I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that I am no nearer to any sort of enlightenment or understanding.
Nonetheless, I have learned quite a great deal, some of which I’d probably not rather know, but what are you going to do. Some traumas have been indelibly etched into my brain, and even now my heart quivers for a moment.
In these eight years, I have seen both great and small evils. The destruction of a republic, the crumbling of an empire. The long defeat. Oh, there have been flashes of goodness—even greatness—interspersed here and there. It is never actually completely dark. Even sunlight filters through the drapes and the blinds, through the baffles and the narrow fenestrations between the walls.
Maybe, in the end, the problem is that he inner core of my being is hollow and vacuous. It is an easy explanation for all the small disappointments and failures, all the fears that have weighed me down, all the opportunities I’ve squandered, all the words and emotions I’ve never shared.
It’s a facile explanation for the gnawing restlessness rasping at my soul.
There’s no there, there.
In this blank space and time, where the future has never been so uncertain, I try to figure out some kind of direction to take. I fear that all of the roads presented to me will lead me nowhere. I’m not even worried whether they’ll lead me to disaster. And I’m done with caring whether or not someone will be willing to come with me on the journey. I know that I have to walk the road on my own. But what I’m fearful about is that the road I choose will just end and leave me stranded in the wilderness, with nothing left to do but go back the way I came, and start all over again. As many times as I’ve done it, I’m tired of starting over again.
So I sit here, or lie here, stranded, paralyzed by indecision, not knowing the right way to go, not even knowing what I should be looking for, or where to turn. If I could just freeze space and time, and live in this undecided moment for ever, maybe I’d have a chance. I know it’s a futile fantasy.
There is a just a significant part of me that simply does not want to grow up.
Maybe it’s just stupid of me to keep hoping that one of these days, I’ll snap out of it, and actually do something with my life. Something more drastic than that has to happen. Something akin to lighting a fuse underneath my ass. What is that something? Where do I find it? How do I start? Why has the last thirty-two years of my life not taught me anything of use in terms living like a normal human being? Why does everything become hypercomplicated whenever I touch it? Whenever I ponder it in my mind? Why is nothing ever simple?
And why do I keep asking myself questions I can’t answer?
In a sense, that is all I’m left with, though. This faint, vague, possibly quite futile hope that someone or something out there might just save me yet. As much as I’ve tried, I know I can’t do it on my own, and apparently I just don’t trust anyone I know enough to help me. I mean, if you can’t trust yourself, how can you expect to trust anyone else? What a cursed existence.
But I suppose tomorrow is another day. All I can do is keep a lookout and stay vigilant. Who knows? Maybe that Change™ will come. Stranger things have been known to happen. Until then, all I can hope to do is keep my head above the water, even as it slowly rises inch by inch.
It’s been 8 years since this song was released by The Cure. I remember that the first time I heard it, I felt that it captured perfectly my despair from that moment my heart shattered 13 years ago.
Nothing I am
Nothing I dream
Nothing is new
Nothing I think or believe in or say
Nothing is true
It used to be so easy
I never even tried
Yeah, it used to be so easy…
But the last day of summer never felt so cold
The last day of summer never felt so old
Never felt so…
All that I have
All that I hold
All that is wrong
All that I feel for or trust in or love
All that is gone
It used to be so easy
I never even tried
Yeah, it used to be so easy…
But the last day of summer never felt so cold
The last day of summer never felt so old
The last day of summer never felt so cold
Never felt so…
It seems like that moment has reverberated through space and time. Every defeat I’ve endured since seems to be an echo of that fatal moment. A reminder that, emotionally speaking, I’m crippled. An emotional amputee. Nothing has ever seemed right since. These days it’s easy for me to feel sorry for myself, and it’s hard not to be disappointed at how little progress I’ve made, and how little hope there seems to be in the future. I don’t begrudge anyone their happiness, but it just seems like everyone else has gotten a “happily ever after” ending except me.
Such is fate, I guess. How emo is that?
Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed.
—Schmendrick the Magician, from The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.
