The Persistence of Memory

I know I have many times quoted the famous Tolstoy line about happy vs. sad families. But I'm beginning to wonder if all divorces aren't the same as well. It's just odd how much we all seem to live out the same things. Namely, the expressed desire of our former best friend to have no contact with us - to shut the door forever. On an odd, (and still emotionally raw note,) I'm writing this in bed in the morning. I just woke up from a dream in which I and a number of old friends were sharing a weekend together - and Cynthia, my ex-wife, was there - and I was able to talk with her a bit. It was exquisite. And by exquisite, I mean I can only compare it to having unanaesthetized dental work done. Every moment is full of a grinding minor discomfort, and the wonder that it doesn't hurt more than it does, but it's the constant expectation of the imminent arrival of the inevitable unannounced searing jolt that's killing you. But it was good - to see her, and talk. The old sarcasm, (which I treasured) was there. But the real reason I mentioned it is that when I woke up I came out of one of those sleeps that was deep enough that your mind's mainframe has to do a bit of an update to allow you to function. It's kind of like Location: searching//: Istanbul Marital status//: single Health status: searching//: fucked up knee; recovering toe; recurring pain in elbow Work status//: currently awaiting beginning of school year Fucked up situations or imminent catastrophes on near horizon: searching//: None //: Accessing updated to-do list: . . . (Ok, I don't know how YOUR process of coming out of a deep sleep works, but that's a surprisingly accurate representation of what happens in my brain when I wake up from a heavy sleep. The location finder only kicked in this time because I have been travelling, and recently enjoying the experience of waking up in a pink room filled with playskool kitchen sets, and thinking "Ok, just stick with me here -I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason for this, which will be coming to me any moment now . . ." ) And, if you care, the space between the "situations on near horizon" and "updated to-do list" is where I have to hit the escape button, if I hope to go back to sleep. Once the to-do list starts scrolling, all sorts of data-trees start flashing on the screen, and it's day-on. Not that I'm actually going to DO anything about those things today. Heaven forbid I actually DO something. I'll just start thinking about them a lot. Anyways, in my dream, I had just woken up from a night of (apparently heavy,) drinking, and found someone had made a minor architectural wonder out of Pringles on the kitchen table, someone was starting to make pancakes, a wife of a friend informed me that people were still laughing over the fact that last night while intoxicated I had purchased an unaccountably large amount of women's cosmetics from the convenience store, the purpose of which was still to them unclear, and then I went into Cynthia's room and she was straightening up some things, and I sat down on the floor and started with some hesitation, and a great deal of apprehension, to talk to her. And when I woke up, as I realized that I wasn't going to get to talk to her, to get to ask her a few things, and learn how she is doing and who she is becoming, I felt quite sad. But then I got a flash of memory of all the times that my mind had to do an update on what the fuck had transpired last night, and all the times that the conclusion was that I really would rather stay asleep, because I was dreading how this day was going to pan out. And then I would have to get out of bed, and buckle up, and prepare for another day of war. And THAT was over. I don't have to dread first contact in the morning. I don't have to explain constantly, and have every motive and choice of word questioned. I don't have to think 5 steps ahead in a conversation. And dammit, ain't that nice? WHY do we have the need, (cuz it's located a lot deeper than simple desire) for holding a shared narrative with someone we care about? I think maybe the answer lies in the wording of that last question. Because if you don't care about someone, you can just say "well, fuck you, you are clearly a moron." But if the person in question is one with whom you have spent a long time, and had accumulated years of conversation, you tend to think that you should be able to explain your side of shit. That if anyone can hear you, and understand what you mean, it would be them. But they don't. Not only that, but you find that this person, who has every reason to know you better than anyone else on the planet, actually seems to understand LESS of you than a common stranger you just met would understand. And the only possible reasons for this are that A. we are fundamentally wrong in what we think about this situation, and they recognize it, and we do not. We are, in fact, deceiving