Because everyone deserves a drunken rant post sometimes…

Oh yeah, I used to have a blog.  I even have the little icon thingy for it on my menu bar.  Been awhile since I’ve been here… I wish I could say I’ve missed it, but I think I’ve been too deep in shit to really even think about it much.

I had the best of intentions when starting a blog.  It was therapeutic.  I would touch the masses.  It would make other people with crazy-ass lives like mine feel not so alone.  Ah, naivete.

So before I write more, I get to disclaim: this is written with my second giant glass of tequila in hand.  Nothing herein can be held against me in a court of law, but feel free to convict me in your own damned mind.  What do I care?  Everyone else does.

So the great poly family experiment turned out to be one of those lab tests that smokes and burns, corrodes everything it touches, and eventually burns the whole fucking joint to ashes.  Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.  Our “family” is in ruins.  A and S are no more, K and myself are no more, A and myself are no more either.  My poor little N doesn’t know which end is up, and act that out every damned day.  My friends are scattered, sick, or depressed.  The level of hostility and craziness between myself and K increases exponentially on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.  Complete and utter abject failure.

Hell, I don’t even see my therapist anymore.

It’s not that I don’t believe poly is an inherently OK choice.  It absolutely is.  And I still feel I am not monogamous in nature.  But the group of people I tried to pull together and mold into a poly family was without a doubt the most utterly wrong group of people ever brought together in the history of time.  You can’t fight upstream against a million tons of baggage, especially with people who are unwilling or unable to open the damned suitcases and admit that they are full of shit.

I admit to lots of wrong-doing.  Shit-tons, in fact.  I’ve made mistake after mistake after mistake (raises glass in self-deprecating salute.)   But it’s way past mattering.  Even if I could ask for forgiveness, almost no one in this house if capable of rationally granting it.

I am, for the first time, afraid for myself and my daughter.  Not that we’ll be physically attacked, no.  But that the level of self-obsessed vengefulness, and depression, and passive-aggressive, borderline behavior that K is showing will eventually damage us mentally beyond repair.  I feel trapped, living in an Alice-In-Wonderlandish house of mirrors, while K claims the wronged and wounded victim status, and stealthily turns everyone that will listen against me – including my own daughter.  While she stands aside and says nothing when my own daughter accuses me of being selfish for not wholly financially supporting her (even though I did for most of last year on my $16,000 income).  While she posts facebook statuses declaiming that she shouldn’t have to be treated as if she doesn’t matter (because I treat her like shit for ludicrously demanding we spend time separately because.. well, you know, we’re DIVORCING.)  While my best friend of 20+ years, along with most everyone else, defends her and explains to me over and over that she’s not TRYING to make me look like a villain and really she’s just hurting and I should be more sympathetic.  While K tells me I don’t care and I’ve never cared and then goes into my bathroom at night and destroys notes/pictures that she gave to me while we were married because she “didn’t think I’d want them any more” and then says nothing when I sob in the shower.

I commute 2 hours every weekday (due to the job I had to take to support us all), I come home every night and paste a determined smile on my face and play bad-cop to K’s blank/absent parent until N is in bed.  And then I turn to booze or anti-anxiety meds or sleeping pills -  which ever one will get me where I need to be that night.  Every night.  And I try to never complain to anyone who knows both K and myself (except for S) so that no one can accuse me of of bad-mouthing or being unsympathetic to K.  Cuz I’m trying to take the high road, right?  But I have nightmares of K trying to take me to court for parental access to N, claiming I’m amoral and kinky and poly and I sucked her into the lifestyle and now she’s “escaped”.  And I dream of zombies chasing me and N and I can’t get away from them, ever.  And I keep S at arms-length, trying to halfheartedly (cuz I still actually want her and need her like crazy) to convince her that a relationship with me is doomed, because ‘m becoming convinced that I am absolutely no good at relationships and I’ll just follow the same pattern with her as I did with K, and she’ll end up crazy-angry at me, too, and I don’t think I could take it.  I think I’d pass N off to one of her nice, stable godmothers and off myself, because obviously then I am just no good for anyone.  Christ, I’m losing my mind.  Pretty sure I ain’t gonna find it in the bottom of the tequila bottle (unless my mind really does look like a shriveled up little maggot by now…)

Oh good lord.  I think I’ve said enough.  Let’s hope that releasing all this to the aether of the internets takes some weight off my shoulders or something.  Cuz goddam, they hurt.

