shiny happy people

so i’m sitting here at work, which is constructively known as a lunch break. justin is now working the 9am-4:30pm shift as a telemarketer, and he swapped his hours to be in sync with mine. he commuted this morning with me, and this was probably the first time he had to deal with morning Bay Bridge traffic. we held hands, and joked as we slowly made our way into the city. it’s nice having him there in the morning. it doesn’t feel as lonely as it used to, when it was just me and Howard Stern/Vinnie & Sarah. I am attempting to recruit daniel from work to ride with us as well, so that we can grab the car pool lane and save $2 bucks a day. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but, car pooling also allows us to zip past the backup at the toll booth.
Since I just got paid this past friday, it was one of the first times that i had paid bills straight after I got paid. Generally I just do things like go out and go purchase crap i think I need. I’ve noticed a trend in my spending habits, is that the more depressed I get, the more I spend on crap (does someone really need 30 pairs of shows?). Needless to say, it was weird to pay off things, and look at my pile o bills and notice they weren’t so high anymore.
however, this is not the real reason why i started writing this in the first place. this morning, my friend AntKnee, from sf-fumblers, posted this story about how he was a party this weekend, and one of his friends stopped breathing. Only one person out of the whole group knew how to do CPR, and it was frightening to realize that this was damn near an average statistic. This prompted me to write a reply to how I felt about the whole situation and general health as well.
Last night Justin and I were laying in bed, and I started to talk. I had been feeling so disassociated with everything recently, that I can’t even conjure up (or imagine to conjure up), feelings of anything else other than survival. I can’t imagine that not so long ago I was in love with Justin, and I thought the world was at my fingertips. I spoke of these things to him, and told him how I felt. Somedays I loved him more than life itself, and other days, I felt like I never loved him at all. he asked me if the later was pretty recent, and I said ‘yes, it was’. I didn’t want to say these things because i was afraid of hurting him and myself, for even when i did say them, they felt both true and false. i feel in a way that i’m living life vicariously through other people: i see what they have and attempt to emulate it to some extent. i feel detached and alone. this is not uncommon with me: i’ve felt this way before. but the difference is, that in a way, i don’t know if i want to correct or help this now. it seems to be so heavy of a burden.
but the flip side is, i look at my life within the next 10 years, and i see myself still working for a start-up company, where i’m not making that much money and i’m living with justin hand to mouth every month. i don’t want to live my life like that. it frightens me that i can and would become something like that.
not so long ago, i had these ideals of how life, to me, was supposed to be. it represented this sort of nuance i felt that very few people had or would want to have. this feeling of ‘something’, that can’t be explained and that when i attempted to explain it, would become more of a choked up answer than a reality.
i remember once, jeff and i were talking on the phone. i think it was the first phone conversation we had. i remember talking about this feeling of a ‘whore’ that i felt, that because i couldn’t connect with anyone on any sort of level, that my ability to move from one relationship, almost effortless, raised a few eyebrows. jeff said ‘i know what you mean’, or something like that. i remember leaning back on my bed, closing my eyes and sighing deeply, because for that one moment, i felt okay. one other person in this whole fucked up world could feel what i felt, and i didn’t feel so alone anymore.
sometimes i miss that feeling. and i have had to think about what was it that i missed? did i miss him? did i miss what we ‘had’? did i even love ‘him’? i realized, i missed that feeling of feeling ‘okay’ even for a short while. i didn’t love jeff zapotoczny as himself, i loved the idea of what he was in my mind. parts of me loved what he represented to ‘me’ on other levels. i don’t know if i ever loved ‘him’ to begin with. so much was wrong that i simply ignored it, and thought i could accept it.
the irony is that, now, nearly two years since it began, and nine months after it ended, i feel nothing that would construe as what i felt before. time heals all wounds. time allows you to forget. but time also makes you remember those painful times when you don’t want to.
to justin’s credit, i feel some of those same things i felt with jeff. the analogy, which includes all my past lovers as well, is like a birthday candle: it lights quickly and burns for a short amount of time before dying out. with justin, it’s like those endless flame birthday candles: it lights up, dies and comes back to life again.
i wish life wasn’t so complicated, as to that i feel like everything was happening without me. i wish that i could not be in ‘pain’, for whatever pain it is, so that i can enjoy what i have. justin says, that because of who i am, nothing is going to be easy. and i suppose on some levels he is right, but it would be nice to know that for one day, everything can be okay.