I've never experienced romance, even in its subtlest forms. Every so often I reach out a tentative hand towards forging a connection with someone, and every time it gets slapped away. Before, I thought that this was due to some great, base incompetence on my part. Something that everyone else had that I was somehow missing, a manufacturing defect that I couldn't rectify because it was simply beyond my capacity. I felt a spiritual impotence, the cold, intriguing flower called alone. It's not so much the sensation of being without anyone that staggered me. I've spent, and probably will spend, the majority of my life by myself. It's the suspicion that it's going to be that way forever. The feeling that maybe you're the special case, the one designed to live out your years anticipating a day that will never come. I tasted bitter bile, and I reveled in it. If I couldn't have love, I could have the next best thing: the glee of anger without reason or focus.
More time passed, and through analysis, I realized that there was another possibility. Maybe I wasn't an incomplete piece, but rather hampered by my own expectations of rejection. Maybe I'd grown too close to my bitter heart. Maybe I'd fallen in love with being alone. But the realization wasn't coupled with any new resolve. I now understand that I could just as easily stay home as I could go out and try meeting someone new, sparking up a conversation, passing some time. If only by the law of averages, eventually I'd have to find success. Still, I don't. I guess I'm resolved to being alone long enough to complain every so often, but not lonely enough to actively do anything about it. Ha ha! Funny joke.
I got an e-mail today. It was a chain letter from a girl I'd known some time ago. Fifteen points of mildly sappy inspiration. I read it, and I saw one that I thought about for a bit.
"6. You mean the world to someone."
I know there's no great authority to a mass mailing that promises 10 romantic screwups in the next 10 years for not propagating itself. I know it's superstitious, even. But I can't help wondering who that one person is. Though I may be a bitter, cantankerous bastard, a vindictive asshole, and pretty much totally clueless, this tiny e-mail convinced me that I had, at the least, a bottomless reserve of hope for slim chances. At least, I can now say to myself, I have hope; hope that the future can be different than the past, that I don't necessarily know what surprises lurk around the next corner, good or bad. It's a hope that can coexist with the bitterness, because I know I won't be bitter forever. At least, for this specific reason.
I wonder if this is just my desire for a happy ending. To say 'maybe tomorrow will be better' is to ignore that our future is the culmination of our actions in the present. I can't expect to sustain the same behaviors and get different results; it defies logic, common sense. I have the great dilemma of the alcoholic : knowing the problem quite intimately, but still as far from the solution as ever. No amount of reflection is going to fix whatever block I do have, yet it's all I seem to do. Mindless self-indulgence of the highest order. If I write it out, at least I can see the trails of my thought processes, try to understand the knot in the middle of it. Hell, maybe I can even find a new scapegoat.
(Why did I write that? Is my bitterness focused inward? Do I really have anywhere else to focus it?)
The trail winds on. I guess I'll stop obsessing over it, at least for a bit.
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