::ends drunken rant::

~Az

 

 

Afire Really Does Mean Up in Flames

I’ve been avoiding posting, knowing that some of my significant others had subscribed to my blog.  But I’m stupid.  I should have long since removed them as subscribers.  I should publish this blog for ME, and letting what others might see of it stop me from having, and letting it be an authentic and honest voice, is so far off the grid of why I wanted it in the first place as to be ludicrous.

So.  They have been unsubscribed.  Riiiiight… now.

I supposed they could come looking for it, but if they do, it’s on them.  And if one of you’re reading this right now – I’d only caution you that there was a reason you were unsubscribed.

So, because I am full of tylenol PM and Ativan, I’ll keep this short.

Life, like it does, has fallen apart.

Death and rebirth, the great cycle of life, blabbity blah dee blah.

K and myself are divorcing, and to say it’s messy and emotionally complex is to compare wax fruit to the Garden of fucking Eden.  I have fallen into a well of self-loathing so deep that any true esteem is as a pinpoint of light in my peripheral vision.  I have had several cement slabs of epiphany hit me, and finally see how everything that has happened in the last few years has hurt me, my child, and the people I profess to love.  And any grand notions of authenticity I hold from my high moral ground have taken a brutal beating as well.

Now I’m thinking about my name.  Names.  Aziza, so I’m told, means “precious” in Swahili.  Not too many call me Aziza nowadays – those friends are… absent.  And I feel about as precious as a gum-covered penny in the dirt.  My given name – let the anonymous blogging seal be broken – is Rene.  It means rebirth.  And as many do-overs as I’ve had in my 39 years, I’ve always fancied myself a bit of the proverbial phoenix.  Lexicography makes me all deep and shit.

Yep, I have names left – words – and not much else.  And if words are just fuel, let them build an epic conflagration of what was once my life, and leave it burnt clean to dust, and let me pray – to some sort of divinity I grudgingly, skeptically, but desperately beleive in in times like these – that I truly am a phoenix.

Now for drug-induced non-thinking.  With any luck I’ll blog again some day soon.

The Perfection of Bump and Grind

There are perfect moments in life that stay in your mind like soap bubbles, the image all preserved and shiny inside their ephemeral preciousness.  I think I’m lucky to have a fair number of these little bubbles of memory gently bopping around inside my brain; it’s what makes my life feel worth it when things get really… uncomfortable.  But sometimes the perfectness of those moments almost make it harder to live daily life, especially when life seems particularly rough and inhospitable, when all you want to do is stop time, stop reality from intruding, and cling to that hazy happiness with everything you have in you.

I’ve been sad all day today, and when I finally had some time on my long commute home to stop and analyze why, I realized it’s because I went out Saturday night and had a really a-fucking-mazing time.  During the course of the evening, I: maintained a happy buzz on my absolute favorite drinks while never overindulging to the point of feeling sick, danced nearly every song for a good two-hour period, got hot, sweaty, full of adrenaline, and happily exhausted to some fantastically clubby music, made out with my equally hot-and-sweaty girlfriend at the edge of the dance floor between songs (cuz we can DO that in a gay bar), and got to bump and grind against some of the absolutely hottest people I know all night long.  And then, just a short time before we left, in a blur of alcohol and hormones and other bodily chemicals, my perfect moment happened.  I was lost to some hard-throbbing tune, my eyes barely open, the beat in my very bones, my hips swaying without any conscious thought, surrounded and pressed up against all my friends on the dance floor during the crowded peak of the evening, and it was some kind of nirvana.  I wanted to stay there forever, feeling free and sexy and physical and loved and protected and connected and lyrical and… me.

