Lately I’ve become a bit unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim famously does in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. But not in any exciting sci-fi way, just in the heartbreak sense of things - my mind creeping back to the past, to things I could’ve done differently, sometimes enacting a whole one-sided conversation, a monologue of what I should’ve said, in this or that situation, to really, properly, -finally- explain my point of view in a way that wouldn’t have sounded whiny or upset him, a way that would’ve finally made him understand. But of course that’s ridiculous. Was I really that bad at expressing myself? Or was it just that he didn’t, could never have, really heard me? Because he didn’t GET me. Because he was completely emotionally closed-off. Because we were a ludicrously bad match. One that I should stop mourning the loss of.
Or maybe instead of explaining myself, I should have asked more questions. Like ‘what do you mean by ‘I can’t give you what you want’, when we’ve never really discussed what I want, or what you have to give?’ Maybe that would have been better. To demand more information, from this blank unknowable void of a person. You can project whatever you want onto a blank void - best-case scenarios and high hopes in the beginning, worst-case-scenario anxieties towards the end - but in the end, it’s all just projections. You never really knew, did you? Spent a year of your life staring at an unknowable mask. A very pretty one, but still just a mask.
Heartbreak is stupidity. Like the Albert Einstein definition of insanity being when you do the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Except retroactively. Going over the same thing over and over, a thing FROM THE PAST that cannot, will not, be re-attempted. And expecting to, what? Draw new conclusions from it? Reach some kind of epiphany? Learn to do it right next time? But there won’t even be a next time. Not one that’ll ever be exactly like that time. Like that person. Because people, and their foibles and flaws and the best ways of communicating with them, are always different. Hence why each relationship presents different challenges. Hence why they can keep failing, and failing, and failing, and it’s never for the same exact reasons, never anything in yourself that you can pinpoint.
Anyway. A friend of mine said that I like to wallow. That part of me secretly enjoys it, this indulgence of rolling around in my own pain and misery, and I should try to stop. I knew what he meant, but surely it can’t be self-indulgence? It’s not pleasurable. I don’t ENJOY feeling lonely, or betrayed. But maybe the frequent re-examination of times when I’ve felt that way is more of a scratching-at-a-scab, biting-an-ulcer kind of habit. But dear -God-, it does seem to take up a lot of mental space. It gets me when I’m half-asleep especially - getting up in the morning, or emerging from a nap on the train back home at night. That’s when I get unstuck in time, and suddenly I’m back in the relationship, trying to re-do the past. When I’m fully awake I can usually shove it to one side, with some effort.
The best way to forget an experience is to put other experiences between you and it. I just don’t know what those experiences should be. Well, they’ll probably happen soon enough whether I want them to or not.
This is all so stupid. Heartbreak is stupid. Especially heartbreak over someone you weren’t even well-matched with, someone who couldn’t even say they loved you. Maybe I should really be examining why I fall for the emotionally unavailable types, and never a nice, normal, open type. But that’s a mystery too big and dark and weird for even my overactive brain to start in on, at least tonight.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. Just wallowing out loud for a bit I guess.
snowghoul
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