2023-02-12 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: February 12, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 6 – Feb 12, 2023

Yesterday was pretty emotionally exhausting, and today will be as well — likely for different but related reasons. I’m seeing Nhyta today. That’s probably all that really needs to be said. Yesterday was exhausting mostly because I was trying really hard to not reach out to her, for reasons I’m still not so sure about. I think there’s all of that old pent-up nature around not asking for what I want and pushing my own desires down until they just go away. So I spent much of yesterday trying to justify reasons to not reach out to her. Maybe that was a mistake, but so it goes.

And that’s why I’m probably going to be exhausted today as well, because we’re getting drinks tonight. I’m honestly doing my best to go in without any expectations, because I don’t really even know what my expectations would be at this point. I haven’t seen her in years, so I don’t really even know what she’ll be like. I think the healthiest thing at this point is holding the whole situation as lightly as I can. I have this tendency, especially over this week, to hold it as if it’s life and death or something. It’s not — if anything, the most likely (and honestly, probably preferred? Still not sure about that one) outcome is that basically nothing happens. We go out for drinks, we chat for a little while about the last few years, we go our separate ways. I mean am I dumb, why would anything else really happen.

I guess I just feel like oh there’s so much history between us, we’ll just fall back into the way we were, which is (1) bad and (2) unrealistic. I didn’t really think about this possibility, but I imagine stepping back into an old romantic partner is a bit like visiting home. It’s just too easy to fall back into wherever you were at that time. I should probably meditate a bit before going out. That may be healthy, just to go in with a bit more awareness of my thoughts and intentions.

I’m trying to dig into what exactly my intentions are here and get them on the page. I think I do have fantasies, and I’m going to be terrible and write them down here just to make myself feel sick — and thus hopefully get to my real underlying intentions. There’s part of me that imagines us getting back together, that we try the whole long distance thing and she comes out to California and things go swimmingly, that we’ve both grown into these extremely self-aware adults and we’re still the perfect fit for each other. There’s part of me that hopes that she gets to that sexy drunk state where she asks where my hotel is and we fuck while we overlook the city. There’s part of me that hopes she hasn’t changed at all and that I get that little taste of disgust I felt after my retreat, that she’s neurotic and self-centered and the same old roller coaster that I cut the whole thing short and never think about her again.

All of those are possible, to be clear. But are any of them the best case? Probably the best case is really some variation of #3: she’s doing great and learned the emotional capacity to really take care of herself and handle all the things life has thrown at her in the time since we were together, and also I have no romantic interest in her anymore anyways. For what it’s worth, that’s actually a pretty normal way for things to go with me; there are plenty of times I’ve seen someone, thought they were really cute, talked with them for 10 minutes and went “oh they were cool, guess I’ll just never think of them ever again.” To be clear, those are people who I’d never met prior and who I was talking to at a party, but the general idea is relatable here, I hope.

Okay, that’s enough honesty. (Time to be dishonest, hehe.)

So after all that, what’s still my intention? It’s to go in open to any of those possibilities openly, to be receptive about what her intentions are, and to respond appropriately. That’s a very open intention, but that’s because I think my intention here is being receptive. I really just want to get an accurate picture of where things stand, because realistically I kinda don’t know, and that’s where the burden lies. May she be happy, may she be safe, may she be at ease, and may she be free.

Anyways, that’s enough about the complexities of interiority. Let’s switch to a more lighthearted topic: the complexities of interiority. You hate to ever make a story so explicitly about oneself, but the promise of “staying in your lane” and that things will work out is essentially the biggest falsehood of modern adult life, and I think that’s worth writing about. So my idea is largely based on the Tatami Galaxy: the idea that single decisions early on in life can set you up for success in the “rose-colored campus life” that the protagonist so earnestly yearns for. In this case, I think it’s more the “happily-ever after”, the “white-picket fence” version of life. Given those, I thought it’d be fun to write this with characters and ideas having epithets, in the way that old Greco-Roman stories did. Especially for a story so reliant upon repetition, returning to the same stories over and over again, I like the idea of the underlying mythos being the driver of change.

Of course, the realization of the mythos and the consequent escape from the cycle of attempts is what makes this story interesting, and I’m not totally certain what they’re escape looks like. On the bright side, this story is structured in such a way that it doesn’t really matter. There are distinct sections, and we can pretty divide them up. So basically, each story follows a similar arc and collapse in much the same way, only succeeding in some way once he breaks out of the fundamental arc of each one. In a way, this is really four variations on a theme with a coda at the end.

Blargh, I think I want to do the rest of my morning writing by hand, so I’m going to do the remaining ~300 words by doodling in my notebook on the possible story ark templates (or, “main theme”), because I don’t think just brain-barfing for the next few hundred words is very helpful.

Good luck tonight, may you be free. Good night, I love you, you’re not inferior to anyone. I’ll see you in the morning.