The evening ended happily, and my body still aches (in that good reminding kind of way) 24 hours later from all the physical exertion.  I should be happy I had such a great time, right?  Sigh.  The problem is, the rest of life is so NOT LIKE that perfect moment.  All this other shit – work and bills and chores and parenting and processing and politics – none of it is that perfectly sensuous moment; in fact is so far from that space and time as to be the antithesis of that moment.  And today, all I can feel is sad.  That I can’t live my life in touch with that feeling.  That it comes around so infrequently.

A friend posted in response to a facebook comment of mine today that if life were always just like those crystalline memories, we wouldn’t understand how perfect they really are.  I suppose she’s right.  I believe in experiencing the ups-and-downs of life.  I believe that whatever doesn’t kill you really-and-truly does make you stronger.  I don’t want a perfect life.  Maybe my wish isn’t to always be living perfection – maybe it’s just to feel that *right* about myself.  In that moment, there was no anger, no guilt, no confusion, no self-analysis, no weighing-and-balancing.  There was just being, and the being was good.  How often do we ever feel that secure in who we are, where we are meant to be, and in the absolute rightness of the now?

Things

Things that have happened in the last 6 weeks or will be happening soon (in no particular order):

* I gave up my dream to work as a sex educator when I realized that mean I was going to be a glorified retail clerk making $11 an hour and never be able to help my kid with homework on school nights.

*K’s dad suffered a heart attack and is still in the ICU.

* I realized that I’m really, truly done seeing J as a therapist and I feel like someone simultaneously ran over my dog, stole my ice cream, and murdered my best friend.  I feel like the most piteous victim of classic transference EVAH.

* We’re planning our first official invite-only kinky play party – on Halloween.

* I left the sexuality resource center and started a new job working in a health insurance company call center – telling seniors their losing their Medicare Part D drug coverage at the end of the year – for better bennys, $15 an hour, and weekends off.

* I’ve eaten steadily worse and worse, to the point that I eat more junk food than protein, fruits, and veggies combined.  Good, healthy food literally tends to make me feel a little sick now.  As a result, I’ve gained about 15 lbs.  None of my clothes fit right.

* It turned from summer to fall.

* I started having bouts of depression, anxiety and triggery episodes.  I shiver and flinch every time I pass a farm house along the back roads to my new job, and freak out around animals, toilets, and litter boxes.  Our angry house cat took a dump on my bed and I couldn’t sleep in it normally for days, despite thorough stripping and decontaminating.

* My birthday is coming in two days.

* I started training a new therapist – a masters program intern at the low-income college-run counseling center.  She’s smart, and perceptive, and has facial piercing, and in short seems like a great candidate for me.  She’s also not J.

* I stopped speaking to A for a week after a day-trip to Chicago where he treated N poorly, pushing every bad Daddy button I ever had.  He never even noticed.

* I instituted a “Responsibility List” for N to check every day to make sure she is pulling her weight around the house and getting her chores done to earn her allowance.  She performed efficiently and beautifully for three days, realized it meant she would have to be responsible forever and has been throwing bloody, screaming temper tantrums about it every night since.  For three weeks.   She is exhausted.

*I realized I’d stopped blogging right as things started to head towards those whirring proverbial fan blades – almost exactly one year after the freak out that lead to my hospitalization last year.

My First Assignment

I am officially “under consideration” (which has a weird connotation to me which I’m not sure I love, but it also helps me define that S and I are in a conscious period of deciding whether or not we will enter a more defined – by us – d/s relationship.)  Part of this week has been adjusting to the idea of completing given tasks and following orders, which I’ll probably write about in more depth later.  But here it is, my first writing assignment…

Her assignment:  write about your beliefs and values, what comforts you, your fears, and your goals.

