Postdigitalis

City yarns. A chase of middles, an invented beginning, a dream of an ending.

[postdigitalis]

The Opposite of Forms? Not Silence

June 4th, an UNMOTIVATED MONDAY.

Under which conditions am I allowed to write indiscriminately, about any old inappropriate topic? I want to feel the free fall of writing things anonymously, but there is also that reluctance to abandon the silly archive of things here and commence a fresh blog. I don’t want that kind of fragmentedness in my life. And then, too, what would be the value of being completely faceless? 

My antibiotics are hard to take. I take each pocket’s worth of stuff with an attitude of checking it off a list, with an eye on how many are remaining and a neurosis-driven need to see the process finished. (Like how I must see everything finished.) I take them with the exactitude and caution I have towards things that are medical and medicinal, and I can almost feel the pills travel into myself. Clean, clean, heal, heal.

I don’t quite have the emotional material to serve as the spine for my writing today. I am muddy and dissatisfied. I hate people. I am disdainful towards my best friend’s lack of basic dignity, I am jaded by my partner’s deliberate sense of measure and calculated emotionality - and his thinking that I don’t see through it - and I am brittle and impatient when it comes to people’s stupidity. It’s come to the point where I have to refrain from openly frowning when someone laughs at a dumb joke. Like at a meeting, when people gasp or otherwise respond, like children, to whatever inane thing my boss is saying. I sit there, flat and gazing into some low middle distance - in the thick of but too lazy to properly engage in some sort of existential angst.

I’m not sure what it’s come to. But it translates into negativity, and people steer clear. Which is fine for now, but I wonder how many bridges burnt it will take before I realize I am in an isolated isle of my own making. 

But I can feign interest and attentiveness like the best of teachers. It’s how I scrape by. A few weeks back I had the unique experience of having “tea time” (their label) with my former students in the informal setting of a cafe. Freshmen at the university I teach at, they had not yet lost the desire to please and the Korean respect for hierarchical lines, and they were equally brave and insecure as they tried to converse with me freely. On my part, I was very forthcoming about my felt awkwardness, going as far as admitting to them that I would probably know how to direct the conversation had this been in a classroom, but that I was at a loss here with the twelve or so of them arrayed around me in this unnatural way. 

This wasn’t exactly true; I was still in a classroom mentally. Despite the subtraction of the podium - which physically and emblematically adds distance between my audience and myself, allowing me to blur out their faces and play-act my speaker’s persona and charisma - I was still very much in the mode, and I was still conversing in a way that wasn’t entirely representative of what I actually felt. I was conversing well.

I wonder if other people are also burdened by the feeling that conversations are just patterns of known and knowable civility. Sometimes I can’t say things because I am so sickened by how predictable the affective entrenchments are. I’m not sure what is at the root of my revulsion at insincerity. And I’m not sure what the alternative would be, exactly. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, except as what is not what I hate.

[postdigitalis]

Voice, a Small Study

May 16th, a VOICELESS WEDNESDAY.

I cannot speak. My larynx (or pharynx?) is inflamed and swollen, and I am on medication to get it all back under control. Meanwhile, I communicate in whispers.

I am not a very vocal person, and I wouldn’t have thought that a few days of not being able to talk properly would make much of a dent in the goings-on of my life. There are days when I consider myself incapable of dealing with people (or perhaps with certain lunchmates I am currently confined to eating with), and I tell everybody I’ll be off on my own to read a book in Starbucks. And it is true that even now, three-fourths of the way through the day, most people in even my near vicinity don’t know that if they were to ask me a question, I would only be able to mouth a wheezy reply. 

But there is a difference. Yesterday, I waited for my boyfriend in the cinema because he was to come a few minutes late (typically - but that’s an irritation for another time). Despite my tiredness from the day’s round of lectures - in which I properly killed whatever vocal powers I had left - I had taken care to dress in fresh clothes and look clean and appealing, and as I looked towards the cinema popcorn counters I caught the glances of the young people minding the till. As I approached it deliberating whether to get a “freshly-squeezed fruit juice,” I felt their anticipation.

“A freshly-squeezed fruit juice,” I rasped in an octave that sounded unnatural even to my ears. One of the guys turned away in haste, and I felt my face redden. Although why?

