Don’t peel back the scab and expose the wound if you’re not willing to do surgery. Leave it covered. At least we can function day to day that way.
I’m left feeling brutalized. Our conversation didn’t heal or love. It didn’t connect us. It left us more clear about the ways we don’t connect, don’t agree, and don’t fit.
The wrong words spoken
The wrong words spoken, even calmly, do violence to my sense of equilibrium and well-being.
I keep trying to work and the sadness in my chest swells. Call it grief. I am grieving that loss of a fictional unity. We still have a unity of sorts. But we were pretending it was more.
With less pretense and more acknowledgment of how things really are out in the open. I feel this gaping, sucking sadness and grief in my chest.
When we see each other, we will not be pretending we are close. We will both know that we are not.
I wanted her to comfort me in my sadness, and I wanted to comfort her in her sadness, but what do we do when the other person causes the sadness? Who comforts who then? What’s the protocol?
I am grateful that she still texted me to ask for help with work issues. This gives me evidence or suggests the possibility that she isn’t as offended by my conclusion as I suspected she was. Perhaps she is also sad. I honestly don’t know. For someone who fights for my health and physical survival, I am nonetheless mostly convinced that she doesn’t value my friendship.
I didn’t KNOw what to look for
My mother never comforted me or made me feel safe. I didn’t know that was a thing. Then my first real relationship was with an older woman who had a child of her own. Physical attraction and motherly comfort and desires intermingled. But never satisfied.
Later I dated someone younger. That was a total distraction. Not useful.
After that I dated another older woman who had a career and a profession, and I was a man child still taking community college courses. The best conversations were had of the early relationships, but no other needs met.
Last was her. Close to my same age.
Throughout, I wasn’t aware of what needs a partner should or should not be expected to meet. So by the time we married, I’m locked in for life, and I begin to assume that when I need comfort she’ll be nurturing toward me. She’ll hold me and tell me and the softness of her skin and her voice will soothe me to sleep.
But no. That’s not how it goes.
