Since I broke up with **** I have had a strange existence. I spent most of last year in the company of a woman friend who I never slept with, but who had become like a kind of Siamese twin. That relationship was too intense. I became too intense. Almost had another breakdown because of it. She had me believing (almost) my melancholic nature was due to hell demons attacking me. I can't remember why I'd made them cross, in her crazed demonology. Recommended I cry out the name of Jesus to come and defend me when the blues (and therefore the demons) got really rough. I didn't do that, but I did take to keeping a copy of the Bible in the house, and hanging a crucifix from a nail in my ceiling, just in case.Pretty peculiar for a Buddhist. When I look back on it now I wonder what the hell was wrong with both of us. (Maybe I was missing the nutty relative I'd lived with before, or the psychic dramas I endured in that situation for so long.)
Finally I couldn't take any more of my friend and stopped answering her calls. I feel guilty about that, but hell, I am alive; and I wonder if I would have been, had our friendship continued.
Since then things have been a little quiet. I had a couple of dates with a beautiful Namibian woman, but when I fell down the stairs in the pub on the second date I knew that was a bad omen. When I look back, from my present viewpoint, at all the female company and entertainment I had only a couple of years ago I wonder what's gone wrong. But nothing has gone wrong. People move, and change. Everybody I know now is so much younger than I am. And everybody I meet is so unlike me. I get tired of feeling like the eccentric uncle of every woman I sit across a pub table from. And it frustrates me having nothing to talk about with most of them. Did I see the X-Factor on Saturday night? Well, no, funnily enough. But I did a great thirty-minute meditation. (Eyes glazing.)
I have decided just to commit to being the person I feel like being, quit chasing worlds I passed through and matured out of twenty years ago so I can get a bit of company that would pretty soon bore the pants off me anyway. I'm happy getting up before dawn to sit on the meditation cushion.I'm happy hiking through the parks or along country lanes talking to the cows. Writing poetry and arguing in my own head or on the internet about politics. I'm happy living frugally because accumulating useless objects is a soul suck I just don't need. These things might make me an alien being that hardly anybody left (at least in this county) knows how to relate to. But I can live with that. Trying to do things the other way for the last forty years has left me a screwed-up and deeply unsatisfied man.
1 comment:
Try falling up the stairs next time. That's a good sign.
Too bad we're separated by an ocean. You seem to be the kind of fellow that would fit in nicely in my little corner of the universe.
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