My boyfriend came, finally, and I wanted comforting, for reasons unknown. But he too seemed to find my strange voice off-putting. My language and tone are always somewhat calculated whenever I am with him, even as I am trying to maintain a carefree, more spontaneous front. It was interesting to feel the words aligning themselves on the verge of being spoken, in the systematic way they do for me because thought and deliberation go into what I say, but when they could not find utterance or could only be outed in such partial, unpleasant ways, I found myself feeling ugly and unwanted. But I was puzzled. Were words really such a big part of what made us work? And also: what a performance speaking is. And without that crucial instrument, the faculty to call up the pitch of a word, what am I showing?

My friend at lunch today was silent in his soup-eating, because I was silent. I couldn’t fathom why he wouldn’t talk about his life and I could just, like, nod along. I’m not too keen on huge responses normally. But his silence, and our awkwardness, made me reflect once more on the role that my vocality seemingly plays.

Finally, in a class I taught just now, the students were sympathetic at first. Their customary excitable voices faded upon seeing me scrawl on the board the vaguely disturbing, “Guys, I have no voice today!” A little bit endearingly, some of them reverted, perhaps unconsciously, to whispers themselves as the class wore on and I had them doing something independent, like making a poster. But soon I also felt traces of a teetering in my power as a teacher, as my whispers, sparse to begin with because I was quick to realize their ineffectualness, increasingly fell on pitying ears, not sympathetic ones. There is something pitiful about an authority figure left with nothing but a whisper. And what is a teacher’s authority, her charisma, but her voice? Not even her words, but her voice?

[postdigitalis]

Empathy, an Attempt

May 4th, a FOGGY FRIDAY.

I’m vaguely irritated, and it’s hard to shake the feeling off with a belly full of kimchi soondoobu (soft tofu). (Who was that last parenthetical even for?) 

It’s my birthday in two days, and my boyfriend’s off in Barcelona to watch soccer. It was going to happen, and now that it’s happening it doesn’t feel like much. I dreamed that I helped him secure a ticket - something he hasn’t quite been able to do in real life but is attempting to do on site. I refreshed the website on my phone over and over and felt a selfless pleasure once it yielded good results. Our happiness was synced, as if we were a unit. Today I Google the stadium IRL and my cursor explores the options a bit, vaguely bored with the inaccessible foreign words and the technicality of it all, the classes of seats lighting up with monetary specification and captions informing you about discounts if you are a “Member,” after which I exit out of everything with haste. Maybe it isn’t boredom but some form of embarrassment. If he knew half of the extent of my interest, he would know that I like him far more than I let on. Is it that I like him though? Or that I’m restless?

Sometimes I find myself browsing the Reddit community for accounting. I look through the unfamiliar jargon, nerdy inside jokes (towards which I have a strange mixed feeling, like respect and longing), and complaints about the busy season, and I search for any insight on what is going on inside his head. I’m sure accountants are as varied as literature students are, but there must be something that makes the lot be drawn fundamentally to a job that cannot by my standards be anything more than completely unbearable. Jobs are generally not great. But this one seems to take a special endurance, a special capacity to desensitize oneself to tedium and the special monotony of numbers on a spreadsheet. For ten-plus hours a day, for seven days a week. Is this why he wants to disappear on his precious trips around the world?

At the same time this attraction towards someone who is an enigma to me is powerful and sexual. I’ve always been drawn to people good at the things I am not. Meeting someone with higher-level competence in the sciences and maths makes me extra lustful, for whatever reason. Smart people are appealing in general, but the particular detached rationality of a science or math person makes me want to cling on to them and make them adore me. Simultaneously, they make me want to hit and scratch something up quite badly. They are insufferable, these rational types. And they are unflappable. Maybe I like the poignant feeling of starving. 

Still, I am quite attracted to the little furrow between his eyes that appears when something I say cannot be filed away neatly in his head. “What does that mean?” he says crossly after I have told him, following our fight, that this experience has sharpened what I want from this relationship. He is sprawled out carelessly on his bed, while I kneel next to him on the floor. His eyes are closed and there is a sharply sweet tension, of the kind that hangs for a little while when a fight has occurred and been made up uncertainly. 

“I know what I want,” I say, laughing. I suppose I am as enigmatic to him as he is to me. 

Someday we may meet in the middle, but for now I must wait.

[postdigitalis]

Tested

April 30th, MOLLIFIED MONDAY.

Over the weekend she felt it, the sharp sting of irritation that she used to experience with such frequency until not so long ago. An effect of being back on the pill? What an inconvenience hormones are. What a variable balance that must be kept, and what a difference a small, insignificant provocation could make, with the power to so completely push her over the edge. How familiar the keen agitation, not too far removed from pleasure. Like the pleasure-pain of self-righteousness. 