I believe in authenticity and personal integrity.  I believe in passion.  I believe in unlimited love (which is not the same as unconditional.)  I believe in always striving for something better.  I believe in being memorable and making an impact.  I believe in things unseen, not coincidences.  I believe in karma and reincarnation.  I believe in art for art’s sake.  I believe in the power of self-faith and self-confidence.   I believe in valuing others and being valued.   I believe in intellectual challenge.

I value chosen family.  I value honesty.  I value laughter.  I value diplomacy.  I value peace.  I value sensuality.  I value action.

My comforts:  Warm fuzzies.  Music.  Sunlight.  My own bed and my own space.  Laughter.  Books.  Friends.  Coffee houses with fireplaces.  Bodies of water.

I need to feel important.  I need to feel desirable.  I need to feel intelligent.  I need to feel stimulated and engaged.  I need to feel in control and independent.  I need to trust the people around me.  I need to believe other people around me are as committed to maintaining peace and living drama-free as I am.

My goals:  To grow as a person towards complete authenticity.  To be reliable and grounded for the people in my life.  To be happy and bring happiness to others.  To make a positive difference in the world.  To have a career or a path in life that I can look back and be proud of.  To empower and inspire others with my actions.  To create peace and foster understanding between people.  To be able to comfortably pay my bills and live without fear, now, and as I age.  To be a steady provider for N and the others in my family. To let go of stress and worry and find a way to walk in joy.

I could expand and expound on any sentence – but I don’t think I want to.  This is me in shorthand.  It is a manifesto.  It has a poetic grace all it’s own.  Understanding that each part has a world of meaning all it’s own is to begin to understand me…

Watch Me Burn

I feel too scattered to blog, but don’t know what else to do with all the thoughts rolling around in my head.  I am free-floating and anxious.

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn,
That’s alright because I like the way it hurts…

She made me go to the gym with her tonight.  S and I have been talking a lot lately about collaring.  The more time we spend exploring power dynamics in our relationship, the more we fall into roles we never imagined would fit us.  And maybe they don’t – not the way they fit other people.  All I know is that more and more lately my heart leads me towards submission.  I will probably write a million more blogs about what this means, why I want it, whether or not its codependent or feminist or survivor shit or just a perfectly acceptable kink, but right now, I just want to find myself with my head in her lap, or at her feet, or beneath her in bed, waiting for her instruction.  Tonight, that instruction was to go to the gym.  So I went.

I am surrounded by people faced with beginnings.  My daughter N entered the 3rd grade today, poised on the edge of puberty.  It was the first year she announced she hated school and didn’t want to get out of bed to go, and the first year she giggled and then melodramatically shied away from her first crush as we walked down the hallway towards her classroom.  Tomorrow, K starts school at the University, taking the first steps towards her graduate degree in Speech Pathology.  She’s terrified and an utter mess and I am trying to bestow everything I learned in my years there to help her find some confidence in her ability to do this.  But also, sometimes I find myself just wanting to shake her into understanding how ridiculously excited and grateful she should be.  I would murder and maim for a chance to be where she is at…  Sigh.

Maybe I’m poised on the precipice of my own new beginnings.  I interviewed last Thursday for a different job.  The guilt and anticipation and terror have been gnawing at me for days, but today was the worst since I am supposed to hear back the second half of this week.  I can’t decide whether I want the job; it pays $3-4 dollars MORE an hour than my current job, but in exchange I enter a business world I care nothing about, sit at a generic desk providing generic customer service, surrounded by people I can’t be myself around.  Currently, I work at a sex store.  We’re more than just an “adult store” – we have a huge emphasis on sexual health, and work with lots of medical providers to reach completely under-served populations.  I educate folks everyday on shit they didn’t even know they didn’t know, and I feel damned good about that.  But at the end of the day, it’s still a retail job (when I’m not being a de facto sex counselor) and it pays retail and has retail hours and is everything I hate about retail.  I’m floundering, I can’t pay my bills, I never see my daughter, I am an absentee family member, and I feel like I work 24/7.  In other words, I love this job, and I hate this job.  And my guilt for even considering looking at this other job (which sort of fell into my lap since it’s the same place S works) after all the extensive training they have invested in me is tearing me up today.

