their mishigas

Human relationships in our time and culture seem to have been reduced to a kind of disposable commodity. They are treated shallowly; conflict, rather than something to be examined, worked through, learned from, negotiated, etc., is regarded as a cue for dissolution: it's easier. There are always plenty of replacements. That one might spend years, say, absorbing (and knitting oneself into/ being knit into) someone’s narratives, and then, hardly with an augenblick, that person banishes you from their life or disappears from yours, is rivaled  in its injustice only by its absurdity. 

Several recent events have made me wonder whether I am too loyal? Too loving? Too tolerant? Am I the sort of person who will put up with a whole array of inconsiderate and even cruel behaviors in order to preserve a connection that I feel is precious? If so, I am asking myself, do I need to change?  Do I need to become more hardened? or more impervious to people’s inevitable mishigas?

There was an earthquake here today, I suppose you know… not a big one, but a rare one, and you know, it made me think, coming up on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, of disasters, and of how one’s first impulse in a disaster is to find one’s loved ones and be near them.  My whole world has changed so completely in more or less exactly the past year (yesterday was the first anniversary of my discovery of Gary’s betrayal, and it has been a struggle to keep myself from obsessing about that, about the events and turmoil that ensued that week and in the months that followed) that I have a quite different set of loved ones, and yet there are these former loved ones sort of floating about the world, some in the same city as me, and it is very likely that I shall never speak with them again, and even if I do, it will not be with any degree of trust or intimacy or warmth. This knowledge is a little like a terrible headache that never goes away.

When that pang gets too intense, I soothe myself in various ways: by eating cherries, or doing yoga, by folding things or reading books or petting cats, or, perhaps most usefully, by reminding myself: it is their mishigas.  The relationships weren’t “working” anyway, and these people weren’t up to the task of repair.  They had neither the tools nor the desire, and they didn’t value me as I valued them. I want to pity them for that, and for having to carry around with them now and forever the fact of their inadequacies, their cowardice, their cruelties, their… littleness. Pity is something I can only feel, though, when I am feeling more or less solidly inside myself and not in a state of just-glued-back rupture.  I know you all want it just to be over, you don’t want to hear about it anymore, you counsel me to forget, move on, look to the future, and I think that mostly I have and mostly I do… despite the fact that in the span of this year I have lost, at their will, the two people I believed were closest to me (and others ancillary to those relationships). Even though that closeness may have been a self-deception, and even though I may understand that self-deceptiveness conceptually, my very cells… in an emotional sense…feel bereft and shocked and confused still. I often feel memories of specific injustices rise up very suddenly and I am overcome by the unfairness of them and of how powerless I am to do anything about them.

I just threw away several Chinese movies he left behind. There is always all this detritus, all this evidence: Gary was here.  When he left he radiated such meanness: well, you can do what you want, you can stay here or move away, whatever you like:  as if we had hardly known each other, as if we hadn’t had an agreement.  He was just this horrible bundle of bad vibes, a cornered animal, his eyes little slits, his body all crumpled and contracted.  It’s not like I’m pining away for that.  It’s just that the shock, you know, doesn’t just dissipate, as the memories do not, and then, you know, I massage them sometimes, as if (counterintuitively, maybe) by really going into them I can lessen their power. 

I’m not taking any pharma-drugs anymore to muffle anything now.  I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not, but it didn’t feel right to do that anymore.   So now, I guess, I just have to deal.