Sunny, my life’s gone easy

I haven’t written here for a long time. I write, but it doesn’t go here. That’s maybe going to change.

But before that, I need a ramble. And I’m going to throw you in at the deep end.

I love him. You know the love I mean. The bad kind. Obsessive. I think a lot about how I was raised to think of this as ‘romance’, as love. My emotional self still seems to think it is, but whatever rational self-awareness I have is fucking tired, people. It’s like stop this. Girl, you are better than this.

I’m at the broken end of my latest obsession. I get one maybe every two years. It takes a year or more to get over the rejection, and then about six months of relative stability before I stumble, clear-eyed and purposeful in my awkwardness, into another one. This is the routine.

My men always have some redeeming traits, things I see as divine connection between us. They’re also always selfish, anxious, they usually drink a lot, they usually don’t want people like me. They have a personality that makes them – under certain circumstances – abusive. And they are almost always friends first. In many ways this is a typical male profile, for men who drink anyway.

I’m summarising them this way because it’s hard not to see them as the beautiful, maybe perfect individuals I still love. Some of whom have continued to be, or who have become, lifelong friends. But I’m not talking about that part right now, I’m not talking about the good part.

Because I love him – and he is the most perfect one so far, and he has done what no-one else has done – cut me out of his life and burned some of my very important friendships in the process. That’s nothing, I know. There are people losing life and limb in Gaza or Ukraine or anywhere I guess when you think hard enough, and there are people in long-term abusive partnerships, there are people dealing with mountains much bigger than I have to move here. Okay. But I’m not them. I’m me. And I have to actively deal with this. This thing is inside me, it’s not inside them. We don’t have to play the hand we’re dealt, but we do have to play our own hand. At least a little.

I want to say I loved him, past tense. The love has been dulled. More than that. The love is entombed now, like a vampire. Waiting for a drop of blood to grace its lips so it can swing back into fully-fledged demonry. It has been entombed for some time. He made sure of this. I tried so hard to stop him, but I couldn’t. You can’t make someone love you, and you can’t stop someone from nailing your love into a coffin and burying it 18feet below your feet.

There were times when he loved me back, but they don’t matter here. I either imagined them or he’s given them up – the result is the same.

So… what?

Well, I can still hear my love screaming down there, in its coffin. You know like in that recent Nosferatu movie – it can be asleep and very awake and alive in your dreams at the same time. In my dreams it’s also buried, but it’s wide awake. It’s thrashing and screaming.

And I needed an excuse to write.

This site was always supposed to be the stories of me, in my bungalow, in a dreamlike Hollywood or LA adjacent place that doesn’t really exist.

I was sitting in my bungalow, and he knocked on the door.

He wears sunglasses to protect himself from my love.

I opened the door and his dog padded into my home as I tried to find his eyes. The lines in his face and the fall of his hair told me things, but the eyes sat behind those laughing, sadistic glasses.

This is the version of him I imagine, when I’m in the bungalow, okay. He’s not ‘real’. Over a year ago, he was the first character I imagined in the bungalow – I think. Apart from the little visitors coming to drink coffee or buy potions and hear stories. He came in a fog, like a character from Silent Hill. He never really wants to talk to me.

And as I write, he’s standing here, looking over me, or maybe not looking. It used to make my heart race just to think that I might see him, walking along the street, getting a coffee, in a meeting. I remember once he was walking down the stairs into the room and the seconds he took started filling out into an infinity of bliss. It was like an angel walking down from heaven. And as he stands here now I can hear the throb of my love’s heart below our feet. Distant, but persistent.

I’m going to talk to him, maybe show him some rooms here. And I’m going to pretend that this is a remotely healthy way of dealing with either breakup or rejection.