08.22.01
There exist, what I suppose could be called, reasonable standards of comfort. Maintenance of these levels of comfort motivate and shape people's actions and deeds. The standards define the individual.
For some, there is discomfort living below, or even above, a certain economic status. For others, there is a matter of social status or caste, and others still are driven to maintain certain levels of popularity or celebrity. And there are even a few that are motivated by love, hate, and other emotions.
I think it is hardest for me to accept that things change.
I tried for so very long to be so many different things to so many different people, trying to make them all happy and miserably failing, that I almost drove myself over the edge. I wore so many different masks for so many others, playing so many roles, that I almost didn't exist myself.
So, I cut everyone off. Completely. If you wanted to see me, you had to find me.
And I drove almost everyone away.
Oh, believe me, people reached out at first. They tried ever so hard to draw me from my shell. Cajoling, wheedling, physically picking me up and dragging me outdoors. Everything.
I almost felt special under all the attention.
But I got used to being alone. I was self-reliant as a child, so I became self-reliant as an adult.
And people stopped calling and dropping by. I don't blame them, I was always inaccessible for a variety of well-placed reasons. I quit noticing that my friends had disappeared. In fact, it seemed that I actually conversed with them more when they were several time zones away. It isn't that I never cared. I just took them for granted.
To this day people move away and I find out months later.
I didn't live in a cave or under a rock. I had close friends. People that were always there. People that were dependable. People that put up with my shit, and I theirs.
But then they moved away, and sometimes the keeping in touch doesn't work so well. I think it is desperately different if you never see someone in person, and then start talking to them when they move across the country. I'm not sure why. But when the person you see every day moves away, you don't have as much to talk about.
And slowly but surely, I got used to these people not being around. It was hard, thinking at the end of the day that I had to show so-and-so something, or being hungry and wondering if so-and-so wanted to go out for thai food, or even if so-and-so wants to go see a movie tonight. And inch by inch I forgot what it was like to have people that close in my life.
My best friend in the entire world moved away, and it hurt so terribly. I cried and cried and then cried some more. The one person that I could do anything with, tell anything to, depend upon in any situation, was gone. Permanently.
For a large chunk of my life, my standards of comfort have largely involved this person, all-encompassingly -- financially, emotionally, spiritually, socially.
I got over it eventually because we grew up and apart, going our separate ways.
And then, strangely, we were thrown back together in the same town, the same friends, the same haunts.
But this time things are different.
Yes, I outwardly live the same life -- same job, classes, house -- that I used to, but I have plans to leave soon enough. I'm going to start over elsewhere. Fresh.
Now he's working at the same place he used to, lives in the same place, has the same friends, the same haunts. He's come back and resumed his life where he left it off. Completely picking up the pieces and putting them a-right.
Sometimes, I find myself looking at this person, talking to him, and wondering if I can be his best friend again, because we've changed so much. I've learned to live without him, to be independent, to pay my own way, forge my own path, and blaze my own trails.
And he is now mostly 'someone that I know.' Someone stuck in a strange niche between acquaintance and confidant. Someone with whom I share a long, strange, deeply-involved past. Someone with a life that will go on without my presence in it, and vice versa.
I feel as though I'm going through the motions, without any sincerity behind my actions. I don't know if we are just awkwardly getting to know each other all anew, or if we're just clinging to tattered remnants of the past, pretending that they aren't just dusty cobwebs that should be swept away and forgotten.
I'm confused and rambling.
And I am most definitely not feeling comfortable in this situation.
