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April 12, 2005
Volume 39: They Also Serve, Who Lie In Bed
Spook,
One thing I've observed obliquely, but which I'll outright say, is a total pain in the ass for me, is that the more I've worked on getting well, the harder I've found it to actually get support, because, in essence, I am less fun. I'm less interested in killing time just to kill time. I feel like, except for a handful of people that I do truly love (and if you don't know if you are one, come by sometime and see me...) that everybody I know - nearly everybody I've ever known - has either passed from a stage where their time is valueless to one where their time is valuable - but done so within a frame of work or family that I'm concretely excluded from - or still regards their time as valueless - and I can't go along with that anymore. It's a difficult position to be in and it's pretty reasonable for me to be feeling cold and alone even just from that. And being sick full time means that, unlike most people, I don't have a job consuming the vast majority of my attention. The problem is - like most of my problems - just knowing about it doesn't do a damn bit of good. Because like most of my problems, I'm too damn tired to do anything about it... and worse than most of my problems, it's actually made itself worse as I've gone along.
I notice, in doing some inbox cleaning, that it has been a month since I first mailed you. It feels like much longer. I've - hell, we both have - gone through a lot. Of my options for people to mail - which I've described as tight, and which is true, but not so much for the reasons I was initially trying to apply - I still think I picked the most appropriate of the lot, though my motives were (and somewhat remain) highly unclear. What I wanted, I think... was someone who wouldn't judge me or push me into action too fast. I do have to be very careful. It's not enough for me to do the right thing. I have to know it's the right thing. Nobody else would just listen to me like you have. Everybody else would start telling me what I should do - everybody else has such expectations of me. Or they would say nothing. You... give perspective. Everybody else... wants me to be what they think I am capable of. Right now I'm capable of damn little and I don't need to be overestimated.
Maybe they don't even know how much pressure they expel. Maybe they act that way toward everybody. But I know that you have expectations of other people that are different from what you have of me, and I know people have expectations of me that they don't have of normal people. It makes me not want to be around people at all. You make me feel like I can just be me. Funny, Kay said that I made him feel like he could just be himself. Apparently himself runs quite a gamut, from delightful to disgusting. Poor Kay. But more on that some other time, when my knives have come back from the whetstoner.
I'm looking like a better bet every day, as the treatments invade, and I become incrementally less sick. A month ago I said to you, if I survived this current black mojo - spent most of the last four days in bed, but feeling abstractly good about that - it was going to turn out to have been the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. Which is not to say that I'm forgiving... I never forgive until I forget and I'm still stippled all over with white burns from the meteor shower of medical outrage I've been inhabiting. But I'm not bitter, either. I'd be happy to get on with life. I just want to get well, in the way that works best for me personally. Just give me one thing from life - the same thing John Self wanted:
I'm understanding. I'm mature. And it isn't much to ask. I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with my Selina - or not even alone, damnit, merely close to her, close enough to smell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the moulding of her artful lips. Just for a few precious seconds. Just long enough to put in one good, clean punch.
AD
Posted by gtaylor at April 12, 2005 03:08 AM
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