So Sad Today (5 page)

I sat with this for a moment. I pretended that what he was saying was not what he was saying or that what he was saying was okay with me. I wanted it to be okay. I wanted to be cool.

I was able to sit with the Pokémon. And then, a few days later, I could no longer sit with the Pokémon.

We did try reconnecting a few months later, as friends. That lasted for about a month. I did a good job of pretending to be a wingman-type bro, all casual and chill. But inside I was suffering. I didn’t want to just be
friends. We would text about books, therapy, SSRIs, taking a shit at Walmart, but inside I was only wondering,
Does he still feel ____________?
I guess he was too. Things devolved quickly into sexts about the Roman Empire and romantic emails. Then I said goodbye again. He got back in touch. Then I said goodbye for good.

What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just disappear? Why can’t it just become something else?

What I maybe miss most is being able to lapse into spaceland and fantasize about the sex with him. But it is no longer safe for me to do that. The fantasy is no longer safe. It is a death valley. Reality killed it. I also miss the many months of uncertainty of not knowing whether we could be. The nebulousness. Now I know we could not.

I want to text him and say:
hi

I want him to text back:
Hi

I want to say:
i am writing a personal essay about not knowing what love is. can i ask u some questions? were you in love with me or was it just the fucking? was i just an older woman who was so grateful just to be getting fucked by a younger man? (or other things I have read about older women fucking younger men on websites from the perspective of younger men?)

I want to say:
was i real to you? could i have been real to you? why wasn’t i?
I want to say:
when r u coming back to me in the way i want u?

But he cannot answer me. My longing is not for him but for the stars. No, my longing is for him. Why is my version of him not real?

We got to be magic together. But is magic even real?

I want what is unreal to rescue me from the world. I want to be a shadow of myself dancing in a hotel room with his shadow. I want to be free.

I see him now in a dream and he has fallen for someone else. He comes to me in the dream and tells me he is about to be married. I ask him what I didn’t have. Is it that I am old? Is my skin a crocodile? Was it that I am already married? Perhaps it is that I am of the stars and
he
is of the earth.

Who is the woman who has his whole being now? Does she have his whole being? Do I still live in there at all? I want to vomit up the whole thing and say, “But it was love.”

When we think of our old lovers, and the people they are with now, we wonder what we did not have. We wonder collectively, as people, what other people have. A collective unconscious is formed, a cloud, and we laze around it and lie to each other. We tell each other we are better than one another, better than whoever he is with now. We tell it to each other, because we are well-meaning people. We tell it to each other in friendship.

Our single friends say they are going to be alone for the rest of their lives and we tell them they are crazy. We
tell them they are definitely going to find someone. But how do we know? We know nothing.

It is our single friends who keep us in our marriages. They remind us that being single is sad. Dating is sad. Online dating is sad. Attending holidays and weddings alone is sad. Marriage, too, is sad.

But love, lust, infatuation—for a few moments, I was not sad.

T
HE OCEAN GIVES ME PERFORMANCE
anxiety about being at peace. The moon is definitely judging me. Dogs know the truth. Babies see through me. Anything natural, anything pure: judging me.

People have said that I’m no better or worse than anyone else. I’ve been told that the universe probably wants me here. Still, I choose to feel that I am being judged as a piece of shit by some cosmic arbiter. The thing is, I’m self-centered. I guess I’d prefer some cosmic judge thinking shitty things about me, rather than nothing thinking about me at all. There are so many people and we’re all awful in our own special ways; yet somehow, I’m the most profoundly, existentially awful. It seems unlikely that would be the case. But that’s how I roll.

In an attempt to manipulate this elusive judge, one
thing I like to do is play games that elevate superficial bullshit to the level of life and death. My favorite game is the one that I play with calories. Like, I pretend the cosmic arbiter is deeply concerned with my calorie intake. If the arbiter is judging me based on my calorie intake, then I can avoid judgment on a more profound level for worse shit. I can channel my more free-floating, all-consuming anxiety over the uncontrollable (i.e., the inevitability of death) into a much more manageable state of superficial, tangible anxiety. I can obsess about fruit and not my cosmic awfulness.

