Night swimming

Crying, listening to REM's Nightswimming over and over,  thinking of my uncle. So much emotion, so many feelings,  so many memories. Realizing how much of what i mourn is the life i thought I'd have, the life that was like his, the life I'd already blown past having long before he died, the life I'd realized by then he didn't even like all that much.

I realize this is something you could probably understand more than him. Your loss was of someone like that. While his loss was a loved one, probably one of the few people he felt loved him without conditions,  and there is regret there, the person he lost was much older, someone who'd lived a long life,  someone he knew would pass long before him. Our losses were lives cut short and people who very much shaped who we wanted to be, the lives we thought we'd live.

But there is this huge gap i can't find my way across. The gap between you saying you are having a hard time with emotions and allowing me to see it. The gap between that and me wearing my heart on my sleeve. The gap between how holding your emotions back unless you know they'll be met with the reaction you want makes you feel secure and how being able to express them and hash it out, come argument or empathy, makes me feel secure. The gap between how I want to know when and how you aren't fine when you don't want others to know and how I want you to know but you don't. The gap between how you resent that people assume you are fine because you seem fine and how I resent having to pretend I'm fine because no one can deal with me not being fine.

We both want to find ways to make this work and have everyone as happy as possible. I think that despite what we might reactively negatively feel about the other, reasonably we realize the other does want this too. But we are aliens to each other.