We have all heard of ghosting (or the fade away, as some call it), probably – that thing when a person you're dating [married to] just disappears. But like real ghosts (which are real, as I just said), there are many different types of relationship phantoms. And fortunately for all of us, these types correspond to famous spooks. How lucky! [such as]..
Bloody Mary: This is a ghost you really believe will reappear if you just try hard enough. Stay chanting in front of that dark bathroom mirror all night if you have to...
-------- (sigh)
Although I'm hopelessly unprepared for the semester, I'm sure glad to be back at work. Holy shit, thank god for books. Thank you thank you thank you god for books. In fact, I think my main thought increasingly is "thank you". I think it at my shoes, a patch of sky, my growling stomach, almost everything/anything I can. Thank god for meetings, even that - it beats going home smelling like a whopper. I always want to pull back against being dragged anywhere, as to self pity relentlessly. Be thankful for your breath, for legs that work, for something. Have you not noticed that the way you think has not served you well at all? So duh, TRY IT IN REVERSE. I'm digging my heals in the more he tries to yoke and drag me into believing that only his pain counts, that his discomfort of today trumps everything else and everyBODY else. No. It doesn't. I swear to Christ, he's going to start running through the streets hitting ice cream cones out of kids' hands out of all consuming resentment that anyone might have a feeling that isn't conforming to his certainty that his own unhappiness is the sole irrefutable center of the known universe. And what really drives me crazy is that for all his self-absorption, he doesn't really care about himself at all either. What IS that?
(And why am *I*, not he for himself, trying to figure it out all the time? Reading 'Psychology Today' articles like it's my job.) (While his mother - whom we've dubbed Low Cunning - while Low Cunning tries to get him to hook up with his landlady, who in turn makes him meatloaf dinners. Which is fine, whatever/eyeroll, but can we at least thank god for meatloaf then?)
Loving Aaron feels at this point a lot like loving my kids at two years old felt, when at the end of the day all you can do is hold them and thank god they're alive anyway, and think 'wow I love you, wow you suck'. And pray they move on from this stage of development before you crack.