Thus, I know the caloric content of every single fruit and vegetable. A large apple is 100 calories. A large sweet potato is 165 calories. One thing I like to do is buy the biggest apples and sweet potatoes I can find (like human-head-size fruit, just really roided up and fucked) and still count them as 100 and 165 cals, respectively. Then I like to worry that I am getting fat off the misproportioned fruit. Then I like to ask people in a backwards way if I am getting fat by saying I am getting fat and hoping that they will negate me.

Sometimes the cosmic judge speaks through other people. Sometimes it speaks through my interpretations of how they perceive me (often totally imagined). More frequently, though, the judge speaks through a committee in my head. Right now the committee in my head is saying,
Why are you writing about your relationship to the
calories in fruit, you privileged piece of shit? Nobody cares. There are bigger issues in the world.
What’s sad is that I’m not even taking action on the bigger issues, because I’m too busy thinking about myself. But the committee says they’re real.

The weird thing is that I also sometimes claim to believe that the judge has an opponent. The opponent to the judge is an equally powerful, loving force who always has my back. For the sake of efficiency I’ll call this force
god
.

I claim to believe my god exists, because I have experienced its presence many times. I have experienced god through other human beings who have helped me. While individuals have let me down, collectively I’ve always been able to find help. My god is a horizontal god who works sideways on earth rather than vertically from heaven down.

Of course if I could choose my dream god it would be heroin. Like, that’s the god I really want—a god who protects me completely from my own feelings and makes me feel blissed out 100% of the time. Except my god wouldn’t be a false god, because I wouldn’t be dependent on anyone or anything for it. And I would never come down. And believe me when I say that I have tried to make many tangible things into this god. And believe me when I say that you always come down.

When I first got sober off the big stuff—alcohol and drugs—not the twelve thousand other things I’ve
become addicted to since then, I really wanted a god that I could put in my pocket, like a few pills of OxyContin or a flask, so that it would be close by when I needed it. The Jewish god I grew up with seemed kind of weird and punishing. I really liked the Buddha, because he seemed like he would make me cool. Everyone knows Buddhists are cool. Also, I liked purchasing statuettes of deities in New Age gift shops in the hope that they would “make me spiritual,” and Buddha statuettes make a frequent appearance in these types of gift shops. But then I got hung up on whether my Buddha was the blue medicine Buddha or the Chinese laughing Buddha. So I started obsessing about that.

Then I got deep into the crystal game. I started carrying around special crystals that would ward off specific elements or feelings at various times. I started seeing the color violet everywhere and was like,
Must buy amethyst crystal now to reflect my spiritual vision
, but then another voice in my head was like,
Yo, this is getting expensive for a pile of rocks
. Every spiritual trinket I’ve purchased quickly loses its juju. In the temple it’s magic, but at home it just becomes more crap.

Ultimately, I had to accept that god can’t be purchased or harnessed in a particular object. I had to give even my conception of what god should look like to god. I had to surrender trying to conceive of what a higher power could be, with my limited human mind, to the
great mystery itself. Otherwise, I was going to make myself crazier.

I still have to surrender my ideas about god on a daily basis. Just when I think I “have it,” it changes. Like any relationship, my relationship with god keeps evolving the longer I stay in it.

The other day, a friend of mine who used to believe in god said she no longer believes and is now an atheist. She made atheism sound really good. I was feeling angry at god at the time and was like:
Fuck you, god, I don’t believe in you either, you piece of shit
. But then I realized that not only was I still talking to a god I claimed not to believe in; I was talking to god as if god were some douchebro. And a douchebro god is kind of a human conception and probably not god. Let’s face it, any kind of bro god is a human conception. If we can define god as a static entity using our human mind alone, it probably isn’t that rad of a god.

This is not to say that if you conceive of your own god using your mind that it’s an inherently shitty god. I think that we should all have our own gods, and whatever we believe exists does, in some way, exist. But, like, when I imagine god as a douchebro or as an asshole (which I’ve been conditioned to do as a result of being raised in the Jewish religion, where god is kind of a punishing dick), it’s harder for me to find comfort in that god. I don’t really want to go to it for help. Why would I?