Or some such bullshit. Maybe I never had a choice, a chance to defy my destiny. Actually, in some cases, I’ve known from that start that I didn’t have a chance, and yet I still boarded those trains and rode them as they smashed directly into brick walls.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
—Albert Einstein
I give up on this. I know I’ve said it before, and it has never dissuaded me from pursuing predictable disaster, but I’m done. It’s just time to accept that there are certain things in life I will never experience, to deal with that hard fact, and move on.
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
The mornings are the worst,
when all of the sudden,
you are reminded of all that
failed to come true, of all that is not there
all that has never been, and all that will never be
Like cold steel slicing between the ribs
straight into your beating heart
quivering helplessly with each beat
then twisted and turned
yanked back
then plunged back in again
Like shark’s teeth gnawing, shredding
rending, tearing
until all that is left is the blood
muddying the deep blue water
and still somehow, through all this
against all reason, I continue to live
I have tried to empty my heart
of all desire
let my heart be still
and want no more
let my heart stay frozen and undisturbed
to never dream again
to never imagine warmth and tenderness
never again to thaw from a loving smile
nor from kind words,
nor from a warm embrace
stopped, and drained dry
so that I might hide it away forever
keep it bound and locked up
so that it may never again be found
better this eternal darkness that I know
this numb silence of regret
and permanent loss
this echoing emptiness
than this aching, writhing half-existence, forever yearning to be filled.
there was never anything more than fine gossamer threads of hope
fraying and tenuous, breaking, snapping, tearing with the slightest breeze
the merest whisper
more like a dream than anything else
so that awakening came like a disaster
and the dawn brought nothing but dread
untethered, my soul writhes
unbound, directionless, unmoored
drifting aimlessly in this empty sea of silence
without a soul in sight
bobbing up and down like an abandoned dinghy
forgotten flotsam slowly sinking into the deep
I cling desperately to shattered, splintered driftwood
knowing soon I will grow too weary
to hold fast to the broken fragments
to swim against this current
the waves shall take me
in the deep fastness I shall lie
and maybe this existential torment, too
is nothing but a nightmarish dream
and one day I shall awaken
at last knowing that every ending is a new beginning
for every closed door, there is an open one
I cling to this thought
bind it to myself, clasp it tight
this final hope
that, one day, my hour will come
and this, too, shall then end
a phantom lifestyle imagined by my
fevered mind where there would be someone at
home who would wish me luck and send me out
with a hug and a kiss, and there would be
someone to look forward to seeing once
it’s all over
some other lifetime, or some other branch
universe, splitting off from some moment
before I erred and made the wrong choices
before the stars went astray and awry
before the decisions were taken from
my hands
to believe that this was how it was all
meant to turn out—the thought makes my heart ache
my breaths painful to draw—that this was some
unavoidable, inescapable
doom
that God would be so cruel to condemn not
just me, but any soul to so hopeless
so desolate a fate, leaves me tired
aching and weary, my faith tattered and
torn
perhaps my only consolation is
that somewhere in this multiverse there is
a version of me who knows what it is
to be happy
in this voiceless silence interrupted
by the whirring internal combustion
engines, rubber running across worn-down
concrete, these assemblies of metal growl
past, slashing through the air like two-ton knives
at 70 miles per hour, almost
like the tumult of a rushing river
or waves crashing down on the silver shore
my mind lost in the eddies and whirpools
of wind and debris, as the sunlight streams
in, vainly trying to evaporate
the dark mood crouching upon my soul like
a gremlin ready to ambush and havoc
seeking some faint memory, some trace of happiness
and not finding it, not in the hidden recesses
of my tumbled mind, that feeling of
having her beside me, the warmth
and tenderness of her embrace
in those murky memories of childish romance
certainly, no happiness in those fits of
jealousy, of possessiveness, of
feeling like every moment spent
away from her was losing her second by second
until in the deep darkness of the fall
I lost her at last, and she betrayed me
leaving this disfiguring scar upon my heart
and maybe the closest I ever came to happiness
was to know that someone like her, whose
smile, like sunlight itself illuminates
the bleak caverns of my crumbling mind
and even in this harrowed mood, a tendril of joy
wraps itself around my heart before
it bursts like a delicate soap bubble
to know her, and to have her in my life
though she was never mine, will never be mine
perhaps I was doomed to see the Promised Land
but to never dwell there myself
As I sit here procrastinating, irrationally hoping that I can somehow, someday figure out how to stop time, it occurred to me that I will probably never be whole again.
