May. 1st, 2014

toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
It has been so long since I blogged anywhere. Usually there’s nothing to write about. I’m blessed with a boring life, and introspection bores me. But I’ve been reading other people’s blogs all evening, and it’s now four-ten in the morning and T is fast asleep and my stomach hurts and my head aches.
It is very strange to read posts made by people you lost contact with ages ago and realise that even when you were friends, when you hung out with them every day or every week, when you lived on the same campus or in the same building, you barely knew them. That you didn’t know the stories within them, even when they knew everything about you. There’s this quote I’m too lazy to chase down, I think Gaiman’s, where he talks about how every person we meet, no matter how boring we find them, has unimaginable worlds inside them.
I don’t find most people boring, if anything I find them more than a little overwhelmingly interesting. I guess I’m one of the boring people; some days it doesn’t feel as though I have any worlds within me, just an amorphous grey substance that’s drowning me from the inside out. The strength in people astonishes me. Tires me. I can hardly bear to hear about their lives, how they have the energy and perseverance to live them escapes me. I suppose the answer to that is there’s rarely a choice.
Mostly I want to sit down with people and drink tea and talk. This last week has been so good. But people are also overwhelming, and this last week has also been excellent because I’ve had a chance to go away from people.
I don’t have many friends. I’ve been in the process of losing one for over a year and I suspect tonight the deed’s done. I feel nothing about it, though we’ve known each other for a decade and a half, and for a third of that time we were very close. I have always been bad at the work of friendship, and always the labour involved to me outweighs the benefits. So I forget to email my friends oftener than once every few months, and never call them, and then feel momentarily sad when I see how close they are to each other, or to people I’ve never met.
That passes (so may this). My overwhelming emotion is curiosity. I don’t care how people feel, or more correctly I don’t care how they feel about me, but I do want to know what they’re doing now and what they were doing while I knew them well and what they’ve been doing in the intervening years or months. If I love them, I only want to know it more urgently. I ought to have been a cat. I do a mean lolcat voice.
I don’t know how to express affection. I have this terror of making a nuisance of myself by asking too much, too many times. I have this terror of having to commit to any faction of an argument. I like very few people very much, and I know fewer very well. I should look up the relevant LotR excerpt. Ah, here we go, thank you wiki.
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

But sometimes, late at night and near dawn, missing the friends I never tried to keep, I wish I did.

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