ourselves. Or, B. the more a person comes to know us at a deeper level, the less reason they find to grant us the empathy necessary to understand us, ie, we are at heart so flawed as to be undeserving of the love that was once given. Or, C. over the course of the years spent in our presence, the other person has become so emotionally crippled that they can no longer function in our presence as a civil, sane, and rationally oriented person would. We are, quite literally, psychologically toxic. I myself tend to go with option C, adding an extra shot of espresso with a little lemon twist in it. You'll like it, I promise. It's what I'm having this morning - hang on, I'll show you what it looks like. Ready? I am toxic to her, because I am a highly addictive, reality-altering substance. One dose of me, and you see the world with a new and vibrant clarity. Two doses of me, and you begin to question your previously held assumptions, because it-all-starts-making-more-sense-now. Three doses of me, and you would sell your own grandmother to stay right here with this feeling, except that grandmothers fetch so little on the market that it's not really worth it. So, as a recently divorced woman of my acquaintance wrote - "I'm not interested in constructing and living out of a narrative that just erases those (good things . . . and times that were happy and loving.)" I am able, and strong enough, to live with the pain of still remembering what was good, and I am not going to let someone else push me into scrubbing away and erasing and fixing and patching and remolding reality so it can create a cleaner plot-line from a later perspective. I have sat in on enough suture-sessions to know that a clean sever is extremely rare, because that would require a very sharp and smooth object moving in a consistent direction at a high velocity, and life is mostly populated with oddly dull, slow, unfinished and jagged objects that cannot move in a straight line to save their goddamn lives. That's not me making excuses, that is just a fact of physics. Pick up anything you want and throw it across the room, and you'll see that it never flies in a straight line - it spins and wobbles around an uncertain center and impacts at an angle less than true. The exception is a throwing knife well-thrown by practiced hands. So why are we and our partners so injured? Because neither of us really wanted to hurt the other - and so let us be grateful for small favors. Let me also be, however slightly, proud of the fact that I can find myself able to countenance my own actions and inconsistencies and inflictions, and that I do not need to write someone out, and pretend that what was good was bad, and what was happiness was delusion, and what was, in brief, now no longer was at all. It is sad, both for us and for them, that they will no longer have the memories we cherished, (and at least I still do,) of the very sweet times we spent in the hearts of the other, for it was a precious privilege, and a painful loss, and to deny any of it would be but a miserable robbing of one's own most precious storehouse. On a tangentially related topic, can I just pause for a moment, and speak in favor of the greatly underchampioned value of shutting your goddam feelings off, and putting on a nice tone of voice, and maintaining the social niceties when conversing? I mean, by all means feel free to say such pointed things as "The amazing degree to which you attribute me agency to affect you speaks volumes to the degree to which you seem to be avoiding any great degree of introspection, self-reflection or personal growth in favor of mentally masturbatory blame-casting," if you want, but there is no reason to go all red-faced and spittle-inflected when you say it. It just makes you look ugly. I mean, the purpose of life, insofar as I can tell, is the creation of a little bit more beauty in any given environment in which you find yourself. There are already so many unattractive things in the world - why be one? Aaaaah, the wisdom I could share with the world - if they would but let me, the ignorant bovine-minded piss-trousered fuckwits. Let others come to their sure conclusions. Let them have their officially sanctioned versions. The more bloodless and anemic of a creature you are, the more you will seek shelter from feeling your uncertainty. Let them enjoy the flimsy hovel they have constructed of tissue-paper and twigs of half-notions just salvaged from the masticating jaws of deeper reflection - grovel in the little pity-pit they've excavated in the center, to shelter in what warmth remains them, because until they are willing to endure the cold and lashing rains of self-doubt for a period, they'll never construct a wall of stone, nor a warming hearth that can contain an honest fire. The only thing that bothers me about that last paragraph is the degree to which I am sooooo sure whereof I speak . . . Surely I have it all wrong.