i’ve never felt this before, unless i count the homesickness i felt
in the 3rd grade. i can’t shake it, and i can’t explain it.
something that should be holding me together is evaporating through my
pores, blasting out of my head and extremities. i don’t know loneliness
like this. i hate to say it but dropping off of social networks and text
messaging may have contributed to my awareness of that numbness. part of
why i drink is to numb the continuous pain of depression, and i drink
these days as much as ever, but it doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
the weather has been all over the place, too, which helps none in
establishing tranquility. i remember the 3rd grade, when i felt sad and
homesick, enough so that i took my woe to the teacher. i remember the pain
of homesickness. it was real, and it hurt. but in my memory i can’t say
with certainty if the pain was real enough to merit what seemed like
several hours of alone time with the teacher. i had a crush on that
teacher. all the boys did. but the homesickness was real, and the pain
was naked and new, as it would be to a 3rd grader. i imagine i was lying,
though, to extend my time with the red-head teacher.
the next time i remember that
much hurt was in college, when a girl dumped me. i fell to the floor and
cried, holding my stomach and kneeling in pain. i thought to myself “I
don’t like this. this hurts.” it was a moment of clarity, in its way, an
introduction to the reality of emotional unrest and pain. during that same
period i also confronted, for the first time, the pain of my father
leaving us. this subject came up in an otherwise congenial “getting to
know you” conversation with a friend, who delivered a long account of his
recent life history before saying “enough about me, tell me about you.”
for some reason i skipped everything before March 30, 1981, jumping
straight from infancy to the day daddy walked out, and i busted out
crying, tears racing down my face and over my shirt, deflecting off of me
and on to the bed on which i sat. the friend across the room handed me
some kleenex but seemed to welcome the outpouring. it was a completely
different tone of subject matter after his good-natured account of his
life’s journeys, but he seemed to receive it with a glimmer of happiness,
a seemingly inappropriate attitude from him which i nonetheless
appreciated for its generosity of spirit and friendship. he smiled while
i wept.
i thought of this
incident many years later when, at work, i met a man who knew a former
employer of mine. the former employer was an individual for who. i worked
for 4 or 5 months before she fired me. when i learned that my current
co-worker had known her my sense of vindication lit up. at the time i was
riding high in corporate, a reasonably successful Director at a
Time-Warner company. i wanted her to know about this. i wanted this
person to tell that former employer that the guy she fired those few years
back had gone on to corporate
greatness, and that she should have let *me* run her company. instead i
saw that my co-workers eyes had lit up, and that the mention of this
former employer of mine (and what turned out to have been his best friend
in the world) filled him with a sense of honor. i was about to
tell him to send my regards to the woman but he spoke first, saying “I was
there with her, holding her hand, when she passed away.” she had died a
couple of years earlier. my confused emotions of the moment started with a
rising feeling that this was my chance to get back at her, to let her know
she fired a *winner* and not a loser, and that the problem with the work
environment was not we employees but the employer, and the work
environment. instead my rush to schadenfreude drowned under the reality
that i would never get that chance to let her know that her firing me was
the beginning of my path to greatness. then i was strangely puzzled and
impressed by the look on my co-workers face when he described her death,
and his presence with her at the moment of her passing. he spoke of it
with pride, even pleasure. he felt it was a privilege and a responsibility
to have been allowed in that room where she died, to have been the one to
hold her hand.
my friend who handed me the tissues as tears belched from
my eyes seemed to have a similar sense of honor and responsibility,
feeling that if he had no control over my sadness than at least he should
feel privileged that i would trust him enough to expose myself like this.
more recently i had a friend who seemed to boast of the fact that i called
her first the day my father commit suicide.
these stories are connected by a string no thicker than a strand of a
spider’s web, but they bring me back to today’s feelings of sour
solitude, the feelings that the torment i have known for so long can no
longer be stopped from slipping into backwash.
maybe i just need a drink.
