Sticks and Bones

The first part of a chronicle of a crush-turned-obsession. I'm sorry, Julie.


To experience this in natural reading order go to A Bright, Ironic Hell: The Straight Read .


Also, try Satellite Dance and Crystal Delusions--Parts 2 and 3, respectively--complete.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Epiblogue (Part 236 of 236)

How does one begin an ending? It helps to know that it is an ending, but it doesn't help not to have come to it naturally, or at least not by the envisioned design. But as there was no such (realistic) design, this must be, by default, the ending the blog must have. All this is to say that I'm not prepared, in attitude and intellect, to address all that needs addressing. But that won't stop me from trying.

The journal was born of the crush's inspiration, the blog of the journal's frustrations. The journal got a two-month headstart in May 2008, and it wasn't until late August that year that the transcription caught up to the writing. Before the journal became a blog I decided that it would remain a journal in all respects but in its medium of delivery, that even mention of the blog would be as of a separate entity. The intent was two-fold and apparently contradictory: to pretend that I both did and didn't have an audience. I needed to believe someone was listening, but I didn't want to know. Once the former pretense was abrogated by reality, the latter became even more of a pretense--and an absolute necessity. This was to be an exercise in candor, a "private" exhibitionism, a naked parade in front of my windows at which I allowed anyone to look and dared anyone to take offense and call the cops. Until Sergeant Chris told Captain Julie, I'd had little evidence that I had been writing in anything but a vacuum. Finding out otherwise, and that coworkers constituted the majority of my audience, mortified me. Some had been reading practically from the beginning, and if I'd known then they'd been reading over my shoulder, I could not have, at that toddling stage, continued with any confidence in the conceit or intent of my writing. But I had more than hit my stride by then, not just confident but certain that I had set out on the right path from the start. This certainty fueled my indignation when Chris broke the blog, and I briefly abandoned the literary conceit to dress down my readers as voyeurs. Yet that was precisely the audience I had set out to attract. Secretly, I was flattered, but, more that, I was embarrassed to realize that I was putting on a show for my coworkers. How many of them, knowing the day, place and time of my intent to ask Julie out, were waiting on tenterhooks for me to come to the back afterwards and give James the fist-pump of success? How many people now knew more about me than did the one person with whom I wanted to share myself? My first lesson on the power of a blog was hard-learned: Someone is reading it. Just as indignation forced me from the conceit, it forced me out of the public eye when I protected it with a password, but through my anger I could still see my hypocrisy (if at the time I considered it a righteous refusal to be cowed by a mob), and removed the protection.

If you've read from that far back, you know the outer details and how I felt at the time. I don't wish to rehash, but much of this is a dialogue with myself, if not strictly temporization while I search for myriad things I can't yet recognize. I didn't open a can of worms but Pandora's box, and I want to understand what I released, its overall effect and how it brought me to this point.

This thing I grudgingly call a blog could not have been anything else. Expression abhors a vacuum. I've kept journals, off and on, for most of my life, and the one thing they never had was a reader. I chopped down a forest of trees and never heard one of them fall. What expression is expressed without acknowledgment? The blog is a curious creature, a kind of written performance art, a volatile, malleable personal forum that can't escape the influence of its audience. Of course, mine was no exception, though only indetectably so, until Julie commented. After all, I was soliciting advice, if still pretending there was no one to give it. But Julie's comment was, if not the only one that mattered, the one that mattered most. The last irony of this bright, ironic hell was that it was the words of the one person I wanted to talk to me that shut me up. Was it what I'd wanted? I'd wanted Julie's affections, but, denied that, I wanted, at least, her attention; and, that denied, I simply needed to hear her say, "Leave me alone." Julie was right when she said she never led me on. I always knew that. I did not need to be led on. What else she did not do was stop me. I am stubborn, tenacious, probably importunate and definitely willfully ignorant of hints. Julie was right, too, in saying she tried to be sensitive to my feelings, but to which feelings was she sensitive? I am not the average male; there is no such thing. I have feelings, but they are to be shared, not spared. Beat around the bush, but I don't see the bush or the stick you're abusing it with. I'm staring at you waiting for the truth. I was staring at Julie, waiting, until she wrote on my blog.

There are many ways I could justify continuing A Bright, Ironic Hell, starting with a logical shredding of Julie's comment: No privacy but my own did I ever invade, and no word did I write that I did not feel. My feelings were real and valid, but not the truth. I could even logically refute the claim that I was insensitive. But I won't. What can the rational say to the emotional? Not a trillion of my words can invalidate Julie's hurt and feeling of invasion. I built up a rapport with my own emotions, but I never got to know Julie's. I was not so much insensitive to her feelings as ignorant of them. Or is that the same thing? Was that the hurt I caused? Upon understanding my own feelings, did I consider them unique? All my talk of shunning martyrdom while believing I was the only person who could be hurt by any of this! I understood why I deserved compassion, but was sitll arrogant enough to believe no one else was as deserving of it. From my awareness of Julie's lack of feelings for me I inferred that my feelings, whatever they were, were altogether irrelevant to her. I was not prepared to believe that she could be hurt by my ignoring her. When she said she was upset that I didn't want to talk to her, the blog whistled over my ducking head.

