the habit of being

I don’t feel a writing feeling. I am only angry and sad, in the dullest way. I couldn’t throw a thing or cry with any real heart. I couldn’t yell. It is silent and sickly, like cheating and STDs. I write spiteful letters and don’t send them. I spy on the people I love, and wonder how they could expect anything different from me. I am so static and sick of observing myself in the act of decay, sick of observing myself at all. Sick of observing my sickness. Do we create the people that we are? Does every moment matter?

- - -

After years of emotional manipulation, I am kicking my boyfriend out of our apartment. He reminds me that I am kicking him out of a daily basis, so it’s hard to pretend that I’m not really.

After his leaving was decided, we spent two or three days in a daze. I was constantly looking at him and touching him softly as I started to cry. We were very sad and very nice to one another. I looked forward to coming home and hugged him whenever I could. We were out walking and he picked a flower for me and put his head on my shoulder. It was the best we’d gotten along in ages. I almost believed things had changed.

Now that period has ended and things are back to the way they were, except that he is always making jokes about the other guys I might end up with and looking for apartments online. I’m half ambivalent and half mortified, and mostly I’d just like to think of something else. This is the way the relationship ends. Certainly not with a bang. I’d hoped it’d be more poetic. The tears are mostly melodramatic and I should rejoice the opportunity to end a five year terrorism of my emotions.

I’m afraid of being even lonelier than I am now. If I cannot have him, I hope I will have myself again.

. . .

There’s an armchair with a rip down the it vinyl seat upholstery sitting in the middle of my room. Across the arms a long mop handle is balanced, with a set of four Whole Foods bags nestled inside one another on each end, filled with free-weights.

I told him not to get a weight bench because they’re big and ugly and would take up half the room. Now that he’s moving out, I guess I won’t have to trip over barbells in the middle of the night anymore.

. . .

I was sitting on the floor with my laptop, looking over his shoulder onto his computer screen, and he wrote “sad panda” in Notepad, then cut and pasted it into the middle of his screen, backspaced and changed it to “sad person” and then started anagramming the letters, changing and moving them one at a time, to make other words. He did this for a long time.

Usually, though, he’s just playing Yahoo! Literati. He says he does it when he wants to escape. Sometimes he calls girls he meets there gorgeous and I cry about it for days.

. . .

Still, there is so much anger, seeping. I want to get out of the suffocating fog of his presence. I want to escape from the self that he knows. We neither know why we didn’t leave on this day or that one, on days worse than this or days better. We don’t know why it is now, just as Spring is trying to come. He is cruel and I am relentless.

Sometimes the only proof I need that we don’t love each other is the fact that we’re still together.

Sometimes all I need to feel better is to just get away from him.

. . .

I taught myself to love. He had nothing to do with it, really. I watched my own emotions and I projected them onto a man. He seemed to see all these things I couldn’t see, and I admired it and I loved him. I wouldn’t learn until much later that he would never see the things I did. He would never feel the way I felt. We were so alike, because we were alive and needy. We were different enough to foster fantasy and obsession, but never the same enough to understand. We were never kind enough to forgive.

Sometimes being with him is the loneliest feeling in the world.

. . .

I think I may have had a miscarriage last month, and I don’t really care.

. . .

It’s not that he is an asshole, it is that I make him an asshole. It is how I ruin him and he ruins me, and, most of all, how none of it would be possible if we hadn’t been in love once.

I couldn’t always feel better just by getting away from him. For a long time he could do that and I couldn’t, and I hated him for it and thought it meant he didn’t care. Even now, when I can do it, it’s extremely hard. It’s so hard to walk away and feel better. It’s easier to just stay there and cry and yell, because at least you know you care. You feel like it still matters, all the hurt we made and all the time we spent. It feels like such a waste when all you really have to do to feel better is just walk out the door. That’s usually what I’m crying about in the first place.