(no subject)
I broke up with my boyfriend of almost a year last week. Or, more correctly, I got dumped by said boyfriend. Having experienced neither breaking up with anyone, nor the more shocking process of being sat down and given the three-minute (if that! ha!) 'I need space' speech... I have no idea how well I'm dealing with it, comparatively speaking.
I imagine, in perhaps a slightly too dramatic manner, that this last week has given me a better understanding of what it must feel like to have a mental illness of some kind. It is so jarring to have reasoned everything down, to have worn it smooth and simple so it fits neatly in my palm, to have it all held there, in calmness and rationality, and then to lose it, to feel it slip from my grasp and swell, as it falls, filling the space available, till it presses against the edges of my bedroom walls, or the windows of the bus that I ride to work. And then the crying! I have never cried with such absolute unhappiness. I wept copiously at my grandmother's funeral, much to the delight of my relatives who I suspect thought everyone else's middle-class restraint just a little unsuited for a woman with my grandmother's beginnings, but this is not grief like that. I barely knew my grandmother, not once she moved out of the house we used to visit her in every Christmas, and her death was expected, natural and timely.
I wish that I could claim that the last time I found myself inconsolable, and gave in to lie on my bed sobbing like a child whose mother has thwarted their intense all-consuming desire for some small furry animal, that it was, well, the last time, but this week has been nothing if not instructional, and I must admit that this may be just another lull. I suspect there will be more empty moments where I find myself conversing earnestly with the air, bargaining for something that at this moment I know I can no longer have. I must confess to wanting it, though--wanting it against reason, wanting like that child, with a child's fury. It doesn't take a clinical psychologist to see that until I done with that desire there will certainly be yet more crying.
It almost amuses me to imagine his surprise should he ever come to read this entry. He expects none of this from the me of his imagining, not from his happy, silly, oh-so-very-casual girlfriend--that girl probably cried for about an hour, dried her eyes and blew her nose, indulged in several heavy drinking sessions when occasion called for it and will be ready to resume some semblance of normal, friendly interaction once she's fully sobered up. And by ‘almost amuses' I think we can all agree I mean ‘really gives me the shits'.
I imagine, in perhaps a slightly too dramatic manner, that this last week has given me a better understanding of what it must feel like to have a mental illness of some kind. It is so jarring to have reasoned everything down, to have worn it smooth and simple so it fits neatly in my palm, to have it all held there, in calmness and rationality, and then to lose it, to feel it slip from my grasp and swell, as it falls, filling the space available, till it presses against the edges of my bedroom walls, or the windows of the bus that I ride to work. And then the crying! I have never cried with such absolute unhappiness. I wept copiously at my grandmother's funeral, much to the delight of my relatives who I suspect thought everyone else's middle-class restraint just a little unsuited for a woman with my grandmother's beginnings, but this is not grief like that. I barely knew my grandmother, not once she moved out of the house we used to visit her in every Christmas, and her death was expected, natural and timely.
I wish that I could claim that the last time I found myself inconsolable, and gave in to lie on my bed sobbing like a child whose mother has thwarted their intense all-consuming desire for some small furry animal, that it was, well, the last time, but this week has been nothing if not instructional, and I must admit that this may be just another lull. I suspect there will be more empty moments where I find myself conversing earnestly with the air, bargaining for something that at this moment I know I can no longer have. I must confess to wanting it, though--wanting it against reason, wanting like that child, with a child's fury. It doesn't take a clinical psychologist to see that until I done with that desire there will certainly be yet more crying.
It almost amuses me to imagine his surprise should he ever come to read this entry. He expects none of this from the me of his imagining, not from his happy, silly, oh-so-very-casual girlfriend--that girl probably cried for about an hour, dried her eyes and blew her nose, indulged in several heavy drinking sessions when occasion called for it and will be ready to resume some semblance of normal, friendly interaction once she's fully sobered up. And by ‘almost amuses' I think we can all agree I mean ‘really gives me the shits'.