Ruminating

It's late and I'm chewing emotional cud, thinking about how things are right now and how I want them to be eventually. And how confused I am about everything. And it's tough, trying to convey all that turmoil here.

I've done a lousy thing: Coming out of the blog closet (first one to say "blogset" gets a shiv to the jugular) and putting my name on this site has really made it difficult for me to tell the truth when it gets ugly. Which isn't all bad, I guess. It provides natural boundaries for me. But I take pleasure (dipped in a decent amount of anxiety) in picking through my problems and thoughts here, having a long, rambling, 24-hour conversation with you all, even those of you who rarely say anything back. It's a risk, of course, putting myself out there to be judged based on my idiosyncrasies. It's a risk I don't have to take. I often wonder why I take it if I'm scared people are going to hate me for what I have to say. (Or, more neurotically, who I am.) Mark Twain or some other mustachioed genius said, " Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." Why do I keep talking? Am I just performing the adult emotional equivalent of thumb-sucking? What am I saying that really matters? And is meaning what drives my writing anyway, or is it the process of writing and discovering and sharing how I feel and what I think with other people, which is itself meaningful? Or is it the meaningless buzz of random pixels?

I'm getting déjá vu, probably because I've read posts like this elsewhere on blogs whose owners were having brief identity crises. Who am I and when did I become someone who wants to air her emotional laundry on the internet?

How long can I do this before it truly comes back to haunt me? What do the things I write here say about me? Are they telling the truth? Am I telling the truth? How much truth should I tell? How much truth do I want to tell? Is the government logging every mundane fact about me and every other stupid blogger in the world? Is this blog going to keep me from getting jobs in the future? Or will it, in some delightfully ironic twist of fate, help me get jobs? Totally awesome jobs where I never have to get out of my pajamas?

Ah, hell. I don't know. It doesn't matter; this post isn't really even about me. It's about Phil, and how, out of respect for him, I don't talk about our failed relationship on here very much, even when I want to. Well, "failed relationship" is harsh. We have a relationship. We're close friends. Perhaps "failed romantic relationship" is more appropriate, though that sort of sounds like a bank transaction that just didn't go through. Please reinsert your card.

Dammit, I'm having a lot of trouble with this. I'm not one to mince (written) words when appropriate, but I'm having trouble communicating The Breakup and all its strange anticlimactic tangents because Phil reads this blog. And I don't want to hurt him.

So I don't really write about What Happened. What's Happening. What's Next. Or Who's Next. Or any of that. Because it feels disrespectful and passive-aggressive. But it means I'm not writing about something that is so essential to my everyday everything. The dominant narrative of my life right now is tied up in this relationship and all its tragicomic twists and turns, and what it means to slowly separate myself from the person I've been sutured to for eight years. It's a divorce without ever having been married. It's like prying two melted eight-year-old Jolly Ranchers apart. It's like being jumped out of a gang you founded.

It is fucking hard.

I want to write about being lied to. About learning to distrust. About knowing someone inside and out but not knowing a fucking thing about him. About using and being used. About loving someone so much but knowing in my core that it can't work out, that it shouldn't work out, that it's time to move on. About being free but bound and excited but scared and completely unsure of everything from every point onward.

But I can't. And I guess I shouldn't. Some day, maybe.