1999-06-10 Woozle thots
1999.06.10
| "I don't believe I want to move on." — Tori Amos (mis-heard) |
- status: feeling neglected/abandoned; functional but very depressed
This seems a familiar pattern: waiting endlessly for a close friend to respond (write back, return a call, spend some time), occasionally giving into temptation and sending an inquiry (letter, phone call) to make sure everything's ok -- that they're ok, that I haven't been bugging them too much, that things are ok between us -- with no response to any of them, each query separated by more patient weeks or months. I try to be considerate, I really do.
Someone on TV (VH-1?) was talking about Paul Simon's brief marriage to someone (Carrie Fisher?). He said individuals can be either flowers or gardeners. A flower and a gardener can co-exist happily; two gardeners can even work well together; but two flowers just crowd each other out. I take this metaphor to mean that people are either nurturing or attention-demanding.
Sometimes I worry that I must be the worst, most water-hungry flower in existence. People give up nurturing me because I just need too much time and energy; I wilt so easily, and don't add that much to a room anyway.
But that doesn't completely make sense, because I've also seen how I can build up other people and nurture them. Can people be both nurturing and demanding? Can they be nurturing and demanding of the same person (as opposed to nurturing one person and recharging themselves from another, robbing Peter to pay Paul)? I feel I've been both with H. Maybe I went a bit heavy on the demanding sometimes, but then I think of the time I pulled her out of a really deep funk and she told me she didn't deserve me (yes, I did confirm she meant it in a positive way), and I wonder if her calculations included all the times I asked too much. If so, then I read this to mean that at that moment she was telling me that it was more than worth it, which in turn implies I am at least capable of sustaining and being sustained by someone else with net gain for both involved. So was it included, or had she forgotten, or was she just being nice?
| *Note: this H is not Harena |
H* hasn't replied to my several letters and two phone calls over the past seven months. On the other hand, the last two letters she sent were very encouraging / reassuring -- she seemed not only to be saying positive things towards me by in fact to be thinking along the same lines as I was. But now this silence.
We've been through this before; earlier indications were that when there's a long gap, I should just sit tight; it only means she's been too busy or not had the inspiration to write. Is it reasonable of me to start to wonder if that's still true? There's been so much to talk about, so much to catch up with.
When there were long hiati (hiatuses?) like this, I used to get paranoid she'd finally done herself in, but lately I'd finally trained myself not to worry about it because the evidence has indicated that she won't. But when time starts to stretch like this and other theories start to seem very thin... I just don't know what to think.