lyris

I want to be speaking/writing in another language, but it has been too long since I could speak Spanish with any real proficiency, so I will have to make due with boring English.

I wonder sometimes if my best friends and I are simply living out a lie perpetuated by one another. I have felt self-important because I have such strong bonds with those girls. I have wondered how people live their lives when they live as though they are fending for themselves night and day, with no hand to hold and no one to lean on. And yet there are times when I am confronted by a person who expresses to me plainly that they believe I am codependent. And while I would like to refute them, I am not entirely sure that I can.

I know that I spent years of my life (albeit somewhat early ones, and emotionally trying) emotionally alone. There were years where I cried myself to sleep every night, dealing with my pain alone so that I could be functional publicly the next day. But at a certain point, one realizes, or at least I did, that being able to live alone did not mean that I wanted to, or that I should have to.

I enjoy helping people that I care about. When I see a friend sitting in the lab and she starts to cry when I ask how she's doing, I sit down and ask what she needs, I ask what's wrong, and I try to see what I can do in the next few minutes to set her upright again. It makes me happy to sit with someone who is happy and make him laugh, but it also makes me just as happy, to turn a person's tears into a welcome sigh. Perhaps I am a dying breed, or at least that whatever it is that made me this way is recessive. But I was able, once I realized that it's what I wanted, to find people with a similar mindset. And I have kept them very close ever since.

I know that I have very high expectations, and perhaps they are too high, but I am not yet convinced.

Now I just have to wait for this feeling of inadequacy to fall away, this feeling that I will never find anyone, that no one will ever be able to give me what I want, that I will never love again.

This is the part I hate, the part that separates that first love from all the others. That first one... I never saw coming. I got the feeling of light and birdsongs and love and had friends ask me what the hell had happened to me that I had stopped being the crazy depressed woman I had always been. And I didn't know until it happened that what follows from that is a sadness so crippling that it literally takes a year to "get over". Since then, I have found the sparkle of love less dazzling, because I can anticipate the fall.

Unfortunately, that fall I don't have control over. I never seem to soften it with my cognitive decapitation of Love. No matter how hard I try. Dammit.