when we're apart, i think you must hate me. by sung aka killdads on twitter, circa sept. 30 2021
One day I said out loud, "when we're apart I think you must hate me, I picture you seeing my name when I text you and heaving this big sigh because I'm so annoying" and he quietly said "that's a little mean. I wish you wouldn't picture me that way" and something clicked.
That insecurity, the fear someone you love goes "ugh" at the thought of you, we uses their image to punish ourselves. We fear they see us as disposable, but what kind of person would so cruelly dispose of us, harbor such contempt for us, what kind of names are we calling them?
What kind of painful is it when all you do is adore someone so openly just for them to passively accuse you of spouting empty sentiments for the sake of convenience? You pour your heart out telling them they make you believe in magic and they tell you you're just placating them.
I once said half jokingly, "I bet you don't even think of me when I'm not here" and he gently said, "that's really mean." It stopped me dead. We sat there holding hands and didn't talk for a while. He
wasn't angry. It wasn't tense. I was just so confused.
I realized later that I'd been so caught up in insisting that I am too damaged and misshapen to love, justifying any perceived failure to love me as not only natural but righteous, that I never considered how it feels to love someone who refuses to take you for your word. Some days later I asked "do you really think of me when I'm away" and he said "of course I do." I asked "what kind of thoughts do you have about me" and he said he wonders what I'm up to, pictures me whistling Chopin while clomping around the house in my slippers like a horse, throwing my head back and cackling on the phone, slamming the kitchen cupboards around with my shoulder squared while cooking or doing the dishes.
He was describing a rotation of tender portraits, mundane images of my everyday boredom, frustration, my quiet little pleasures, like thinking of me, because he loves me, is something that brings him joy.
I thought about what kind of thoughts I have about him when we're apart. That image of him groaning with contempt after seeing my texts. The idea that hearing from me disrupts a vacation he needs from me, that I think of him too much because he never thinks of me. These weren't loving thoughts. They weren't even about him. So I thought about him. How he saunters through the door beaming and says "hi gorgeous," how he breaks into a smile sometimes after looking at me for a long while, how he's calling the back room of his house my office.
These were images of being loved. Evidence that this person is happy to have me around. I needed to acknowledge this evidence to be able to see him clearly in my mind in his times alone. To picture him picking up the phone when I call and smiling.
Envisioning his time away from me as inert, amusing, beautiful, tragic, poignant, or very very boring, most importantly none of my business, allows me to confront and accept my deep-seated shame around intimacy as the protective instinct of a wounded person.
This shame tells me not to get too comfortable, it distracts me with numerous petty and hyperbolic insecurities to keep me from seeing this person as clearly as I need to in order to accept his love. Because what if I'm wrong again, what if I'm abused or abandoned again?
But the thing is I'm a living breathing learning organism and I confronted my father and my mother and it loosened some things. I picture him alone and let myself adore him and it's chipping away at that shame. I feel it. I feel the little differences all the time.
Suddenly I find myself able to say, "I sleep like shit without you there." I go buy my own pack of cigarettes for the first time in weeks and I tell him buying my own cigarettes has started to feel wrong somehow. I can say, "I missed you" before asking, "do you ever miss me?”.
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