August 4–21, 2004 — You think you’re talking

I’m trying to pretend that I’m growing up.

For the first week after those two weeks when so much happened, I mostly kept myself distracted. I did a pretty good job of it, going back to Ottawa for a few days, reading a lot and feeling much better about most things.

In Ottawa, I decided it was time to learn to dress myself, so I bought my first pair of jeans in more than three years. I also decided that it was time to replace my wallet with Elmo from Sesame Street on it, but I couldn’t find a wallet I liked, so Elmo lives on (though with the knowledge he could be relegated to a box under my bed at any moment).

I’m also thinking of taking out some of my piercings. I feel strange about having clung so much to the past for so long a time.

Back in Toronto, I talked to E         for the first time in two months and told her I hoped we could talk again one day soon, but not on a regular basis just yet. I almost feel as though I’m cheating now; it’s so much less work not to be bitter and to just talk to people and tell them that everything’s fine that I worry I might be taking advantage of them. Since I started talking to Kerry again, I suspect our positions have been reversed and I’ve put us in a place where it’s harder for her to talk to me than for me to talk to her; I think I might have made a number of the wrong decisions.

So I don’t know.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the way people come in and out of my field of vision. Because it’s so rare for me to feel all that connected to anyone, when someone does come around, they keep creeping back into my thoughts long after I’m sure I’ve left theirs. I cling to memories of that person and try to make each one mean more than it probably should. I feel like I’m sitting beside a dead fire, trying to warm myself by blowing carefully on burned-out embers. I continue to be surprised at how well this works.

And really, the fire doesn’t need ever to have existed. I’ll go back and suck every bit of energy out of the memory of the tiniest of sparks. That has been part of these weeks, trying to find hope in outcomes that seemed possible a long time ago even if reality never came very close to the best-case scenarios I used to run through my head.

I feel bad for this, too. I feel like I should stop thinking so much about someone when I know they’re not thinking about me.

So between putting an end to old sources of bitterness for the sake of feeling lighter and stealing hope and energy from things that never were and never would have been, I get the feeling I’m taking advantage of a lot of people and being pretty selfish.

But I guess it depends on your perspective.

All I really want is for it not to be so much work.