tumblinas.

A User Manual

So here’s what I do. I think and analyze and notice and conjecture until I am unavoidably injured. Or threatened. And then I will retreat and wilt.

I can take contentedness and warp it into fear or anger or insecurity with no new material, in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after laughing with you, I will think back to the old photos of her you still have in the recesses of your blog or the corners of your closet and I’ll wonder if it’s forgetfulness or enshrining. I will measure the milestones you achieved with them and compare them to ours. I’ll wonder why you don’t offer them to me. I will not consider that you’ve learned to be slower. Wiser. Or that maybe they took what you didn’t readily offer then either.

I will take what I am honestly ok with – you contacting her in a time of incredible loss – and will rally the consequences and fears until I have talked myself into hating the idea like a foe. Until it seems a personal offense. Until I am small and utterly threatened by the notion.

Then I will pull away, get quiet. I will know I’m being crazy, long to feel differently, but will still want you to be bigger than it all. To offer salve for the wound and have no personal reaction to the matter.

You asks what’s wrong. Once. Twice. More. I relent – thinking we can really have an unbiased conversation about it. Which, in my mind means you will be unbiased. Supportive. Take nothing personally. Launch no defense. Take no offense.

I am starting to realize my premise, my expectations, are flawed.

I want not only to be heard but to be richly understood. To have you…I don’t know - “become”… my hurt. I pull away and I believe you should notice and be sincerely, organically concerned. You should feel the departure in your guts. Be nervous, maybe even. Come after me, comfort me, pull me back in in great warm reassurance.

This is what I need. I need to know that you sense when my tether slips free of the anchor. I have always needed a concerned watchman in order to have the courage to stay. To not set sail under the oblivious night.

It doesn’t work that way, I am learning. Because this all is about more than me alone. You get tired of chasing and wondering what you possibly said that triggered it all this time. You don’t understand my mental voyages. And by this point, you know you never will.

While I wait for you to find me, comfort me, pull me back, you are still back at the start frustrated at the gun shot that sent me fleeing. You are worn out of this game.
Worry is not your dominant emotion when I am injured or drifting. Yet again. Instead, you feel another round of exhausted. Criticized and tired of days finding a way to go wrong, no matter how right they start.

You back away too. Lost in the same room. Or stands your ground and let me flounder. And it feels shockingly cold to me – that you would change the rules. Even if I understand they are fatal.

You are not interested in apologizing for the things I conjecture. I know that. It’s not what I want. Not exactly. I just want, I guess, you to be bigger than me. To be better than me. To understand my mind and love it and reassure the cruel comparison games it plays with itself.

For the record, I understand the better option is for me to learn to quiet myself.