What is self-righteousness, if you are so fully aware of it? And if you are repelled by it?

“Whenever you choose to do something over being with me, I keep thinking it’s because I’m not your priority.” 

“I never said that. Why would you think that?”

“But you did.”

There was a time when she thought it was not possible to be happy. As things went, many conditions had been met. She now had a stable lifestyle. A home of her own, with the components inside arranged to her liking, or as close to her knowledge of her liking as it were possible to make it right now. She had income, Seoul was accommodating, and she got things as she desired. A cylindrical retro compartment for the storage of her towels. A high-quality figurine of a character from that video game she liked to play. A gaming laptop to play the game on. Spring-weather jackets with large pockets down the front. She had a thing for jackets.

This was as close to happiness as it was going to get. Anyway, how would she be able to tell? What role do emotions and moods play anyway, in the deeper scheme of everything? Towels and personal space were humble factors in the eyes of some, but for her it implied much. In her space she didn’t have to wither on a daily basis under the world’s real and imagined gazes.

“I think I might give up soccer,” he tells her yesterday. Something gives a flutter inside, but she is a realist and she tamps it down per usual. Things are always too good to be true. And things are never about her. How could they be?

“As people get older, they give up stuff they like, little by little,” he continues, unusually philosophical. “That’s life.” 

Despite herself, she is gracious. “Why would you do that? Soccer is one of your favorite things...”

“Maybe I just don’t enjoy it anymore. Maybe I need to find something else I like doing.”

It would be too much to ask him to be so directly affirming. Too much to ask him to state something as banally direct as, ‘I want to make more time for you, because you are important to me.’ He probably was being quite literal, in the way of guys, not thinking about her at all. 

But at the least...

There was something here, and it wasn’t love, but at least it held up when tested. To the measure of what exactly, she wasn’t sure, but perhaps there was reason to try and figure it out.

[postdigitalis]

Four Years Later

April 25th, RESTLESS WEDNESDAY.

There are needs and there are needs. There are energies that need venting, because otherwise one would burst. Some people exercise, “spending” their frenzy to the point of equilibrium (or to the point of fatigue superseding anything new forming, which could be the same thing), and others commit to interactions, talking and sharing and confirming their status as human beings. I feel a brimming of energies, and the more I think of these possible vents, the more I feel trapped. The frustration is like trying to breathe through a dusty cloth. My throat itches, and forms crowd my head, but how to let them loose without rendering them inarticulate, like a scream? My mediums can’t do them justice, but I want to do them justice, because the urgency of my thoughts have partly to do with the need to be heard. 

So as much as I have avoided writing in the last several years due to various unsorted reasons, and as much as I know that my writing is imperfect (both as a device as well as in quality), I want to at least try and resort to expression again. There is too much buildup. I have it under control better than in more immature years, partly as a result of “calming mineral supplements,” a common sense that I suppose you gain with age, and a knowledge that I just can’t afford to entertain these trivialities to do with my emotions any more. Is this adulthood?

Still, there are turbulences. I am still triggered by micro-rejections. The moment of a perceived rejection is also the start of an addiction. It’s not clear exactly what I am addicted to, but there is great power behind it, and a pull towards familiar eddies of craziness. My therapist says it’s not uncommon, though obviously it makes me perverse - to be attracted to that which rejects me. I want to correct things, I want to prove that the rejector is wrong, and most of all, I want them. They had the power to reject me, and that places them far above me, endowing them with a sheen. How desirable is the object that is snatched away from your hand. Needless to say, conversely, anyone who treats me well is not at all worth anything. 

How my words trip over themselves uncertainly. But I have things to express, and express them I suppose I will.

[obegone]

Backstory: Hobbies, Reasons, Non-reasons

She thinks, What is “literature” now? Who wants it, and what does it entail? What is the status of marginalized and popular literature? What kind of story do people want? Which themes pervade the bestseller lists? How much sensationalism is needed to make a book gripping and readable, and what is the direction in which stories are being pushed? Is the merit of reading to do with creating escapist engagement, absorption, and a level of intensity not reached in everyday life, or rather, is it simply an extension to a Berlantian “coasting” - a passive activity throughout which we search listlessly for a slightly more concrete realization of the mundane solutions eluding us in life?

