Not sure if I should be doing this today…

I notice that I always feel this way when I get up late. And on those days, I also tend to stay in bed longer, wondering what I should do when I finally do get up.

Why do I waste the most time when I have the least time to waste.

I missed a phone call today, it was probably unimportant. I probably should check the messages though, as there’s so much going on… my phone says scam likely. I’ll let it go. But there I am looking at my phone, looking at all the other things that I have to do, thinking about all of the things that I could do. I think I’m going to do some of them, depending on what happens.

My brain is going in all directions, like a puppy who hasn’t learned to use all of it’s legs for the same purpose yet. All directions. I saw my ex the other day, day before yesterday, it was his birthday. I miss him so much, I love him so much, and it’s over, it’s really over. There’s no coming back from what we put each other through. There shouldn’t be. But we were meant to be each with each other, that much is painfully obvious. Everything else is hollow and fake, we missed our chance at a good life. We were meant to be with each other, but we were meant to be miserable.

"I think we're meant to be together," she said.

"No way. We can't even stand each other."

"I never said that we were meant to be happy."

— A Small Fiction (@ASmallFiction) October 19, 2017

I felt this way for about 10, what probably 15 years before I saw this tweet. It’s like a direct quite from a fight I had with my ex in a dilapidated apartment with no foundation in 2005, when he still hadn’t fundamentally learned how to listen to me. And here I am in the middle of nowhere on the internet, wondering if anyone is listening to me, knowing that they’re not, but still afraid enough that they *might* be that I still watch what I say, and have the drive to speak at all for that matter. Just enough of an audience to try and make me feel like I have to make sense at all. I realize that this is a very familiar feeling, this is what I felt like when I would speak to my ex over coffee.

It’s not all his fault. But quite a lot of it is, and he hasn’t done a damn thing to make any of it better, certainly not any easier on me. I wonder how he gets along with everyone wearing masks, being as he’s deaf and relies primarily on reading lips. Being as I am too. There’s a pause. No one is listening.

There are so many reasons to run back and delete that last paragraph, and I might. But if I do, I’ll leave this here to remind myself that I did.

I did quite a lot while being miserable, and my dreams last night are coming back together and making a lot of sense in this context. I guess the only way to explain is to get into as much of it as my coffee will allow. The coffee is bitter today, and I am drinking it slowly. I with I would learn how to relish the good times more than just drag my heels through the bad.

A long, long pause.

I was sitting in the audience of a show, or movie, it was outside, or in a large old auditorium that I can almost remember in real life, and we₁ were watching a movie. I believe it was an Adam Sandler movie, which makes things make sense₂. It was just the 3rd scene in, after the establishing shot, where we first see the main character doing what he’s doing. Was it Wedding Singer? Or one of the very formulaic clones thereof.

Anyway, the irrelevant woman standing next to the lead, I leaned over to my boyfriend and said that I knew her. That’s when the trouble started.

“Oh my god you always say that. I don’t know, I’ve never seen you in anything.” honestly I don’t know why and I don’t care, but the words are so hurtful that it’s painful to remember them even though I never would think it would hurt honestly. But it did make it clear that I have to go back into my life and see what I can get together again.

1. When I refer to we, I was sitting with a man who was apparently my boyfriend, but looked like a great professor my Mother had once been very good friends with according to her, as all people are according to her (the symbolism is starting to make sense now). Thinking of it, they’re both Brooklyn Jews of the same era and only slightly differing age and neighborhood of origin, and my boyfriend refuses to even attempt to cut his own hair. They kind of look the same actually. The voice was of neither of them, it was the voice of Rick Sanchez.
My professor did really act like Rick Sanchez.
My brain is fucking amazing.
But these should be be footnotes and not in the main narrative… not sure if I should change it or if I will. I’ve changed a few things this time.
Oh, and my Mother was there too I do believe, but silent, as she would be. I also feel like my very good friend was there, but to be honest maybe I’m just piling together all of the people I know who act like Rick Sanchez
2. I just realized that I could add actual footnotes with proper notation here. The boy uses the word “proper” in such a way that annoys me much the way my use of quotation marks here would annoy him. Anyway, my professor, the one who my boyfriend now looks like and this dream is modelling, accused me in class way back when of “making sense” like manufacturing it. The human brain is wired to find patterns, some more than others, and me seeing myself and knowing what I know about who I am chemically, and who my mother therefore might be, I see what this whole dream might be getting at now, and it’s fine. I should really call my professors, all of them.

Long pause, I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect that to hurt so badly. I’m reading back through this post and I can’t find a good excerpt to snip. I guess this might be it, the part where I realized that something hurt so bad I had to let go of it, get out of the stream of consciousness and sit on the shore – the point where a dream gets so stressful that you force yourself awake.

I just used the general you pronoun – I’m looking for help, for understanding. And there’s no one here, like there used to be when I was with my ex. A general you, but I’m not really talking to anyone, I’m just scared to talk only to myself. It feels better to talk to someone else sometimes, even though no one should hear this and I’m scared someone will.

I (this I pronoun, I didn’t break through today… but it’s a start) wish it weren’t Friday, because there were other things I’d want to do get to this weekend, and the boy is just going to commandeer me for the weekend, unless I stop him which I know I will not do.

It’s not that I don’t like him, I just have a lot going on, a lot for me anyway, and I’m unable to take all this time away from myself. I wonder what’s stopping me. I wonder how he feels, honestly. Is he going through the same thing? I should ask, I don’t know how to ask without making him angry.

It was about a year into my relationship with my ex that I actually started to say what was on my mind, go about living my life instead of just wasting all of my time to make him feel like he was getting attention, and it was about that point that our relationship failed. Maybe it’s that time between me and the boy now. He’s a similarly fragile self absorbed white man, so I guess if the past has taught me nothing I should know that this is going to get worse, not better, and to just bite the bullet.

Why am I afraid he’s going to get angry. Why do I care, he’s only an affair. I’m sure my actual boyfriend would be utterly bewildered by this entire thing, as my dream demonstrated. I have better things to do than play house with an idiot. So many better things, the list of better things is so long.

Maybe I can clean myself up and make it to the alumni happy hour tonight.

This has actually been a very rewarding cup of coffee today.

I’m going to call my Mom.