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn,
That’s alright because I like the way it hurts.
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry,
That’s alright because I love the way you lie, I love the way you lie…

I guess I am officially under consideration – S is shopping for collars, and I am to hold up my end of some instructions she charged me with… To show her this week what I mean by offering her my submission.  To write about my values and beliefs, my fears and my goals, in relationship to her and more globally in my life.  It’s left me feeling like everything is in transition, everything is under the microscope, everything is up for upheaval or debate or change.

Why is this blog named Aziza Afire?  Because to me, passion is one of the most important concepts in existence.  Passion gives meaning to anything you do in your life, any thought you will ever have, any sentiment you will ever express or action you will ever take.  Without passion, my life feels meaningless.  Unless I feel that heat for something I care about – I don’t know how to commit to it, embrace it.

So I am trying to follow my burn, but what road leads me to the fire?  The degree I never finished?  The career program at the technical college?   Parenthood?  The important job with the retail pay and a side order of social stigma?  The meaningless, well-paying job that lets me reconnect with my family and pursue other things that make me happy?  The coffee house/art collective/kinky community center pipe dream?  The collar?  Right now, I can’t see the fire for the flames…

I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like…

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn,
That’s alright because I like the way it hurts…

Hunger

I’m hungry.

I’m craving cherries.  Ripe, round and firm on my tongue, soft where my teeth puncture.  Sweet.  Staining my lips bloody red. I am eating them right now, too quickly for them to last, but with a voracity that speaks of other cravings.

Because also…

I’m craving sex.  I am a pillow queen of the worst sort.  I want to be worshipped, pleasured.  Stroked and licked and bitten and nuzzled.  Made to sigh and writhe and shout.  And then…

I’m craving kink.  I want to be fucked.  Hard.  I want to be held down and choked and punched and cut and tossed around like a rag doll.  I want rope marks and rug burns.  I want my limbs to ache and my cunt to burn and then I want to sink into a space so deep when it’s over that I can’t focus my eyes or turn my head.  I want to be told what a good girl I am, and have my hair stroked while I slip from subspace into sleep.

I’m craving comfort.  Comfort food, soft pajamas, heavy blankets.  I want fall to come with it’s crisp smells and it’s golden leaves and it’s perfect sleeping weather.  With apple-picking and pumpkin patches and hay rides.

I’m craving attention.  After a few weeks of being on hiatus, I want my friends back.  I want social interaction and movies and coffee (and thank you to those of you who’ve reached out and spent quality time with me the last few weeks – you know who you are!)  I want to be wanted, missed, desired, thought about.

My brain knows I’m hungry, and my stomach growls, but there’s no way I can eat all that I’m really hungry for…

Goodbye, I Hardly Knew You…

I have been lucky enough to be relatively untouched by death in my life.  (Well, correction, in the adult life I have good conscious memory of rather than the childhood I subconsciously choose to keep blurry. )  My great-grandmother passed away after years of dementia – and it was a blessing.  My paternal grandparents passed away, and I felt nothing.  Funny that, since they were horrendous child abusers.  But basically, I’ve had very little experience losing anyone as an adult who meant anything to me.  Until this year.

On Memorial Day, my friend Keith passed away.  It was a weird situation.  Keith and I were not close – but he was a giant in the kink community here, someone everyone knew and admired.  He was an anchor for so many of us who felt adrift when we entered the kink scene, and regardless of how well you knew him or how much time you spent with him, you felt like he would drop everything to help you out.  I *knew* I was his friend, and he mine – and so did hundreds of other people.  His death sent shock waves through our whole community, and I mourned his loss in a way I’d never experienced before.  I felt his absence like an ache – and seeing that ache mirrored back to me a thousand fold by people who were closer to him made it even more excruciating.  To this day, things simply aren’t the same around here.  It has been a slow process to try and fill in the gigantic hole he left in our daily kinky reality, but we fill it in a bit every day, shovelful by shovelful.