Strangely, I don’t remember being formally taught about wound healing in medical school, and I only remember having one didactic session during residency. I’m sure we must have covered it somewhere, probably in pathology during the second year of medical school, when we learned about inflammation, but my memories of those days are pretty faint.
From the things that I’ve seen in the past 6 years, it occurs to me that wound healing only really closes things up. It rarely if ever actually reverses things to where it used to be. In other words, all wounds have permanent effects. What is gone is gone.
I think about my dad, and his damaged heart, and while he is in particularly good shape for someone who threw a clot down their LAD, there’s always going to be scar tissue there. A section of his heart has died, and it’s never going to come back.
And while the Romanticists waxed poetic about the heart as the seat of emotion, it’s ultimately really just a muscle. But we are starting to understand that emotional wounds are just as real was physical wounds. Hence, the diagnosis of PTSD, but that’s another rant entirely.
I’m not entirely sure what precipitated this thought. I’ve been interrupted five or six times now since I started this post, and I’ve forgotten what I originally meant to write. But I was just packing up to get ready to head back to S.D., and it occurred to me how I still haven’t recovered from something I realized about 10 years ago. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried to change, she would never feel the same way about me the way I felt about her.
I have to admit, for the most part, I’ve gotten what I’ve wanted out of life. Now, granted, I haven’t really wanted many things. I mean, really wanted it, where it felt like I would die if I didn’t get it. Even though I’ve spent lots of sleepless nights agonizing about my convoluted career path that nearly didn’t materialize, and even though I’ve worked pretty damn hard to achieve what I have, I remember having given up, and accepting the possibility that it was never going to happen, and being OK with that. Well, mostly OK.
And I’ve certainly had my little heartaches from time to time to time, fantasizing about things that were never going to happen. But they never lasted as long, and were never as painful, as that original wound. In a lot of ways every incident since then has merely been a reiteration, a repetition, of that time. It’s like my ownpersonalGroundhogDay. Every day is exactly the same.
A lot of it is plain old stubbornness, maybe. Although it’s more like learned helplessness. Once I realized that it didn’t matter what I did, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t even bother trying. If it’s never going to happen, then there’s no point.
So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I don’t try, then of course it’s never going to happen, but I guess I just never want to get to that point again, to that point of wanting someone so much, and yet realizing that I don’t have a chance.
Bn will always ask me, how do I know for sure? Of course I never know for sure. But I can guess pretty damn well. And, practically speaking, an infinitesimal probability is pretty much the same thing as no chance.
I talka lot about the probability of dyingalone. I have to admit, it’s a terrible feeling to believe that no one will really miss you when you’re gone. But it’s not going to kill me.
No, I haven’t watched it yet, so there aren’t any spoilers. I just read the review in the L.A. Times from yesterday, and it seems like it would be very much my movie, the way, I suppose, I got obsessed with “Beauty and the Beast”, even.
The sense of the protagonist’s shy, tentative optimism despite the overwhelming sense of loneliness, abandonment, and alienation that is already just palpable in the 5 min trailer is a little heartbreaking.
I can relate.
OK, I should’ve warned you, Kenneth Turan’s review of Wall-E does have a few details that could be construed as spoilers, although it doesn’t actually give any part of the plot away. The details make it sound almost like something that Douglas Adams would write.
Wall-E (which stands for Waste Allocator/Loader/Lifter - Earth Class, basically an autonomous, intelligent trash compactor) is the only sentience that seems to remain on Earth, excluding insects. He is tasked with the goal of reducing the amount of space all of the Earth’s garbage takes up.
