Drifting and Resentful

I'm sitting here and I'm feeling like I can't breathe. I wish I could blame it on the heat. But this is something else. It's that cold, gnawing ache. All I want to do is just stop for a while. I want to cover my head, curl into a tight ball, and just ... stop.

I've tried really hard to keep from saying too much here. However I feel about certain things, I've learned to keep it to myself. I am not a part of some great sisterhood. I don't have a gaggle of women who will flock to my side to comiscerate about male oppression, lift me up, and tell me that it will be okay, that I will get through this. I don't have a partner in crime who will stand beside me and tell me that she is proud of me, that I have earned my transgressions, though I myself know just how full of shit I am.

I've never needed anyone to hold my hand or kiss my ass. I'm not ashamed of talking about what I'm going through here, but I've tried to keep it to a minimum. Every time I've spoken out, it's been used by others in their own melodrama. So my tactic has been, simply, that it's difficult to use silence. I refuse to feed certain lines of pathos.

But sometimes, like today, it just gets the better of me. When I realize that although I have asked only for a few moments of compassion and a sympathetic ear, I am the wrong sex for any sort of sympathy. We all know that when relationships dissolve, the man is at fault. And if He was a good, decent, moral man, there must have been some other reason that She did was she had to do. This would be the appropriate time for a small penis inference. But I just don't have the wit right now. You'll have to insert your own.

I have learned a lot in the past few weeks and months. I've learned who is false and who is true. I've learned that vultures will land upon your back while you are still crawling to your grave. I've learned that the finest among us is not above taking advantage of someone's misfortune. I've learned that words are just words, and that most people say “I am here if you need me” for no more reason than that it's the appropriate thing to say. And I have learned that, no matter how desperately I might try to delude myself, at the end of the day I am still sitting in the middle of an empty room, struggling for breath, and wondering how in the world I ever got there.

Yes, Virginia. There is a metaphor.

I suppose sometimes I resent that the catalyst for, and source of, all this destruction I've been cleaning up lately is where people have gone to render aid. Much like feeling sympathy for a stick of dynamite because it chose to ignite itself and destroy everything around it.

I'm not good at the public melodrama. So if there's a sympathy contest, I'm going to lose it. Mostly because I refuse to perform. I've lost on a technicality before the bout has begun. But for other quarters, by all means, be my guest, if that's what you need to get through your day, as you suffer from self-inflicted wounds.

Oh, look ... a memory ...

I remember once in 1992, I slipped on a boulder and smashed my knee. It was three days before I could stand on that leg, two and a half months before the swelling had gone down enough that I could roll up my pants leg (to show anyone the still yellow and purple bruises that covered my shin from my knee to my ankle), and months before I finally learned to walk properly on that knee without it giving away beneath me. I missed 4 hours of work the day after the injury, and that was all that I missed because of the injury.

What I heard by way of sympathy from my aunts (my mother had six sisters) while I hobbled around the family restaurant, trying to work because there was no one who could work in my place, with tears in my eyes at times because of the pain, was “men are such babies.” And yet when one of those aunts came down with a common cold, all of her sisters (a literal sisterhood in this instance) rallied around her as if she was dying.

Apparently some traditions hold ...