Unspeakable Vow

A new year already?

I've been hanging out a lot lately with the kind of crowd I normally avoid. Not bad people, but problematic ones all the same. And I let all the terrible things they so casually say wash over me, and wonder how things can ever be different.

I suspect the answer somehow involves the phrase "one step at a time".
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I've been working over the weekend because I dread the idea of being overwhelmed again on Monday. And because it doesn't really seem like work.

I'm also taking a first step, and who knew editing and formatting a book of poetry would be so difficult? Who knew even the best of my own poetry was capable of setting my teeth on edge?
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I sort of broke up with someone this month. Weirdly enough, I sort of broke up with someone last month as well. And the month before that. It's been good practice for therapy, so something came of that. Some break ups more than others, but it is what it is.

I've been thinking a lot about the quote from my last post. For a couple of years, really, but lately it's sinking in more than ever.

Where I come from, we had the tendency to erase all our relationships. We all dated each other a lot, but it just never did seem to count. There was always a reason for it not to count. "We're just friends," we'd say. "We're just hooking up." For some of us, it was because we were cheating on partners we already had, living miles away, probably engaging in some "just hooking up" of their own. Or not. These are the little lies we tell ourselves so it both counts and doesn't count at the same time.

"It's no big deal," we'd say. "Just a thing." We'd shrug and change the subject. We'd pretend like it didn't matter, because it couldn't be seen to matter. In a world where your neighbour is your enemy and your best friend is just for today, caring about anything could well be your downfall. So we pretended not to care. And we got pretty good at that.

But every now and then, the system would falter. Sometimes, it would even fail, and drunken kids would lunge for each other's throats over things that hadn't officially mattered until right that moment. Things that wouldn't matter in the morning, not really, but at least now they had a good enough reason to openly hate each other. And none of this had to be explained to anyone - everyone understood how things could matter more than life and yet be denied to our dying breath.

I once was surprised to know that a man's name was not in fact his name, but his surname. His name was sweet and normal and not really the kind of thing I'd have pegged him for. "It's alright," he told me. "I dated a girl for 5 months and she didn't know either."

5 months isn't a long time, and it shouldn't have mattered, but it did. It mattered to him, even though he shrugged like it didn't.

When it came right down to it, it mattered to all of us, and that's why no one batted an eyelid over drunken kids in drunken fights, trying desperately to balance sanity with the web of lies they wanted to live. Trying desperately to understand emotions they just didn't have the depth to handle.

Because we openly disdain the laws about promises spoken where there's no one to hear them, even as that disdain is killing us. Because we'd rather die a million deaths inside than, well, admit that we're dying a million deaths inside.