Late night ramble, although it's not that late. I just need a break from what I'm doing.
So, what shall the topic be tonight? Relationships? Okay, I guess I could say something about that.
Let me start, though, by saying that I'm sitting in a house that's warm and dry. Sure, the air is filled with smoke from all the fires. My W is gone. I feel lonely. But there isn't a foot of water downstairs. A bomb blast didn't just kill all my friends. I have clean water to drink, food to eat, and high-speed internet. So most of what I have to say tends towards narcissism.
My step-mom clipped out an article from Oprah magazine and sent it to me - "Can't We Be Friends?". Now, I don't know at what age you begin to clip articles out and send them to people but usually that stuff goes straight into the recycling (I'm green). But the subtext on this article was "Breaking up is hard to do, but trying to go from romantic to platonic ... only adds to the pain." Hmm - that's me. Okay, so I read it.
What the author advocates is an embrace of the mourning process, an extraction of the "I" from the "we." In mourning, one passes from loss to the restoration of independence. You may not end up the same person you were before. You may be scarred and damaged and more emotional and who knows what else. But you are whole again. And in that wholeness, you have the chance to transcend what you had become - the compromised individual - and develop into something greater. A phoenix, bursting from the flames of a R spiraling out of control into the depths of hell. A wonder to behold, springing from the abyss itself.
I can definitely relate. I've spent months now in mourning. Look at my thread title if you don't believe me. But will I be a phoenix? I don't think so. I think it's more like the Darwinian fish, pulling itself from the depths to flop about for awhile in the muck at the edge of the water. I gasp and gasp and gasp and think I'll die, but I don't. So I lay there for awhile ... and I'm not dead. And I prop myself up on fins that were never intended for walking, and I set out to find something new. It's all painful and new and I don't want to be doing it, but here I am and I am and I am and I will.
What I wonder at is my W. The succinct one. The decider. No show of emotion on her part. Complete focus on the task at hand. How does that work? Is it denial, total detachment, apathy, avoidance? Hard sayin' not knowin', but I'm glad I don't do that. I'd rather annoy my friends by talking about my feelings too much than never say anything to them about how I feel.