Seemingly at odds with the typical Disney stereotype of “singing Zippy-dee-doo-dah out of your asshole”, “Wall-E” starts off with a rather dystopian vision of a planetary eco-catastrophe. The writers take our fears about rampant global capitalism and the inexorable expansion of the consumer culture, and they extrapolate them to their logical conclusion: the Earth basically becomes one large toxic landfill from which every human has fled, cavorting off into space polluting the rest of the universe too. The vision of lonely ruins of modern cities buried in garbage is extremely haunting, mostly because its probably going to be right.
And yet, despite this utterly hopeless desolation, you get the sense that Wall-E can’t help but harbor a spark of hope. As meager as his existence is, he finds small, meaningless joys in small, probably ultimately meaningless tasks. But none of this fulfills the need for companionship. For communion. For connection.
In a literal act of deus ex machina, EVE (which stands for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) arrives on the planet, armed with a high-energy laser cannon. She is apparently the herald of the exiled, morbidly obese, wanton and gluttonous humans who have been living on interstellar cruise ships since the mass exodus—reminding me very much of the Golgafrincham B class as created by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—an acerbic, sardonic send-up of humanity as a whole. Idiots, the lot of them. And that is where the mostly predictable plot begins.
Still, maybe that’s all there is to life. While I’ve had my moments of companionship, communion, and connection, they have, for the most part, been brief exercises, not going too deep, not getting too difficult. People slide in and out of life like set pieces. As long as you don’t ask too much, you’ll get by, but you won’t get much, either.
And it seems the moments that I’ve tried to bridge the gap, tried to reach out and go for something more meaningful have all been shot to shit somehow.
There’s no point in connecting closely, meaningfully, to anyone, because no one wants to be that close to me, and even if they did at the beginning, in the end, they leave as fast as they can physically go.
Times like these, I end up asking: why continue to burden the universe with my existence?
It would be one thing to be bitter and angry about all this, to learn all the wrong lessons. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Get yours while the getting is good. Fuck everyone else. But all of that is pretty much just as meaningless as my one-dimensional existence of microscopic, ultimately meaningless, achievements. Why trade in one set of nonsense for a whole new set of nonsense, when the current set gets me nowhere just as well as the new set probably would?
So, instead, I’m just sad. And I wake up in the morning like everybody else, take a shower, get dressed, go to work. If I’m lucky, some of the meaningless little things I do will actually have measurable results, no matter how small.
Like I said, it’s not that there aren’t awesome people around me who are looking for deeper meaning in life. But they can usually find someone less mentally convoluted and more physically attractive than I am.
Bn likes to say that I’ve never (or at least, almost never) tried, and that’s why it hasn’t worked out for me all these years, and maybe it’s true. But each year I’m a little more tired. The gangrene affecting my soul advances just a little bit. Each advance, I feel less and less pain. Eventually I won’t be able to feel a damn thing at all, and then they can rip my soul out of me and I won’t even flinch.
Only hope can keep me together.
Love can mend your heart, but love can break your heart.
—”Message in a Bottle” by the Police
Then again, when we’re talking about someone who is just awesome in so many ways, even just being friends with her is probably more than I deserve.
Coherence is probably a little too much to ask at this hour, after this much to drink. Today I have come to another bitter revelation, and I have a good idea of what my trajectory is going to be.
As I walked down the hall between the ICU and the wards, I actually shivered a little, with the cold, hard realization that as each second passes, the probability that I’m going to find The One™ diminishes. The likelihood that I’m going to die on my own increases ever closer to complete certainty, and all I’m left with is this useless thought: this sucks.
There was some point in time that this all became irreversible. That I was actually never going to trust another person ever again, and that I would never be moved to actually pursue someone with all my heart, without preconditions, without fear, without expectation.
In the end, it’s all half-assed. Blundering, clumsy, idiotic, foolish bumbling. Senseless, ridiculous, and hopeless. The last, what, four months have passed without me learning a single goddamn thing, and I’m pretty much done. Sayonara. Arrivederci. Hasta la vista.
