I only get true and aggressive interest from those who see me as an object instead of a person.

For the others… those I really connect with… well.  I’m good enough to fuck, but not good enough to love.

Morgan.  Jason.  Now Sean.  I’m too much work.

And what was my crime this time?  Wanting to work in time to see him into a very busy weekend.  Trying to organize our schedules in advance.

God forbid I should tell him when I’m busy, when I’m not, and saying that I want to see him whenever it would work for him.  God forbid I should try to give him all the scheduling info at once when I had time to do so because I was about to run off to a fucking wedding.

For that, he has stopped responding.  Just a “ooh jee, busy this weekend, how about next week?”  And now, nothing.  Not like he didn’t see my message saying that was fine.  Not like he hasn’t had time to even write one lousy sentence saying yes, no, busy, later… or even “I changed my mind.”

Nothing.

Outside of my own head, that’s all I’m ever worth to anyone.  And I have no fucking idea why.

Dearest Lugh — when you tell me that love will find me (in May, mind you), you know damn well that love means actual love, not “I’ll fuck her as long as she’s not too annoying.”

You know what I’m looking for.  You know the hole in my soul.  You know what I need.  You know damn well that lying to me about “finding love” only makes this shit worse.

I would give anything just to have someone to say that to.

so let go, just get in
oh, it’s so amazing here
it’s alright
’cause there’s beauty in the breakdown

Aside from the obvious trolls, messages from OKCupid make me feel obligated to respond, just in case, to cast the net wider even if I’m not really seeing the potential for this particular person. And honestly I don’t like that.  Even simple conversations suck up hours of time to conduct via email —  for someone who may or may not even be committed enough to show up for an in-person meet.  I’m committing a lot of energy for, probably, very little return.  I’d much rather let this stuff happen naturally in the course of committing my energy to the stuff I already commit it to, in public spaces, meeting people in the course of doing my art and living my life — two birds with one stone — except it apparently doesn’t work.

There is a coldness, an emptiness, to my day-to-day that isn’t filled by the stuff that crams my schedule.  I still come home to an empty house. Most often I have very little reason to leave it.  I miss the love that isn’t there.  I miss having a reason that isn’t motivated almost entirely by a need to pay the rent.

And for those who message me, who I respond to just in case, and yet it makes me uneasy because the conversation, the progress, the plan is not in my control. I didn’t select him; I have no plan, no contingencies, for how to direct him to a comfortable and safe face-to-face meeting.  If he doesn’t mention photography, the photo club is out.  If he says he’s agnostic, the spiritual groups are out.  Kink demo for a first meeting?  Possible, but hardly ideal — too loaded.  And, well, there’s not much else.

There’s no way to get completely away from the artificiality, and it makes things awkward, makes me uncomfortable, and makes me want to pull away and give up without even trying.

There’s not many good ones left… if any at all.  This should have been settled years ago.  I should have been given that chance.

I am not close to anyone, except my mother. Not even as friends. No one knows my heart.

It makes me softly sad.

Yeah. I remember last Yule I was begging for the light to return.

I’m still waiting.

-8 Earth, 3 Air, -3 Fire and 8 Water!

You have one of the seven Water personalities. Water is the solvent that blends things together and flows through pretty much everything alive. Water personalities tend to care about the connections between people and emotions and caring. If you were a doctor, you’d care about how your patient felt.

The Listener is also the Counselor, depending on whether one is introverted or extroverted (sorry, didn’t test for which). You deeply care about people and have enough creativity and sense of right and wrong to generally figure out what is good for them. You don’t like to go out and muck with your friends’ lives personally, but might put a word into someone else’s ear to make something happen. For you it is more about knowing people than doing things.

because this is how you all see me…

And then the conversation takes a sharp left turn and we’re arguing. I don’t even understand what we’re arguing about, much less why.

I guess I ought to shut up now. This happened the last time, too. No one wanted to hear about how I felt. They just wanted to argue me out of it.

Well you can’t argue feelings away. I care about him. He fulfilled me. I want him. I was (am) only a short trip away from loving him. This remains true and real and present whether you agree with it or not.

Ever more isolated.

I just really don’t want to.

All of these spirits crowding around and leading me to this idea, and is it going to be for nothing?  Why bring me here if it’s no good anyway?

I assumed I knew what storm she spoke of. After last weekend, it being so intense, I figured on needing some major debriefing with David which may get too intense to be comfortable. But days pass and he’s not returning my calls, and this conversation in my head morphed into a it-hurts-me-when-you-cut-me-off kind of conversation. And I couldn’t really figure out how to fit both of these things into the same conversation without having it completely blow up in my face. Either one of them alone was capable of doing that.

And it was a week full of petty frustrations — the cold, the ice on the sidewalk making it virtually impossible to walk to the train without getting hurt, corporate stupidity at work. Add in a major case of sub-drop early in the week and most days there was at least one point where I was very close to tears.

But then Friday comes and I am handed a storm of an entirely different sort. Late in the afternoon my co-worker pokes his head in my cube and asks “Did you hear about the shooting?” And I think in that sort of abstract way, how horrible, what makes people do that?

The address didn’t register. It wasn’t until the corporate admin department sent a company-wide email warning that train service at the Ogilvy Transportation Center was shut down due to the shooting that I realized what it meant.

It’s the building where David works.

I can’t really describe what that kind of panic feels like. All those stupid clichés — blood running cold, heart dropping — are true and more. And worse. For a moment there was no ground under me to hold me up.

I jump to my phone and he answers and I breathe again. He’s okay, he says, eighteen floors away from the shooting, and the ground is back under my feet. He makes a joke about really needing to go to the bathroom, since they’ve been in lockdown for over an hour and no one can enter or leave their suite. I worry, not knowing if the gunman was still wandering around looking for someone to hurt.  I tell him to take care of himself and that I’d call back in a little while.

He’s fine and he handled the whole thing with near-perfect aplomb. He went home that night and worked. I went home that night and tried to chase away all the “what ifs” running through my head with a run.

My early-week complaints now seem ridiculously petty — almost selfish. I thought I would have one or both of those conversations with him when next I saw him, but all I said, all I wanted to say, was that he’s not allowed, ever, to get shot.

And at the same time it leaves me wondering if I shouldn’t be saying the things I’ve been keeping to myself. I’ve been telling myself that I shouldn’t push him, that we have time to get to it later, and now that feels a lot less certain.