Why did she read? She read because it was a way to pass the time. Because silence, especially that of the mind, was excruciating. Because “time well spent” was a standard she no longer even tried to satisfy. “Spending time” was better, a possible catchphrase to describe this desensitized, tired generation. Spending and time. Two words that pursued and pushed away from each other like magnetic opposites. She read because her story had coherence and meaning and structure, and her life did not. She read because there was nothing else that added up.

Not that stories were that great either. Maybe it was the idea of a story that kept her “coasting” from book to book. At the end of each convoluted plot coming to a forced convergence of narrative vectors, she lay down her last-edition Kindle with something not unlike rue, momentarily disgusted, and then increasingly accepting of the underwhelming nature of her recent experience. As if she no longer even expected Experiences anymore - experience with a capital E, the kind that made you stunned with the cleanness of it, and the realization that this was the change required to make things a little bit better.

Even when such events came, it was like no one was allowed to feel anymore. Emotions were caught in some kind of tricky sieve for acceptable emotions, and it was so very smoky and fuzzy, that passage between impulse and show. And nothing makes a story less readable than indecisiveness. The type that is unforgivably sollipsistic in its incapability to articulate what is important to oneself.

That’s why she read, book after book, but more often, the same book again and again. As if the repetition and familiarity produced a pattern in themselves, which she found comforting.

[obegone]

The Trajectory of Coins

She’s always been attracted to capsule toys. Maybe because she never experienced them as a child, never got the chance to participate in this city-child’s ritual. The cheap thrill of twisting apart that flimsy shell and exposing the plastic bits within. She buys them as an adult, guiltily slotting in two, three, no four coins, and turning with an unadultlike rush of excitement the hefty dial. She feels guilty not because of the frivolity of the expenditure, or even because the whole thing screams undignified in 2016 Korea: the crouching down unsteadily on heels, the kids in the aisle stealing wary looks, and the tackiness of the machines themselves - even kids aren’t so interested in gacha anymore, and the receptacles are coated in a thin layer of dust. She doesn’t mind all that so much. She does wish she could ignore the little introspective voice that tells her it is significant, her disproportionate delight in little things and One-Punch Man-shaped surprises. Never mind how rapidly her initial interest dies seconds after the toy is placed on an empty corner of a shelf in her bedroom. Or maybe that is part of the symptom. It isn’t quite an addiction, not yet, but she sure does love that jolt of pleasure felt whenever she buys something so completely devoid of practical value.

[postdigitalis]

"Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall

She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens

And she is dying piece-meal

of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble

Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. 

They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.

Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,

And is almost afraid that I

will commit that indiscretion."

[postdigitalis]

Help

January 14th, EARLY TUESDAY.

What is this, Tumblr, have you linked random words to ads and surveys?

I need help. I am tripping every step of the way, on myself probably, who's to tell now. It stings, this discomfort, this ongoing pithless keening unhappiness. Relief in misery, high drama, in things on the verge of unraveling. The euphoria of teetering on the edge of the fall. A needle-sharp disturbance in the pit of one's being. Like warmth, like pleasure. Like jealousy, like love. Poisonous names, I scroll, afraid to look and terrified not to. Fear and safety, fear of safety. Victims and monsters. Years now since I was exposed to the complaint that we don't fit, I am not, I cannot, there is no. I feel so helpless against this disillusionment, against this accrual of disgust towards people, towards myself, towards a blueprint of love that makes me nauseated; so thin, so offensively empty, so inauthentic and missing the point it makes me want to hate, and love, and hate, and love, and I just

want

to be helped

without knowing

a blind trust

irrealizable

[postdigitalis]

things thrown together like mud

January 7th, an ACHING MONDAY.

Your tears are for her. I no longer believe I am the main character in anyone's story, much less my own. Have lost touch with whatever it is that keeps me knowing things happen to me, or things don't happen to me.

Everyone around me drifting in this thin malaise. How frozen the cores of the people of this generation, how frozen it hurts to move. Mostly, it's too much of an annoyance. A soupy salty languid defeat and a noisy outrage ringing hollow.

Did I really just manipulate a guy into thinking he broke the world? Is it manipulation, or desperation? Am I sad, or fatalistic? Am I a victim, or a monster

Take two. There's a reason my journals have gathered dust for years. Peering into myself would require a strength that frankly just doesn't make sense anymore. Why should I? For what in the world

Too many things broken and broken. I'm not writing a damn novel. Stop. Repress

Too many impressions collapsing into each other, an inarticulate murk. A smell, faintly acidic. A rubbery migraine, the swell of invisible pressures. The violence of sweeping the contents on a shelf onto the floor. A cowering against a raised hand. Religion. Marriage. Be good, why aren't you, why don't you. 

