‘);
I ask her why she’s applying lotion to her backside. She says she wants to be satisfied when she looks in the mirror.
“Is it also so that I will like the way it looks?”
At another time she may have said ‘of course’, or a coquettish ‘maybe’. But this is now, and she says that she has spent her whole life doing things for other people, and now she is doing it for herself.
In desperation, I try to squeeze some recognition out of her: “Not even a little?”
She responds sarcastically, ‘OK, I’m doing it for you.’
All the while, she is smiling, as if it’s all so light and funny. As she tells me that she has no sexual desire; hasn’t for more than a month….
To love herself; to be beautiful for herself: these are at the core of what she struggles with. She needs to value herself, and to live for herself. There is a deficit of self-love on her side, and I’ve struggled for years to convince her of her own value. If this is what she is doing, than I cannot stand in the way. I must give her the space she needs, though it pains me.
To be needed by someone; to know that you have a vital place in their life – only to find that they suddenly have no need for you, and wish to live only for themselves… a sense of unfairness rises up from somewhere. She needed me there for so long, and I sacrificed everything to be there, to listen, and to counsel, and now she simply…doesn’t? And even now, while she lives only for herself, she is surrounded by people who live, in part or in whole, for her.
Is this a temporary period of adjustment? Does she hold on to her love and affection somewhere inside – waiting until this crisis passes to let it out again? Will she build a place for me in her newly constructed life? She may have experienced some kind of break with her old self, but our lives have progressed in an unbroken continuum for me. There is one path leading from that first smile, to this present pain. She finds it exhausting to talk about it with me, so I can’t know what she is going through from day to day. I just know that this day; this pitiful, rainy day, I am confronted with loneliness. That demon which once came to me every night, and gnawed my insides is standing there grinning right beside her. I am forced to imagine life without her, when life was her, not more than two weeks ago, and she’s still there, as pretty and conflicted as ever. I don’t want to lose her, but I can’t keep holding on so tightly to a hand that remains limp. I feel like I need to distance myself now, if only a little, but I don’t know if that is right. I am selfish either way.
Under normal circumstances, I might rely on friends or family to counsel me. Only we seem to be living in a time when everyone I know, who is still in touch with me, is at a low point. Of the friends who live within an hour of me, and lucky I am to have them, only one has a car. There are 3 of them. Two are living on disability checks for their unconquerable psycho/social conditions, and one is perpetually a drug-addicted mess because of his own. Another friend, living 9 hours away and previously a close counselor, seems to live only for his online streaming hobby, and talks of little else. The last to maintain any meaningful contact is living on the opposite coast and struggling with a new home, a pregnant and severely depressed fiancée, and a job he doesn’t like. He’s doing the best of any of us. The only family member to ever serve as a confidant was my mother, but she’s already tied up in anxieties, with my out-of-control brother, and her impending job loss/lack of retirement.
Olga was the one to lean on and confide in, and now I have no one. I’m just standing there again, alone on the hilltop overlooking my life. That familiar wind is blowing; there are no other voices. I look around and there are no roads leading to or from; all the threads are cut. I don’t even know what to look at up here. Where is forward?
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Standing on the rise #JHedzWorlD
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