I daresay it was the blog itself that hurt her. My attention to her and interaction with her in the workplace was minimal, but of course my pen was not quiet. I had assumed that she had, as she'd told me at our second confrontation, that she had just read "enough," but when I suddenly discovered otherwise, many, if not all of my paranoias became solid realities and moments at work that had seemed at the time eerily coincidental to my immediately previous writing proved, under retrospection, to be reactions to the writing. (No one at work, for example, ever saw the reinstated picture, only the backside with its inscription.) Julie may actually been bending over backwards, in her fashion, to try to please, or at least appease me based on what she read in the blog. But she was, indeed, damned if she did and damned if she didn't, because what I really wanted from her was something I couldn't ask from her even obliquely, much less expect from her: Love. I knew at Stir Crazy (and probably long before) that love from Julie was out of the question, so I tried to scale back to friendship, but know already that that wouldn't happen, either, I hoped for at least conversation. What Julie gave me was not enough for which I was able to show gratitude. If Julie had not been reading the blog she could not have known simply by my actions at work what I was going through or trying to do. She could have left me to my own pathetic devices.

As she in her way tried to help matters, I suspect, too, that she acted in the same way on her frustrations with me. A non-assertive person is a passively aggressive person, after all. I'm certain that it is no mere self-flattery with which I translate some of her actions as goadery. And how could I blame her, as much of it as I did myself?

This was our conversation. I spoke to her with the blog, and she manifestly responded with her actions. The problem was, we were never speaking directly to one another. We weren't building a single bridge in cooperation, but two bridges in entirely different locations based on assumed specifications and smeared blueprints. Such has been, virtually, our entire relationship and how we have come to know each other.

Julie is (again) right to say I don't know her. Regardless of how closely my speculations on her character might have struck to the truth, I can never know how closely. What I know about her that she has not let others know is knowledge not freely given by her but taken from her, forced from her by anger and frustration. Yet I would not give it back even if I could. It's the knowledge that she is like all of us, a frail child who wants to be liked, and in order to be liked must hide what it's not proud of or what it fears makes it too different to be liked. It was, finally, my belated perceptioon of this frailty that turned her from the one-dimensional, perfect object of my desire into the moist-eyed, weary human being I had been haunting.

I have reached a point in this post where I must assess what I've done, what I've accomplished, what I've failed at, and what I've become. When I said at the beginning that I was not prepared, this was the task to which I was specifically referring, though I didn't know it then. Who was I kidding, thinking I could tame and categorize the ephemeral beasts shooting from that box of oppressed feelings after I'd smashed it to splinters? or that I'd even want to? And, right now, I don't want to. I can't. I've been trying for weeks, and I can barely form a thought around them. My intellect is no match for time. Closure may be years away. I have gained the confidence to heed my wisdom; now I must be patient while time ages and mellows the beast and sends them home to me, prodigal emotions returning as new wisdom.

I'm tired. I want to let this all go. What am I left with? I learned to express my emotions, but not to apply them to others. How much, then, can I say I've grown? Almost enough to have made it worth the trouble. But I did nothing I could have done any other way. I had to make the mistakes I made. I came out of myself, and if I accomplished nothing else, I wouldn't say it was all worth that result, but I'd say it was a good start. I've committed myself to be who I am. I can't regret the time it's taken me to make that commitment. It's finally time to go forward. Pride is not a friend, but, knowing that, I am more wary of its advice. I told Julie when we last spoke, "As far as I know, the feelings I had for you are no longer there. It's just bitterness, pride--or shame--that keeps me going." Since then, things between us have not improved, and I take the full blame without deference. There is no going back, no "normal." We exchange few words beyond greetings, no visual contact beyond recognition. Julie has tried a little bit, I have not tried at all. For me, it's back to the old attitude of "What's in it for me?" and still I see nothing. There's a lesson I haven't learned, or that pride is still able to occlude: Though Julie hasn't feelings for me, she still cares what I think of her, and to say this has nothing to do with her and everything to do with my pride, is irrelevant. But how much do I need to care about that? There really is no Julie anymore. (That was surprisingly painful to say, its spontaneity notwithstanding. I had to stop for several moments after, clench my teeth against the tears.) She is another coworker with whom I (might as well) have nothing in common, someone else to whom I have nothing to say, with whom I can't have a meaningful conversation. Mike told me he got over a girlfriend by hating the things she like. I can't do that, but I can open my blind eye. Julie is little more than beautiful now, and beauty has never been enough for me. I can't say it's no longer difficult working with her--her presence still kicks my pride--but maybe one day I can give her a smile that means no more than a smile I'd give Jennifer or Becky. What other goal could I have? To have no hopes that Julie will someday feel for me the way I once felt for her? Which goal will be realized first?