God, for me, is more of a feeling, a feeling of peace. I think my god lives in a silence that exists inside me. It’s such a delicious fucking silence, so profound. But this can also get tricky, because if I’m feeling crazy then I’m like, Where the hell is god? Has god abandoned me? Like, no peace, no god. But it’s still better than some bro deity telling me I’m a piece of shit.

Also, the silence is always there. The silence doesn’t go away. It’s just that sometimes I don’t hear or feel it, because the committee is so loud. The committee is a lot louder than the god-silence, and also it can seem more exciting. When the committee tells me about stuff I need to have, or am going to get, it’s sexier than the silence of god. Also, the silence is just there, chillin’, but the committee is working really hard to get my attention. When I’m sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas. It’s like,
Good morning! Everything is shit! Time to act impulsively. But first let’s start by getting into fights with imaginary people from the past. Next let’s catalog everything that’s wrong with you and your life. Also, I want to remind you of everything you don’t have—and everything you should be scared of losing. Let’s begin.

Sometimes I try to placate the committee by doing what it tells me. I shop or eat or send emails I shouldn’t be sending. I chase attention. I watch too much porn. But ultimately, I can’t escape the committee by feeding
it anything external or trying to run away from myself. There will never be enough stuff to sate the committee. It only gets hungrier and runs faster.

The only chance I have to find respite from the committee, even just for a few minutes, is to get totally still. If I get really still and quiet, sometimes the committee will talk and talk until it has nothing left to say and then it finally shuts the fuck up. It seems counterintuitive to hang out with the assholes in my head who are trying to kill me, so as to defeat them. But this is what I have found to be effective. This is why I have to meditate every morning.

My morning meditation practice is nothing intense. It’s ten minutes, first thing, before I go on the Internet (the committee loves the Internet!). Sometimes I do a mantra or wish loving-kindness upon four people: myself, a loved one, a stranger, and a person I dislike at the moment. Mostly, though, it’s just me staying still long enough to get to the silence under the committee. If I am really still, I get to ask the silence questions and it gives me good answers.

The silence is always there, under the committee. But I usually have to spend the first eight minutes of my meditation getting yelled at by the committee before I get to the silence. Like, mostly I am meditating on how fucked I am.

A typical meditation is:
Hare Krishna (you’re an oversharing loser) Hare Krishna (you totally come off as needy)
Krishna Krishna (stop texting people back so quickly) Hare Hare (don’t initiate texts either) Hare Rama (your tits are sagging) Hare Rama (your nipples were never that good) Rama Rama (it’s basically over) Hare Hare (you’re basically dead).

Right before the end of the meditation, the committee stops. It’s not gone for good, but it shuts up for a second. That’s when I get the moment of peace I’ve been searching for my entire life. It’s what alcohol and drugs did so beautifully for me at first, before I came down. If I could have stayed drunk all the time, I wouldn’t have had to get sober. But I couldn’t, so I did.

I don’t think my meditation practice inherently makes me spiritual. I haven’t ascended and I’m not enlightened. I’m no better than anyone else (if anything, I just require more help). But what the practice gives me is a chance of staying on the planet. When I meditate, I go from being a 96% impulsive and self-obsessed person to a 92% impulsive and self-obsessed person. That 4% keeps me alive.

It’s like every morning I access this template for pause in my brain. Then, as I go about my day and the voices start up again, I have a frame of reference that these voices might not be the whole truth. They may feel completely true, but there is also a memory of quiet beneath them, which shows that they maybe aren’t
giving me the full picture of reality. They might be lying about me being a total piece of shit.

But who really wants to sit quietly and be still with the voices? I certainly don’t. Sometimes I’ll go without meditation for a few days, because I’m having a really good time running my life on self-will and I don’t want god, silence, or the space for reflection to piss on my party. Like, I don’t want to see what I’m doing. I don’t want to see that I’m about to make a mess. The committee is like:
You’re killin’ it! Don’t stop!
But inevitably, I always crash and return to my meditation practice again.

There is a large part of me, the committee, that wants to see me dead. If it can’t kill me, it’ll settle for seeing me miserable. It wants me spinning out on what I lack, talking to myself. I don’t know why these forces exist in me that want me to die, I guess I’m just wired that way. But it’s cool that there is this other part of me that must really want to live. I don’t have scientific proof of its existence, and I don’t need it. I’m still alive. So I know it’s there.