Take three. Curt, stunted descriptions of a half-state. 

Take four. I'd like to believe I'm not mindlessly masochistic, that I'm not stupidly suicidal. That I'm not inventing injuries.

If I found peace the world would no longer communicate to me in a language I recognize

[postdigitalis]

Stop

September 30th, a DISGUSTED MONDAY.

A missing cry, a terminated fuck, a heatless scream. 

Miss Bo is finally getting fired; a miracle she's lasted this long. I don't quite hate her anymore though. I realize it's been some time since I've felt that way, since I've wanted to cave her moonlike face in whenever it appeared disgruntled around the corner. My strange love for my old students has faded as well, now that they're breathing the same air as I am, avoiding me as I avoid them. It's like I live in a bubble and I don't care what or how or why. Nothing is familiar, not even my own body, and everything changes every day. Funny how I don't talk about the new characters in my vicinity. Things trip over themselves in my head linearly.

What a joke the past year was. When I think on it I want to scream. Who the fuck was I? What the fuck was I doing? Dreamlike. Wraithelike. Every day is a fucking inability to look in the fucking mirror. I have no sense of what it is exactly that I want to stop, or improve, or escape from, or whatever else might have been the backbone of my complaint in posts past. I don't know what the fuck is going on. And I am too tired to cry. But I can feel it, this heat, crawling up my brain, and I just want to pound into something, over and over and over

[postdigitalis]

Here's What I Think of Wise

August 23rd, a TROUBLED FRIDAY.

Work is work is work is work. At times I feel a shrugging indifference, knowing things could be much, much worse, and that I could be hating what I must do for the duration of two years much more feelingly than I am right now. It’s tolerable, and satisfying in its own way. Producing stuff. Making stuff look sleek and serviceable. Finding I can get inside people’s heads and really know what they need. Arranging my classroom to perfection every single day. The faintest hint of mint and tea. Not like Rury’s next door, which smells strongly of peach, or some sort of sharp synthetic fruity strain. Ash and brick and bruised hues, breezy emerging shades of grey and orange and ecchymotic blue. The relative peace and silence of the fifth floor, as opposed to the bustling third. I perch my hair-thin ultrabook on its white stand and think, it isn’t so impossible.

And yet I spiral ever inward. I silently note the stupidity of everyone around me. I can’t hold a single conversation with these people without wondering, was I really at a place, not so long ago, where I talked about theory and abstractions, and my head felt stretched by the end of the day, instead of used? Where people did not give me blank looks when I use an unassuming word like “precocious” to talk about Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes? A world in itself, this world of ESL. The teachers make it stranger than the teaching ever does. Though the teaching is a topic all on its own. One day I may attempt to describe the contrary feelings meeting (and sometimes teaching) some of my old students elicits. And another thing: am I hopelessly vain when I keep catching myself searching for traces of myself among them? A student who thinks and feels and acts like I would have at their frail and incipient age? Seventh-grader Lydia, responsible to boot and eager to please, with her insecure but tightly-controlled giggle and her dutiful braveness when facing the hesitations that must accompany her perfectionism. Sweet Julie, now in the third grade, with her soft-spoken but steady-eyed air, also very dutiful but holding something reserved just for herself, something knowing and aware and watchful and grounded. And still, they are yet just different from me enough that I find myself keeping a distance, not that I know what I can or should do otherwise. Preemptive steeling myself against disappointments; how that is becoming a pattern, something more basic than habit.

I still think of you, of course. Too much and too little; I no longer know up from down of my emotions. Something is consistently painful, a perpetual ache for something lost, something regretful, something bitter and angry and yearning. The fear of picking scabs, you said by way of justifying yourself. Was it already scabbing for you by then? How short-lived, how humiliating, how stingingly inconsequential. I neither have the strength to believe in my right to have deserved more, ever, nor the stability to accept it as an unobjectionable thing. Do normal people feel so little? Am I abnormal? Was I nothing? Just some Asian girl?

[postdigitalis]

Invisible

July 26th, a MOPEY FRIDAY.

