To Be Deleted Later

Not gonna lie, I know 2020 was a bad year for us all, but mine looked to be quite a bit better for a little bit, and then recently got a lot worse. The woman I still loved who dropped me without warning last year dropped me quite suddenly for a second time this year, it was as predictable as it was devastating, and just as last time, I am left navigating the emotional detritus of a presence that once was completely here and now is as absent as as a black hole.

She emailed me to apologize about how things ended. As these things often go, I had no intention of anything happening from there, but within twenty-four hours we'd fought and made up and decided to be friends, within a week we confessed we still had deep feelings for each other, and within a few days of that, we were dating again more seriously than ever before. I doubt either of us intended it at first nor ever thought it possible, but the ways of the heart could not be 1% so joyful nor terrifying were they more predictable.

She came into my life without warning, she left my life without warning, she returned to my life without warning, and without warning she has left it again, and twice, she's nearly destroyed it. She was whom I was just beginning to truly know, and every time she came, with barely even a fight, she would break things off just when I began to think that this was going to last. I prayed she would return, and I prayed we could somehow find a way through the chaos to work with each other as a team for many years to come, only for her to leave me twice with the chaos of her absence.

'I'm not going anywhere this time amore. I promise.' And I tried to tell myself that I had no idea what was in store for us, it filled me with equal excitement and terror, and I could promise neither her nor myself nothing. I had so little to offer but my brain, so different from other people's, with both its skills and its troubles. She had hardly seen me at anything like my worst, and I'd like to think I had given her more than forewarning of its horrors, but nobody knows what it's like to see a person in the grips of insanity knows what it's like until it's there. I'd hoped that in a few years with increased success and confidence I could get certain things under control as I never could before, and in the meantime we would take it somewhat slowly as we must.

All I know is that from the moment we first met, I valued her company as I have valued no one else's in the short yet very long history of my life. Her natural instinct was for whirlwind romance, attraction like magnet to metal, and my instinct is always as I do, to worry that whirlwind depletes shelf-lives, increases instability, and every beautiful experience meets its reactive ugliness, and as it turned out, I was correct both times.

And yet it was so long, so long...., since I had thrown any caution to the wind in any aspect of my life, the wall of my caution and worry is so thick that only alcohol, which I've basically given up, could ever find its way through the inhibition. She was the embodiment of the hope which the universe, whatever its creator may be, seemed to have thrown me, and in these two brief periods gave my life a beautiful meaning I doubt it ever otherwise had. I hoped, I prayed, for its stability, through whatever turbulence and terror makes itself known. All close relationships, of whatever type, are a boat through waters stormy and calm, the storms will come as surely as the beautiful views, but to whatever possibility of predestination is out there, I prayed we'd have been blessed with its good grace and better angels.

But she was clearly as crazy and intense as I, and inevitably, the brighter it burns, the quicker it extinguishes. She constantly assured me the feelings were mutual, and yet before the romance could even burn out of its own accord, it was over with barely a fight, and I was left at the restaurant to foot the bill, and process the end of the two most hopeful periods of my life entirely on my own.

I think anyone who says they like dating is either lying or having a great time at other people's expense, but I particularly loathe dating: everything about it, every minute of it, every interaction, every letter of every word, every toe on every footstep on the path to rejection multiple hundred and something. It's hard enough to date while simultaneously trying to finding a way to own up to a mental duress that is nearly perpetual (one ought try and avoid the term 'mental illness' because the power of judgement it gives to others is almost insurmountable), but once you do fess up to the inevitable, the chances of almost immediate rejection are well over 99%, and those few who would have you as a member of their club inevitably turn out to be as mentally suspect as you are.

So preoccupied are you with putting a realistic portrayal of yourself in the best possible light (while still trying to find it...) that you rarely even get a chance to think of whether or not the woman is right for you. And on the path to inevitable rejection, if it looked at all promising, you're stuck on an eternal mental replay, looking for all the things you did wrong, replaying everything on mental loop, second to second-thousandth guessing every move, every word, every moment, forever beating yourself up for allowing your hopes to exceed the veracity of your situation, which is that love as others understand it is a virtual impossibility, and that wisdom dictates that after half a lifetime of consistent emotional abrasions, you must resign yourself to endure its second half exactly as you did the first, with overwhelming difficulty in something resembling lifelong bachelordom - because nobody in their right mind would take this on. The blessing and the curse of strong personalities is that they seem all too complete to the untrained eye, because who can possibly exist in a space with a personality that big?

There are, so we're all told, many ways to find fulfillment without relationships. And god knows, so many relationships we've all watched have been atomic explosions, but eventually, no matter how much fulfillment you derive from every other activity, you must return home, there is either someone else there, or there isn't. There are either people at home for you to take care of and take care of you, or you're only taking care of yourself - and you were never very good at that...

