that you wouldn't abide. That's his last chance. It's over. Wash your hands of this." And I've said that maybe we should stop working so hard on being friends, that maybe it shouldn't be this hard, numerous times in the past year and a half, over much less serious issues than this. But this time, I just couldn't bring myself to say those words, with really bringing up the possibility that this should be over.

Maybe it was because that seems to let you off too easily. Maybe it was because you seemed so...broken and genuinely sorry. But maybe it's just that I don't want to run anymore. I'm not sure when it happened or how it happened, but I want to face my life. Open arms and open eyes.

None of this is to say that it doesn't hurt, because it really fucking does, or that there shouldn't be consequences and rebuilding after something like this. It isn't even to say that we'll be able to be the kind of friends that we want to be to each other, because I just can't promise that that is possible. I've said numerous times in this blog and in real life that I consider you family, someone that you are there for when they need you, even if the everyday relationship is too fucked up to do. But there have been many rather benign times in the past when being there for family was something I forced myself to do, when what I really wanted to do, what I did as soon as I got the chance to do, was run. Things don't feel like that anymore.

My heart's in pieces so please understand, I'm trying to jump, but I've nowhere to land. So give me your heart and I'll give you my hand and try as goddamn hard as I can. The hill I'm walking up is getting good and steep but I'm still looking for a promise even I [can] keep.