Sitting here in 2018

I’m sitting on a mattress, on a filthy floor, in a rotting house, in an empty part of a dying city. And I’m coming to terms with just how difficult it is to express anything beyond the bare minimum required to paint a scene.
I’ve been thinking about this since Sunday. I talked with Ken, or Ken Wiseman as I label him in my phone. Talking to him is always intense, though I suppose that I should confess it’s only the second time. He is one of the most fascinating people I have ever met. His conversations are beautiful spirals, chasing various threads, knitting together forgotten comments from an hour before. We talked for three hours, and, exhausted and sick as I was after Rakugo, I could have gladly kept talking.
He asks questions, and he asks questions as a person who needs to know. He digs. He probes. He writes notes in his little book. He finds things and puts them together, he catches contradictions. And, of course, whenever I talk to anybody about anything long enough, it tends to all wind up back at Rachael.
He told me something that I don’t know if I’ve ever really considered, and it’s been a bit difficult to take in. He told me that I’m incredibly lucky. That not many people will ever have the chance to care enough for anybody to be so utterly broken for so long. I don’t know if I agree, but it’s interesting. He also really forced me to dig deeper into the hows and whys of the relationship, and what happened, and what it meant, and what I felt. He did it in a way that nobody else ever has. He ripped open my chest and examined each organ piece by piece. But the way he did it, I felt as though I were sleeping gently on a sunny day on my veranda.
I’ve felt a peculiar kind of sadness in the last few days. I think that for the last two weeks, I haven’t really had the chance to deal with everything that’s been happening to me. I think that a lot of it is just kind of settling in now. There’s a kind of horror and isolation that kicks in when you realize just how far you are from anybody. At least in Satsuma I could go to Kitchen Inoue and get a pick-me-up. Here? All I can do is to hope that the neighborhood cat is at Lawson.
I can feel, welling up in my shoulders, a kind of sadness that has something akin to beauty in it. And I don’t know what to make of it. It’s frightening. In some ways, I have felt so very old. However, at the same time, I feel very young. It’s that disconnect which is currently saddening me, among other things.
I need to write more of my feelings, and I need to hide from my feelings less. Talking to Yoko last night helped. She’s my Japanese Mom. Or, alternatively, I call her my Good Witch of the North. Talking to her at dinner last night, after having talked to Ken on Sunday, made such an impression on me. It’s strange to feel that strongly.
There’s such a gap between what I want, and what I need to be to have it. I want to lie on a bed and watch the sunlight fill the city with someone I love. But I know that I’m not a person who’s capable of being that. I want to somehow be everything that I’ve always loosely felt that I should be. And in true Petersonian fashion, I’m trying to clean my room. And in true Ozmentian fashion, I’m failing utterly at this. Utterly.
There’s never enough time. I spent three days, after the Rakugo performance on Sunday, just resting. I was exhausted from months of nonstop pushing. I had meant to keep going, and the loss of a schedule, and sleep schedule, is something which I’m sure is making my life actively worse. Yet, what’s there to be done? I wish I had more time. I still feel as though I’m about twenty one or twenty two, when, in reality, I’m almost half way through my thirty second year. I wish I had a week to lie in bed and somehow turn into nothing until everything somehow sorted itself out, but, I have a job, and responsibilities, and the job and responsibilities are only going to increase from here. I suppose that I’ve very little to mourn, and yet I mourn it. I feel as though I’m ten years late for everything in my life. It’s difficult to find a great deal of faith that anything will improve, because I know that in order for anything to improve, I have to improve it.
Jordan Peterson said something interesting that reflected ideas that I’d written about years ago, when I was writing regularly. Winning the lottery doesn’t solve anybody’s problems. It solves money problems, but it makes every other problem worse. I realize now, of course, that were I to be given everything that I’ve ever dreamed of, I’d ruin it within a month because I’m not the person who can have that. One thing that I never realized was that we change in the process of accomplishing our goals, and only those changes make us able to handle the goal itself.
Anna and I broke up, but I don’t mind. I’d lost my physical attraction a while ago, and, really, I wasn’t getting much out of talking with her anyway. I like talking to Yoko. I like talking to Ken. I like talking to people who engage parts of me that I had long forgotten that I’d had. Anna was intellectually stimulating, but, as cliche and moronic as I feel for writing this, there’s something to be said for a girlfriend who moves your heart. I wish that my emotional development were not so stunted.
I don’t think that it’s right to pine over Rachael, or Amanda, but I think that they’re things to consider. The Amber situation faded away, and I’m actually kind of amazed by how little I think about her these days. But, who knows. I have no idea who I’ll be when I wake up tomorrow. All I know is that I won’t like him. But maybe he’ll be a little less insufferable than the guy who went to bed the night before.