This morning I woke up and checked my email to find a message waiting for me from a bariatric surgery friend.  It’s subject was simply the word “Mark” – and I knew at once it was bad news.  The news: my surgery buddy Mark passed away over the weekend.  There doesn’t seem to be much information on why/how – but my first thoughts were quite dark as I remembered the last time I saw him.  He was depressed.  Not just blue, but trouble-lifting-his-chin-up-off-his-chest depressed.  Problem is, so was I, and so while I could see and feel his pain keenly, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.  So here it is 6-months letter, and I receive an email notification of his passing.

I wasn’t Mark’s best friend.  Hell, I wasn’t even a “close friend”.  But when my insurance request for gastric bypass surgery was denied, Mark was one of  a small group of support group buddies who leapt to my aid.  He opened up his whole life to me in the form of his own appeal process, and insisted that I not give up.  He encouraged me to keep coming to support group, keep trying, keep exercising until the appeal was settled.  And when my surgery was finally approved, he was one of the first to applaud.

Bariatric surgery is a life-altering experience.  Anyone who’s spent even a few minutes talking to me or reading this blog surely knows that.  I became a different person, turned inside out and upside down over the course of a year.  During that year, it was this small group of surgery buddies I turned to – because no one else could understand the peculiar insanity that was happening in my brain and body and emotions.  They did.  But as the weight loss slowed, and the giant tumbler that was my life slowed to a slow toss, I didn’t hear from them so much, didn’t make as much of an effort to reach out.  Until one of them sent me an email this year.

There is a very particular kind of pain that comes from knowing someone you cared about has winked out of existence.  No, I didn’t talk to him every day or every week or even every month.  But now I can’t talk to him AT ALL.  I can’t shoot him an email to ask him a stupid question about my next exercise scheme.  I can’t look for the empty seat next to him when I finally drag myself back to support group for my 6-month confessional.  I can’t bump into him at Target after spotting his signature business van in the parking lot.  I can’t poke him on facebook and say gosh, are you still out there and have you started dating any hot guys yet?  He’s GONE.  And it just doesn’t make any damned sense to me at all.

I called one of my oldest best friends today on the way to work, crying.  Not because I missed Mark, but because I missed HER.  We never talk anymore.  She’s stuck in a horrible job that’s sucking the life out of her, and I’m in my crazy-assed poly catastrophe, and shit just gets away from us.  But when I started imagining what I would do if someone else winked out…

Goodbye, Mark.  I will miss you, and your inspiration and your grin and your generous nature.  Look up Keith when you get where you’re going, will ya?  And let him know we still miss him around here, too.

And one more thing, even though I am far from religious:   May god bless you and keep you, may god’s face shine upon you, and grant you peace.

Isolation

I’m feeling isolated.  Admittedly by my own actions, and yes, I think I knew what I was doing at the time.  I realized the friendships I had in my life were too surface-y to provide the kind of support I needed, so I withdrew from them until I could get a clear picture of what I wanted to do next.  But in the meantime, I’m spending a lot of damned time feeling lonely – and fantasizing in my head that someone, anyone would reach out to me in my isolation and tell me they miss me.

I used to do this crap a lot when I was younger.  Growing up an abuse survivor leaves you with all these self-destructive habits – one of mine was being incredibly manipulative of the people around me.  It was mostly subconscious; I was convinced I would never get anything I wanted or any of my needs met ever if I didn’t manipulate people into giving it to me.  After all, who would want to give freely of their time and attention to me, right?  And I ended up unwittingly setting up a lot of scenarios to “test” people.  Pulled away to see who chased me, asked for a mile when offered an inch, told folks over and over how ‘bad’ I was until I drove them up a wall and they threw up their hands in frustration, thus proving my point that they would eventually see I was bad and leave me.  It’s toxic behavior, and I know it.  After lots and lots (and LOTS) of therapy, I think I’ve mostly broken myself of these habits.  But at times when I’m mentally troubled, I find myself longing for the comfort of them…  To be rescued, or at least proven right that I’ll never truly be rescued after all.