Seoul is yet a place, not a setting. Work is robbing me of all thought. Exhaustion unrelated to intellectual stimulus; hello, you old life. I feel a vague hurt. Tonight the balmy street elicited an invisible tear or so. A loneliness complete, and hours spent in an office bathed in white light and the icy drafts of the AC on hyperdrive. My back throwing up a riot. The acupuncturist thinks I should come in regularly. As if I had the time, or the motivation. You are no longer quite a face, but an amalgam of mannerisms. A reel of impressions not quite concepts. A pinpoint of relief against this sea of vague and vast unhappiness. Everything so fucking ridiculous, as if I am the sole spectator grave and stupefied in my efforts to assimilate all these things mutely floating by, things quite detached. Alone in my empty musings. The beginnings of something, a simmering rebellion. Ultimately empty too. I want to run away, to save up what money I can and go, away, back, to Chicago, where I can find a little room and roam the city without an obligation in the world, those familiar alien streets, those carefree angles, that heady grime.

[postdigitalis]

Hello, hello, hello

June 29th, a SATURDAY.

I am tremulous inside, dangerously so, but I am keeping it together because that’s what adults do. Being back is like nausea and heartache. There is nothing here that reminds me of anything good. I stay in religiously, not only because I am dirt poor at this juncture in life. Going out pulls me away from myself, and I watch detached. The things that bring bubbling to life old feelings, old associations and sinkings. I simultaneously scoff at and envy these Koreans. Their flawlessness, their skeletal frames, their impoverished self-esteems. Such emptiness here, and things that catch fire fast. Their shifty eyes, the cynical cants in their voices. See those porcelain faces, gleaming coiffures, and straight, white limbs resting peaceably from under fashionable shorts and elegant blouse sleeves. Who are these people. Who am I.

The person I called my boyfriend these past few months is in a town called Why. When he returns from his trip I wonder, will things be so predictable? Will everything be lost under the sands called time? My dreams are violent and rich, and in them I feel and feel and feel. Family is good, family is nice, but what odd pieces we make, untempered and grossly inexperienced. Awkward fittings. And this forced return to religion. I let myself be conditioned, if that’s what it is, out of my unwillingness to fight anything. A strange stupor. Arvo Pärt’s "Fratres," over and over.

The placeholders of life. You. I miss you. I will always miss you.

[postdigitalis]

Suspension

June 30th, a SUNDAY.

Truly a limbo state. Work starts in a week, and until then time feels suspended, during which I am unable to think of what productiveness even means now. From grad school life to this; some transition it's proving to be. It's not that it's particularly jarring--the switch from academic immersion to nothing, that is. I feel languid and passive. A state tinged with strange unidentified hysteria from time to time, but nonetheless deflated. 

I need a new obsession. Something, a goal, a sense of trajectory. This blankness, bleakness, deflation, whatever--is unbearable. I don't even know what I'm waiting for, even if it feels like it, like I'm ticking off the hours for something encroaching, some tangible result at the end of my aimless social media wanderings. Neurotic page refreshings. For what?

How is it that I can sink so easily and comfortably into this nest of misery. For now, it's all I know.

[postdigitalis]

Hello Goodbye

June 8th, A PANICKY SATURDAY.

Someday I may just take a pause and jot down everything. Just, everything. Not today. But some day. I feel things rekindling, things buried a long time and now making me do things and feel things, and that scares me a lot. I don't want to be touched like this. I want to banish this urgency, these stirrings of something not under my control. Not love but something more basic, something more needy, primal, a wound reagitated. If I could be completely honest I would say something like this:

Your coldness alienates me. Your happiness alienates me too. I am that insecure. I am not convinced of anyone's love except on the chance it incapacitates him, and even then it is somehow irrelevant to what I really need. When I think of us I feel sad, but mostly because I wasn't able to make more of an impression. I am selfish that way. But I am also modest that way: why should I assume anything I do matters? I wish I could have been able to make an impact, a dent, crack open just a little bit your resolve concerning your safety, and disillusions about love and attachment, and your self-control. Your self-perpetuating conviction in your self-control. There is something sacred about that, the smoothness of your pragmatic "This relationship is explicitly finite," and I know I didn't earn the right to touch it. So I didn't.

Nevertheless, these months were good where it mattered. I am so scared, so deeply scared to turn yet another leaf and have to start again. I feel that I learn nothing in the accumulation, just weariness and a numbing which detracts, and preempts and triggers the very thing that fails. 

I am so bitter. So very bitter. But there is nothing more to say. Blame has no place here. All things residual have inflected our chemistry, even when I was very careful, and I am sorry. Good things are short. I am glad this one happened.

[postdigitalis]

Fucking shit. Pull myself together. Nobody's about to coddle me forever. Pull away and pull together.