Sudden eventualities
I have done everything I can possibly do today: clean litter boxes, take out trash, wash the laundry, load two loads of dishes (last night's and tonight's), a work out, and an acquirement a surprisingly calm epiphany.
Over the last few days, I've been wondering about the nature of long term short distance relationships. Specifically, the type at hand.
Growing up, I, like millions of other Americans, were steeped in the myth of individuality. The red, white, and blue holy grail, a "be who you are" engraved golden cup of achievement, is set up early in a child's sense of mythos. And if the kid can survive grade school with a sense of discrete displacement, she is lauded with praise.
So, as a participant in both the long distance relationship and the revered mythos of true individuality, I've been questioning how the two positions cannot be at odds.
Living with someone is essentially justifying your way of life by directly opposing it with another's. At first you get a smug sense of satisfaction that your method of leaving clothes about the house is superior to his. Your socks don't end up underneath the tv or between you and the rotini. But then, one day you realize there are 8 cups with varying amounts of semi sentient liquids precariously placed about the nightstand. So, for a bit, you glide on the idea that you're equally messy.
Cordiality flies out the door when the drunken brute wakes you up to show you cat video. Even though the brute is just a semi-sensical man trying to make you laugh, your self esteem flies through the roof that truly, your manner of living is the best. He needs you to help him through life. And you stand atop your self made pedestal just long enough to collide into the front door at 2 am drunker than a suburban teenager.
So it goes, so and and so forth, and then some. Reveling his needing, reckoning your wants. Sometimes, though, in between finding beard hair in the morning juice and leaving the period panties in the living room, a little thought drifts. Maybe he has erected and destroyed the same navel gazing pedestals.
We pick these people out to share our lives briefly but keep them around when the need for finding another is outweighed by the normality of underwear occasionally walking into the dining room. Then, it is necessary to assume that if these people have the same realizations within their own individualities, that it is not required to be less than one person in a relationship of length. It is more natural that over time, those disgusting people we insist on sleeping with continuously can be extensions of ourselves; tools lengthening our own emotions into situations foreign to our own scapes of coffee ridden furniture, hair covered sinks, and crawling socks.
That is, reconciliation of both individuals and individuality is achievable . . . At least briefly :)
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.