Tuesday, November 6, 2007

soft shoe

Okay so I suck. When I am not making some inane attempt, I am generally cracking wise to all and sundry, thinking I should really be writing this shit down because I am secretly brilliant. And then I go to write it down and the Big Fat Sads hit me and all I can write about is how some stupid guy is leaving me and blah blah blah. For chrissakes--do you think I’m going to get over this anytime soon? I hate the Big Fat Sads. I used to indulge in them a fair amount as a teenager--I was anti-color in clothing (shades were fine: black, white and grey. No color though. Not on my watch) and would have been wearing the big black eye makeup and such were it not for the fact that I grew up in rural Maine and I never learned how to put on makeup at all (seriously--I am a no-makeup person. I had friends who tried to teach me in college, but they would put it on and 15 minutes later I would have smeared it off--I’m really bad at most of the grown-up-girl-stuff). And I thought sad was probably the best of all the emotions. I was always sad about something.

So I think I may have wasted all my sad back then. Or possibly the summer after my freshman year in college, when I indulged in clinical depression (don’t worry, I think it was mostly situational) for a couple of months. So now I am all “sad sad sad” flailing myself around and then in mid-flail I suddenly realize how ridiculous I am and how stupid it all is: to be sad over a boy? Wtf? Okay so he is leaving me, okay so it isn’t going to work out in typical fairytale fashion. Did I really think I was that person? I mean, yeah today I wore khakis to work, but I am generally just about a half-step above streetcrazy as far as appearance goes, so how in the hell did I expect to “normalize” and participate in the mating games of civilized society anyway? Because that’s the thing: he totally made me feel like we were doing the “normal” thing, that there was a flow and we were following it, that everything was as it seemed and that that was a good thing. And so I’m all romanticizing life and imagining continuing normalcy and it turns out I was some sort of diversionary tactic prior to his world tour. Shit. And its one of those things that starts to freak you out, not in and of itself, but because you’ve been building your little romanticized worldview and as it gets pulled down around your ankles you suddenly realize that its cold out there without it and you can’t figure out how to keep warm anymore.

It reminds me, very pointedly of the most worrying part of my ramble around Europe in college--my aunt and uncle came to visit me in England, and we palled around for a weekend--did all the expensive London stuff I couldn’t afford to do on my own, went to visit some friends of theirs in Kent, that sort of thing, and then the time came for us to go our separate ways--and I had been traveling for over two months already at that point--I knew my deal, knew what I was doing and how to go about it, but when I left them at the train station I was suddenly terrified and uncertain about anything and everything--I felt abandoned and alone, because I’d been a kid again--a part of a group, a follower--for that whole weekend, and then I was jumping back into being in charge of myself again and it felt so totally foreign in that moment I wasn’t sure I could do it. But of course I did: when you haven’t got any other options it makes things pretty easy I’ve found. You do something because you have to and its just that simple. Which is where I am right now I guess. He is leaving me and I am all wrapped up in my Big Fat Sad but I’ll get over it because I have to: I just don’t have that kind of tragedy in me anymore. And I never did learn the proper way to do that eye makeup (I would still like to learn that I think--I do think it is fabulous still, to this day).

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