“John?” I said quietly, as I walked into the house. Strange. It was quiet. Was my insomniac roommate actually sleeping for once? I glanced over at his bedroom door. Yeah, he had to be sleeping. It was the only time that his door was ever closed.
I walked into my room, and sat down on the floor. I stared at the walls for a long time. I was edgy. Restless. There was this knot in my chest, trembling in my fingertips. I knew this feeling. It was the fight or flight instinct kicking in.
Howie.
How did this all happen? How did it get so. . . weird?
My brain searched through the memories I had filed away, trying to reach some level of understanding, some glimpse of Howie that made me understand why I had let it go this far, why I couldn’t make him go away, or why I had taken the time for him in the first place. If only it could have been like those first two days. The drunken conversations, the long walks in the middle of the night, the reckless spontaneity.
Maybe it would have been better if we had never slept together. If we had just become friends instead.
There’s no way either of you would have let that happen.
How could he have done that tonight? Even he knew that work was my escape and I couldn’t stand to have any outside baggage coming in, and he was very much baggage at this point. If he loved me as much as he said, why couldn’t he just give me the time I asked for, the space I needed? Why couldn’t he respect that I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t be with him, that he was just some sort of shadow replacement in my eyes, and I could neither put him or myself through that? Why couldn’t he just leave it be? Why did he have to constantly be there, pushing, demanding, as if my love and companionship were somehow owed to him?
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I had to stop thinking about it, that was all there was to it. I had to stop thinking about it, dealing with it entirely. Or at least I had to stop thinking about it tonight. Because at this rate, I would never get to sleep, and there was something pathetic about the way I just stared at my bedroom wall, brooding.
I opened Kierkegaard to a random page.
“So to despair over something is not yet properly despair. It is the beginning, or it is as when the physician says of a sickness that it has not yet declared itself. The next step is the declared despair, despair over oneself. A young girl is in despair over love and so she despairs over her lover, because he died, or because he was unfaithful to her. This is not a declared despair; no, she is in despair over herself.”
It hit me in a flash, in an epiphany, all the pieces of the puzzle.
I was on the verge of a breakthrough, I was on the verge of making sense of it all and if I could take the time, get away from all that defined my life in the present tense, I was sure that last bit would come in. There would be peace. There would be calm. The fear and confusion and obligation would fade. I was almost there. I knew on some level that my nostalgic pining for Vincent was primarily self indulgent, that comparing everyone to him was some absurd perfectionist neurosis, but what I could never quite bear was others’ despair. Guilt and suffocation were almost one and the same, as I carried around some nonsensical responsibility for other peoples’ emotional well being. I knew there was a way to re-wire my brain, de-progam this one personality flaw. I just had to claw below the surface to that one vital fragment of information.
What I didn’t realize, and what I saw in that one paragraph, was that Howie was no victim to my whims, no innocent bystander that I owed something to. There was no way he could love me that much in such a short amount of time. Especially not the way we were. We had more differences than affinities, and his neediness had unintentionally revealed a core quality of his: he was in love with love. He was in love with escaping himself, hiding from himself, and I had been the perfect vessel for that escapism. And when that was taken away he didn’t despair over me, he despaired over himself. His pursuit of me had been a cause, a game. Because if he had really loved me he would have seen me as I was, free of maneuvers to change and mold, free of that well intentioned meddling, free of that desperate neediness that rushed everything faster and farther than it needed to go, was meant to go. If he really loved me, he would have to know me. And to know me was to know that I valued independence and self respect above all else. No self respecting person could ever degrade themselves by continuously throwing themselves at another person who obviously had no interest in them. No self respecting person would confuse the desire to part on civil terms as weakness, as still having feelings for them. And no self respecting person would confuse being a doormat with loyalty.