The Broken Throne

So. It's been a week and two weekends. I have felt I've been doing surprisingly well. I have reflected on the happiness of working toward a goal that I have enjoyed over the past year. I have cried, have sought comfort in the words and company of my friends back in America and found it. I have felt confused, and hopeful, and empty.

I have searched for work, intermittantly, between sessions of passivity and fatigue bordering on depression, but not quite depression. I have despite this managed to submit resumes or reply to job ads to the tune of twenty in the two weeks I have been here.

I wrote a song. I got into a conversation on FetLife and was disappointed and alienated by an uncanny scriptedness of the advances of another human being, even though his script was polite.

I came into the campus this morning to job search, but wrote "love thyself" on my checklist, consciously, intentionally, a note of gentleness and will toward peace and joy.
(Context: There was a time, during a panic attack that I documented here, that I wrote "LOVE THYSELF" on my checklist as I was leaving class, like a compulsion, in jagged and accusing words, and visualised myself in a round room, curled up in a fetal position, with those words wrought across the rounded wall. It was one of the most direct and straightforward messages I have ever gotten from myself through my visualisations and compulsions.)

I came into campus this morning to job search, and listened to favourite OCremixes on the way, enjoying a variety of the songs that impressed me enough while I was combing through the vast collection that I wanted to keep them and hear them again. A few that I may want to remove, being not as impressed with them now, or feeling I had only liked them in comparison to other songs I liked less. Still at home, I felt a little downcast at the memory of Turks in Pursuit. A fine track, but one that Eoin had pointed out to me, based on an original track he liked, back when I showed him my habit of Audiosurfing these remixes. Now I sit down to a desk in the campus library, access the wifi, and another remix is next to come to my ear. It is one that's always struck me hard and driven me to thoughtfulness, and worse, it also speaks of Eoin. He knew the original duet, and we had planned, once, to sing it together. A 'Kid-pella, a touching a cappella rendition of Setting Sail, Coming Home from Bastion.

I take your hand; now, you'll never be lonely...

Tears come. I had hoped to be professional today. And I still hope I will be. But if I need to cry, it's well that I do it, and the sooner I can get over it.

I imagine the million things I want to say to him. To say I wanted to believe better of him than to think that his having said I would always be special to him last year, having said he liked me, and thought he would like to stay in touch a week ago, was empty words to placate. I still want to. I feel angry, although my wisdom counsels patience. I feel angry that I have heard nothing from him, after promising I would let him come to speak to me if he wished to.

I wonder, in my reeling thoughts, when I think of this, whether that was a mistake. Whether I might be able to claim him as friend quite readily if I'd been willing to lead the overture, but that he will be too intimidated to start a conversation with me, will not know what to say, and so will say nothing, until it eventually feels like it has been too long, and it would be too late now, and so will continue to say nothing. Should I rescind my promise? But that would be weakness. Desperate weakness, and would make me a clinging thorn if the truth is he would rather not speak with me.

I wonder if I should wish there was enough submissiveness or enough apathy in my nature to live on without much thought to it, and let him speak to me in his own time, whenever it strikes him to do so, even if it never does. I cannot wish for apathy, though.

The challenge of staying in touch with my loves across the ocean is upon me. It is quite natural for me to stay up late, but it makes it difficult to get any sleep. I am woken most mornings as my roommates rise, a neighborhood dog barks, a child with some developmental disability hoots a now-familiar loud cry. Perhaps I will be able to sleep in the evening, wake for company, and sleep again through the morning until it is time to wake. Perhaps, but then when will I work? There is so much to answer. It is difficult. But the voice of my dear Iris is comforting, in that blind, desperate way that something can be comforting even though it does not necessarily make any of the things that are wrong better. I remember that I wanted to talk with my friends about my future. I want their advice to help me figure out what to make of it. I realised through this experience that I build myself more to be what I think the people I love want me to be than I may have been willing to admit before.

I smashed the throne I built for Eoin, but the pieces, heavy as marble, still weigh in the center of me. I have not cleared them away, and it is hard enough even to resist the temptation to rebuild it. The throne room is a sad place now, deserted and despairing after the hope that had lived there. "My heart is wrapped in cold sorrow", I remember thinking to myself, as I marched home that Saturday afternoon, after that Friday evening, and my train back to Carlow.