In a certain way, you get used to the rejection. Rejection after rejection stings for a couple hours, but one by one, you forget about them all. But you never, ever get used to the loneliness. It is waiting for you every night, as present as the presence of another person ever could be.

Perhaps if you were taller, thinner, better looking, women would keep you around for a little while before realizing that you are an investment of incalculable risk, and if your moods were at all controllable, if you ever gave any sense of being able to operate on any mode but spontaneous combustion, if you ever developed a modicum of self-control over the inner monologue's diarrhea, if you ever were able to get ahold of yourself, win the fight for self-control and discipline and all those things so many thousands of others do so easily, then, perhaps, you could live a completer life.

'We the single' are far from America's most oppressed demographic. Indeed, perhaps our worst oppression is our complete lack of oppression from others. We are our only company, a tunnel of infinite space and eternal time stretched out before us in every direction that each of us must fill only for ourselves. And since the more relaxed among people are the ones who find companionship more easily, it is not those calming inner monologues who find themselves without interconnectors. With no one present to calm us, we self-oppress better than any persecutor. With no one to challenge us, we self-destruct better than any potential murderer.

For people who live their lives as an individual game, time and space exist on a scale nobody else understands. People who play their lives on a team give of their time to others as obligation, and there is never enough time in any day. And yet for us there is nothing but time, no one to whom we give our time who truly wants it, and every interaction becomes a fraught and fear fueled guessing game of why the only person we may talk to over the course of a day doesn't spend more time in our company. The end of each interaction, no matter how long or short, just another chapter in a self-composed epic of renunciation. Sure, they have so much more to do: more responsibility, more activity, more questions to answer, more hypotheses to test, more answers to determine about the meaning of their lives. But for us, there is only meaning in our racing minds, and no one fully present to slow them down and remind us that our worst terrors are ridiculous, and we ruminate, and ruminate, and ruminate about mistake, after mistake, after mistake, until all the great and small mistakes of our lives become a tangibly vivid movie of regret, and shame, and horror.

Life for us is an an endless supply of empty minutes to occupy in an endless surfeit of empty days over a multiplicity of empty decades, and when our minds cannot fill those lives with possibility, it rather fills our lives with agony. Our lives were not measured in children but in coffee spoons. Just 'me,' 'my' work, 'my' hobbies, 'my' thoughts, 'my' space, 'my' feelings, about which none really care but me, and the reason none care but me is because we are so clearly unworthy of care.

Maybe a few of us truly wanted to be alone, but I doubt many actively chose it. We may have chosen solitude at times because the other options seemed so paltry, but were the possibility of a loving relationship presented to us in a way that really seemed as though our lives could objectively improve from a partner's presence, would even one in a thousand among us have such desire to remain alone that we'd say no? And even had we filled our lives with friends and fun and other family, there is always that moment when it ends, and you return to seclusion, the knowledge that there is always a draconian seeming limit to the amount others will abide by you, and that rejection never goes away. It is not only the poison of loneliness, but the poison of asking, over and over again, why me o Lord? What have I done? And inevitably, the mind finds so many things you've done that justify constant rejection over so many years that time's arrow exaggerates memories into abominations rather than the absurd.

Dad's about to turn seventy-five, Mom's about to turn seventy, and their friends begin to drop like flies. And it's almost all not the married ones, it's the single ones, the perpetually complicated, unattached, grouchy, mercurial, the ones who never quite got it together, and as a group, they're not making it past their early seventies. Maybe it's a lifetime of emotional stress that finishes them off the moment they finish their threescore and ten, or maybe grandchildren motivate the elderly while the single pass on from a lack of familial reason to get through the day. Or maybe there's just nobody around to remind them to get that thing checked out. But whatever it is, I get it, the years take their toll, and for whom are these years being lived? There's no one for whom you're saving money, and there's literally no reason not to have that extra night out, that extra drink, that five-course meal, that expensive dessert, that regrettable hookup, it's all you have, and may be all you ever have. There are so many days when your only options are to do the inadvisable, or to do nothing at all but listen to your own emptiness, and if the inadvisable makes you leave the party twenty years before everybody else, what else were you sticking around for?

And so the twenties become the thirties, which soon become the forties, and what before seemed as though it might be a fulfilling life with a regrettable first act now begins to seem as though it will be a regrettable life with a possibility of fulfillment by the third act. And you work and wait, and try to self-improve, and do everything you can to free yourself from the chamber of inner horrors, and yet it is always there, it is your only true relationship. It will always be there for you, and jealously guards you from any affairs on the side.