Maybe next lifetime.
Seriously, though. I stare numbly at the woman who OD’ed on God only really knows, and I can’t help but wonder, just how easy would it be? Everything at this stage in the game feels so fixed, so static, and no matter what sort of emotions rage inside me, nothing ever changes. I can’t even get myself to do anything about it. I’m a goddamn gimp.
How easy would it be to take the exit strategy?
But I recognize that there is always a third way out. Something that I haven’t thought of yet. Something so bizarre, arcane, convoluted, and perplexing, that you’ve got to ask yourself, is it really worth it?
Of course not, but it’s certainly better than the alternative.
Still, it’s like choosing to suffer for a long time, until the inevitable finally overtakes me, or suffering for a short time, with me taking an active role in ending that suffering.
hey pig
yeah you
hey pig piggy pig pig pig
all of my fears came true
black and blue and broken bones you left me here I’m all alone
my little piggy needed something new
nothing can stop me now
I don’t care anymore
nothing can stop me now
I just don’t care
hey pig
nothing’s turning out the way I planned
hey pig there’s a lot of things I hoped you could help me understand
what am I supposed to do I lost my shit because of you
nothing can stop me now
I don’t care anymore
nothing can stop me now
I just don’t care
nothing can stop me now
you don’t need me anymore
—”Piggy” by Nine Inch Nails
I am stuck forever living that final moment of torment, never recovering from it. It is a cancer that has gnawed through my soul, a festering wound that will never, ever heal.
I can’t fucking win unless something inside of me somehow changes for the better. I don’t know how to do it on my own. I’m like a blind paraplegic crawling around in the dark, hoping for a fucking miracle.
I can’t save myself. The writing is on the wall. And if this cup will not pass, so be it.
I just crave sleep. I’m so fucking tired. The entire last decade and a half just decided to fall on top of me, and I can’t even crawl out of the debris. I’m just so fucking tired. All I want is to sleep, goddamn it!
15 years: 5,480 sunsets
the days spin by, the hours whirl
blurring into infinity
and I can’t remember where I’ve been
nor all the answers that I figured out
falling out of my hands
scattered wildly like spilled grain
as I was, so I will be
upon this path to nowhere
to anywhere
my heart stands still for a single moment
and I think of her golden tresses
and her radiant smile
around her, there is always sunlight
and for that moment
I am at peace
still the gap yawns
all distances stretch to infinity
half again, then half again of that
as close as I can get
still the current sweeps me away
the closer I get, the more keen the sharpness of the pain
and the storm rages again in my soul
the violence, the cacophony
overwhelming all reason
into this storm I wander
this madness that I have known
don’t know which way is up or down
water above me
water below me
and there is barely any air to breathe
crashing waves, bursting foam
the raindrops splatter against the tormented sea
my sail runs ragged
rent and sheared
I have come this way before
too many times
and the sunsets pile upon each other
compressing, condensing
gravity crushing all these memories
into an impenetrable singularity
even light cannot escape
I am lost down this familiar road
bewildered and confused
dazed and helpless
as a newborn expelled into the cold, cruel world
squeezed and strangled
smashed, battered, flailing, bawling
it’s never enough
summer, then fall
the Devil’s breath
flames bursting
ash raining from the sky
come fall, then come winter
as the shadows lengthen
and the night reigns
then winter, and spring
and hope thaws from that winter twilight
joy unlooked for
happiness come suddenly
we spin the ever-turning-wheel
again I pass this road
cross this valley
climb this hill
still no closer to the stars
though I grasp and reach in vain
it is, I think, at the last
no matter how I rationalize and dither
my doom to die unfulfilled
cold and alone
unlooked for, not missed
as the days lengthen
and the leaves fall
they will forget what I look like
wonder about that empty space for a spare moment
and shrug
that final winter
with no ensuing spring
that ultimate night
without the promise of dawn
that last silence, without words to follow
alone, alone, the raging sea
my soul drinks deeply
of rain water, and the morning dew
still I thirst
knowing my longing shall never be quenched
I’m watching my mom and my dad lying on the couch together, and quickly calculate how long they’ve been married: 32 years. Holy shit.
