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19 June, 1998
Now I close my eyes
Les yeux sans visage eyes without a face -- Billy Idol, "Eyes Without A Face"
Why do I do this to myself? Why am I still curious about it after all this time? Why does it still get such a strong reaction? But most of all, WHY DO I KEEP DOING THIS TO MYSELF? I should know better by now that I can't read anything that either of them writes, that I can't look at pictures of them together. That my emotions boil and roil up like bile to choke me and throw me into some crazed mix of grief, rage and despair and a sense of having something which was mine ripped away from me. They sit there on the screen, the wedding photos in a newly re-designed web page. All those smiling faces -- high school friends who should have been on MY wedding list but who have changed with the winds as easily as if I had never existed at all. Do I sound petty? Crazed perhaps? Sometimes I think that I am crazy. That the sane me has thrown up this life I'm leading now to protect that insane me, still curled up inside, from the world and from myself. Because I don't think of everything that happened on a daily basis at all, so firmly pushed out of my mind it is. But things like this ... THEIR wedding page ... some things she says ... some things he says ... make me want to throw up with the violence of my emotions. I mean ... how could she neatly summarize what happened as "a bizarre series of events led me to be happily wed"??? She's talking about betrayal and a cruel disregard for friendship and trust here ... "bizarre series of events" my ASS. But I make myself take a good long look. Stare in fact, trying to force myself over it through the numbness of familiarity. I guess I think that if I look at it long enough, I'll get used to it and it won't matter at all. Not one little bit. But I know I'm just fooling myself. His picture still catches me sometimes, unawares, when I sift through a box of papers ... in the photo albums still. Probably because I had to shelve too much, too suddenly without a satisfactory enough explanation. Probably because I had to re-evaluate my life completely at an unexpected time when I was completely unprepared for it. Probably because for some reason I feel like I had a part of my life stolen from me. Probably because for me, in some ways, it never really ended. The feelings just didn't stop because he said good-bye. They cut me off at the knees, the two of them, and it's taken me this long just to find my feet again. So I can stand again and I have been. I'm happy ... really I am. Sabs is great ... I have a decent job ... I'm getting my Master's ... Shara is the best cat on the planet ... I've got almost everything I want ... right? So ... explain this to me ... explain to me WHY THE HECK a stupid collection of tiny pictures of smiling faces can make me feel this way. Why I want to tear down the walls and scream my rage out to the open sky. Why I want to pound my fists into the pavement and cry out all the grief until there is nothing left of the old me and I can rebuild myself, all over again from scratch, without any memories of him, of her, or who I was. But none of those is an option. I just have to go on as I am. I have to struggle against what these feelings do to me, reach for peace to keep the anger and grief from turning to bitter hate. Keep the proto-hate from washing through me. Lock it up or vent it out somehow (like writing this) ... turn it back to light ... not turn to the dark side. And it's so hard. But I have to do it. I have to go on. And for some reason, that prospect is inordinately bleak tonight. So I drown myself in music ... and hope that it passes ... and try to face another day. |
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