There is so much more to say that I'm sure I could go on writing for quite some time, but I have to put an end to it--the post and the blog--knowing I've said what needed saying and not regretting later what might have been said. The blog has the answers, and I trust they will be revealed to me, in time. Where I go from here, I don't know, but I know I can't stop writing. I will write another blog, but blogging has changed for me. I can no longer pretend no one is reading but it would be irresponsible and egotistical to think that I can command an audience simply by putting pen to paper. A Bright, Ironic Hell was inspired by and focused upon a pursuit. Where is my inspiration? and what is my pursuit? I have dreams, of course, some of them specific and maybe even attainable, but who will follow me, my guitar and voice to a corner in Carytown? That is not the essential pursuit. What is? I would love to be in love, but I can do little more about that than lay the groundwork, and what is that? I am rudderless, but I still, have a sail. I just don't know which way the wind is blowing. I trust it's not an ill wind, that I will hurt no one this time. I see nothing on the horizon. I can't tell if I'm even moving. Whatever I do next in the way of writing must be a continued exploration of this emotional landscape of which I know I've only taken snapshots. There is a place, I'm sure, where intellect and emotion are not separate, where emotion does not need to be picked apart and analyzed, where it is not a slider puzzle or a Rubik's cube, where it is not a curiosity. Somewhere, emotion and intellect exist as one thing. That's where I want to go. I'd like to take you there with me, because I know now that you are necessary. I don't know the way and don't know if we'll even ever get there, but is there anywhere else to go? I'll miss this place, believe it or not, though I doubt it will ever be far away. For me, it's been everything its title implied--a torture full of hope. It could have been nothing else. Whatever's left to learn from this will catch up, pass and lead us. So...let's go.

11 comments:

Expat From Hell said...

A flourish of a finish, for sure, my friend. I have been greatly inspired by the ride. Please don't forget we followers. You have much to live through, much to express. We, the commenters, have much to learn from you. Please stay in touch.

Best from Texas.

EFH

Deboshree said...

So, finally the end comes?
What an end!
Yes Dion, we are very much here and real and we do want to walk with you and see other sides to you. You have learnt what you had to and with time will learn much more when the perpective is clearer.

Lots of love
Deboshree

Anonymous said...

I never realised my comment sparked off the end! Wow. To Dion - I miss reading your blog. To Julie - sure, point taken, and I do try to see both perspectives, my comment was merely based on my thoughts around Dion's posts. I meant no harm.

Anna
x

Dion Burn said...

It's good to hear from you, Anna. I'd assumed you had read Julie's comment and were just ducking out of the line of fire. I hope you don't blame yourself for this. Your straw was just the last in a monumental stack of them for Julie. I miss the blog, too, because my feelings aren't through with it. But I'm writing another one now--though it's not ready to be posted just yet--and guess who I'm never going to let read it?

Lonesome Loser said...

Oh my gosh, Dion, I can't believe Julie commented on your blog. I don't know how I would feel or react in the moment if Jessica commented on mine. I'm quite sure my heart would stop and my mind would vacate, similar to your experience.

Definitely Julie was in a very uncomfortable position with the dynamic between you two and with this blog. However, it seems to me Julie could have been more forthright with you about her feelings or interest in you from the point when it become clear to her that you were interested. Now I know she said you two could only be friends, but the relationship post-confession was never really clarified. I think she did what the loved ones often do, accept the attention (at least somewhat, at least at the beginning before things get too complicated) without feeling they have any responsibility for creating it, sustaining it, or clearly ending it. Technically, logically, reasonably, the loved ones DON'T have any responsibility to us other than basic human civility perhaps. But it would be very helpful if the objects of unrequited love would be clear about what they do and do not feel as soon as possible to the would-be lover. But that's also harder than it appears -- when I've had others be in love with me, it's taken me too long to notice, and I gave too casual of a response, verbal and/or nonverbal. You know? I've also been guilty of enjoying the attention and so minimizing my empathy with the person's feelings.

I hope you get this message and it's not too long. I've really enjoyed sharing this journey with you, Dion, it's been a pleasure to talk with someone who knows what it feels like. I'm going to take a look at your new blog now.

Dion Burn said...

LL, I'm glad you've written. Honestly, I was disappointed you hadn't sooner, but that's neither here nor there and definitely nothing I blame you for. Your support has been important to me, and, boy, did I need it then. Your words were worth the wait.

Julie gave me that "basic human civility," but to my pride it rang hollow. I couldn't muster it to give back and still can't. Now she doesn't even bother, and I can feel her resentment for bringing her down to my level. Apparently, I learned nothing from my failed marriage in that respect.

Aritul said...

Wow. This was just so beautifully written. I was going to offer my sympathies about things not working out, but it seems that you are doing quite well without them. I hope that 2 years later, the whole situation with Julie is just a mere memory that causes you no pain nor feelings of regret.

Dion Burn said...

Thank you, Aritul, for the kind, hopeful words. The memories are still vivid and still hurt occasionally. Please read "Satellite Dance" if you would like to know how I got on with Julie from there. I'm glad someone is still reading. It's still very important to me. I will be starting a new blog at the start of the year.I hope you will want to read that, too.

Aritul said...

If you are as open and lyrical on your new blog as you are on this, then sign me up.

Dion Burn said...

I can promise the openness, but if there is lyricism in my words it is simply a by-product of expression. Still have a deal?

Aritul said...

Definitely.