ACCOZZAGLIA

It’s as if a part of me wants to savour the pain of the inexplicable.

I was Googling something on desktop tweaks for OS X when I found a possibly relevant link. Apparently, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to where the link came from, because it was on a Mac-associated community on LiveJournal. For the most part, I don’t use LJ much nowadays. The kind of time it’s great at sucking isn’t the kind of time I have to burn away. The post, it turned out, was by some vaguely familiar LJ username whose animal reference — a water-based mammal — made me think, “Oh wait a minute . . . is this not one of my ex’s online buds?”

Turns out I was quite right. Of course, this means one thing: The Reminder. I get to a point where I think about Joan (the ex who once flirted with the idea to marry me, likely more to boost her sense of self-worth and good Samaritanism, not because she was actually thinking in terms of “forever — or me love you long time — until do us part”) less and less, and then some ugly tendril from underneath finds my legs and drags me under the murk and dark, drowning me with it.

Next thing I remember was making the mistake to hop from there to Joan’s LJ page. And as the glacial hop was waiting for an http response, my mouth started talking aloud: “You’re walking into a landmine . . . why are you walking me into this?”

After about ten minutes of what then followed, I had had enough and shut the window, angry with myself for being stupid and weak and willingly clicking on a couple of links to take me exactly to where I have done a fairly nice job avoiding for about these last eight or so months. Burying that period of my personal life seems not to be the healthiest way to work past it — I doubt therapy will ever make a difference — but “letting go” by just washing my hands clean and walking away as if it was as perfunctory as a dental checkup has never seemed particularly realistic.

Not when you sometimes start falling asleep and then spring awake just moments after stage 1 sleep with this sense of panic. How ever did I fuck things up between us? For someone who vowed her friendship über alles, why did she so instantly dissolve it? What really did she want from me that I clearly couldn’t give to her? Did she want to redeem herself for her own previous life decisions? Did she use me as a proxy to spite and snub her estranged parents? Did I just annoy the fuck out of her like I assume I do with nearly everyone anyway?

Rationally, I guess it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change my health, and it doesn’t change most other things. And besides, there isn’t exactly rationality in having one’s emotions toyed with. It’s why, inter alia, I mostly disinvest emotionally with just about everyone, both for their sake and for my own selfish motivation to refuse letting another person have that kind of insane access to me. The best that most people get nowadays, with a couple of exceptions, is a nice brush at my surface, never anything deeper.

At least a couple of times since 2005 I’ve found myself writing some kind of closure letter to Joan, but I don’t really bother sending them. The first was pretty bitter, and I hit delete. The second was more filled with a myriad of questions which demanded answers that I knew she’d never indulge me with.

The big one I wanted to ask but never did was, “With this world so rarefied of people who actually find they understand one another, and with so little time for everyone to live, why would you throw away a meaningful friendship so completely like the way you did with me when connections are so special to come by in the first place?” Actually, it was worded I’m sure a little differently, but it’s the best I can remember it now. And after that, which was sometime late last summer, the only other bit I’ve ever had to say about the whole debacle was in this LJ.

On some level, I do wish she were still a part of my life, because I think she’d have been proud of some of what I’ve accomplished in just these past two years, and I think she would have been surprised that I was even capable to get past some of what I have. But there’s also a whirlwind of things she would have cared less about, and would probably have been a bit hostile to had she been there when they happened. Not as hostile as when she adamantly argued with me that my choosing to pursue uni was in her mind a bad idea, but nevertheless she would have frowned.

Then again, she ran away. I stuck it through.

I think the remainder of what memories persist with me all this time later is how much that sense of communicating and exchanging with one another was something that I’ve known with no other human being. More than sex, more than kissing, more than anything else I know that could bring two people together, there simply is no comparison to whatever it was we were able to do with one another so effortlessly, so apparently naturally, so flawlessly. Then again, it was just a wrinkle in time (sorry, Madeline).

I guess the bittersweetness I feel deep underneath stems from a sense of awareness that such intimacy and exchange was actually even possible, even if it’s liable to never repeat itself. Though should it happen again — let’s face it, it won’t — I know that it won’t be with her. In fact, the idea of revisiting that relationship, all these memories notwithstanding, would be tantamount to stepping backwards with my own life. Lest I ever forget, her unsavoury bits — the ivory tower mentality fed by her upbringing and elitist educational endeavours; the eating disorder issues she never seemed to want to deal with when we were together; the workaholism which tore her apart but never tore apart her reputation; the multiplicity she felt was better to bury and deny — are the very things I now gladly do without.

But really now, at what price paradise?