So, knowing that a bit of that toxic brew remains, I’ve put myself in isolation.  It sucks.  I feel sorry for myself.  I find myself slipping into my old self-hating thoughts.  I wonder if I’m truly capable of love or companionship or friendship like the rest of humanity.  And maybe my cure is a hard enough medicine to do a lot of collateral damage.

I’m just not sure what else to try…   And, after 4 days on a liquid diet, everything is a lot fucking harder to figure out.  Tonight, we feast on cottage cheese.  Maybe I’ll stop having the stupids then.

F*CK (or In Which I Realize Life Is Harder Without Friends)

Everything seems upside down lately.  Things in my life have done a 180 turn, which was I think maybe was supposed to make me happy, but instead I just feel completely discombobulated and without earth under my feet.

I’ve thought of a million things to blog about this week, and haven’t had a damned minute to sit down and touch a keyboard.  Now that I’m sitting in front of a computer, I can’t remember a fucking one of them.  I am typing, hoping that some sort of memory imprint in my genes will make the thoughts come gushing out my fingertips without a conscious remembering…. no such luck so far.

So, right now I am simply thinking about the chocolate cookie I just ate which is making me feel like vomiting (a condition that has been all too common lately as proof that I have managed to completely fuck over any positive conditioning instilled after my gastric bypass), that it is time to go change my tampon (since it’s been maybe an hour since last time and all the shit happening in my girly parts lately has lead to a massive hemorrhaging and cramping that has been torturing me for the last four days), and that I haven’t heard from K at all today (since she’s left the state and gone home to her family for a week and is potentially telling them stuff about me and our separation that will completely sever any chances I have for ever being accepted into her family, which oddly enough, even though we are fucking separated and possibly divorcing, breaks my everloving heart.)   Yep, that’s what’s on my mind.  One great run on sentence with as many instances of the word FUCK as I can squeeze into it.  Cuz really, that seems to be all I can think right now when reflecting on my life…  FUCK.

On a side note – it seems like I had friends…  I thought I did…  but I was apparently, oddly mistaken.  It’s not like I don’t have acquaintances; people I can share a table with at the bar, folks who will drop by with a 12-pack if I throw a party, even folks who might come help me move heavy furniture.  But it seems like I’ve lost the kind of friends I actually TALK to.  The ones who call me on the phone when my facebook status looks to gloomy and say “what the fuck is going on?”  The ones who invite you over to lay on their sofa and just watch dumb movies for an evening.  The ones who insist they cook you dinner when you’re feeling overwhelmed by life and no dammit, you CANNOT help with the dishes.  What happened to all my best friends?  My girls?

I’ve talked a lot to S in the past year about how even though I feel the core of me is a person who wants to be happy and peaceful and laid back, I am shrouded in the body of a Type A super-mom who seems to draw drama and stress to her.  Now, let’s be clear – that is not the same thing as being a drama-queen.  I don’t CREATE drama, and I sure as hell don’t want to exacerbate it.  I am pretty cool in a crisis, and I am a damned good diplomat.  But somehow, my life is always STRESSFUL.  And I am always the biggest victim of that stress – feeling wrung-out, frayed, moody, and alone.  Am I alone, have I lost all those best girlfriends, because of this?  Or has circumstance just moved them away from me, and I’ve spent too much time absorbed in romantic relationships to realize my friendships were simply skin-deep.  How do I grow the friendships around me?  How do I even know if any of my sort-of-friends WANTS to grow our friendship?  (After all, my overtures have been pretty lukewarmly received so far…)  How do I fix this when I’m in the middle of Stressville, USA and I can’t even find the time to take care of myself or write a damned blog, let alone nurture little baby friendships?

Sigh.  I will not wallow.  I will not pout.  But it has been a friggin lonely coupla weeks.

FUCK.