I am almost half my father’s age.
My dad was 32 and my mom was 30 when they got married.
After that, I’m out of goal posts.
Except maybe for 33, the age that Jesus was reputedly crucified.
But we won’t dwell on that.
There are worse things than to be friends with an extremely intelligent, wonderfully beautiful, magically creative woman. The first difficulty to be overcome is my disbelief that such a woman would even bother talking to me.
From that point on, it’s a matter of reigning in my exuberant imagination.
I have misread the signs quite a few times before. Just because she likes me doesn’t mean she likes me in That Way™. Herein lies the second difficulty, and pretty much this is where the process ends. Sometimes abruptly. Sometimes in incredibly excruciating, protracted ways.
The next part of the process involves sticking around until she does find someone whom she likes in That Way™. Then it’s back to the Pit of Despair for me.
I keep hoping that it’s going to turn out differently some day. It’s all mathematics, right? Statistical probability.
Given enough time, whatever is possible will be inevitable.
I’ve got to assume that it’s possible.
The time thing is kind of against me though.
I keep trying not to think too far ahead. Why I can’t just live in the moment I have no idea.
I don’t know. Maybe S. is right. Maybe the last 3 years 10 months have finally caught up to me.
‘But sir,’ it squealed, ‘I just heard on the sub-ether radio report. It said you were dead….’
‘Yeah, that’s right, I just haven’t stopped moving yet.’
—Zaphod Beeblebrox from *The Restaurant at the End of the Universe*
The May Grey creeping outside my window doesn’t help a bit. Today is the kind of day that makes me want to just crawl back into bed and go back to sleep.
I think the worst part of this is that I really don’t have anything to be miserable about. If I think about all this rationally, calmly (hah!), I’m doing OK. I have a (sort-of) job for at least part of next year. The last two blocks of my residency should be pretty (relatively) cake.
It’s just this oppressive sense of time running out. Time waits for no one. Great.
Every day that passes I start to feel like my universe is contracting. Every day that I don’t act, my choices become narrower. The possibilities diminish.
If I don’t do it now, it’ll never happen.
I thought, oh God, my chance has come at last!
But then a strange fear gripped me and i just couldn’t ask
—”There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths
But then I stop to think about it. What exactly is it that is running through my fingers like sand? Nothing but vapor, really. Wisps of probability. All of them possibly infinitesimal.
I’m over-thinking all of this, really.
How do you lose something that you don’t have yet, and may not ever have?
I’m starting to think about what I do* have. Family. Friends. They are *real. And while none of us can predict the future, and I knock on wood right now to keep misfortune at bay, I know that they’ll be there. Certainly longer than any of these fairy tales that keep running through my head.
In other words, while loss *is* a real possibility—we are all mortals doomed to die, after all—they’ll always live inside of me. Memories of shared conversations, trips taken together. Random meetings and crossings in this wide world of ours. The randomness exchanged over the ether, by e-mail, IM, or SMS.
This is not something that I can easily lose. It’s not something that can be easily taken away from me.
Which leads me to a self-styled koan that may or may not make sense:
Whatever you need, you have it.
Whatever you don’t have, you don’t need it.
There is a geeky acrostic from computer programming that seems applicable at the moment: YAGNI. You ain’t gonna need it.
It is something I have, I suppose, struggled with my entire life: the idea of just letting something go, because there’s nothing I can do about it at this moment. I have spent many sleepless nights trying to fathom things that weren’t meant to be, things that I knew at the time couldn’t possibly happen.
To everything—turn, turn, turn
There is a season—turn, turn, turn
and a time for every purpose under heaven.
—”Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)” by the Byrds
So it all comes down to the Art of Not Wanting, as usual. Desire causes suffering, and I’m just tired, so very tired.
