Things Fall Apart

This post could be called The Icebox Blues, too. But anyway. I don’t really consider myself a pessimist generally, but something I try to keep in mind is that things fall apart. In science’s quest to find an equation that describes the entire universe, wouldn’t Things Fall Apart constitute a significant portion of that equation?

That’s how things seem to go, to me anyway. And not just in the sense that what goes up must come down, etc. Some things seem to fall apart a lot more reliably than others. At least for me.

For most of my life, I didn’t have the confidence or comfort in my own skin to make a convincing case to myself, let alone the fairer sex, of my merits, my worth. Now that I do feel reasonably at home in my skin and in my world, I find myself with access to more doors but, still, none of those I choose to take leads anywhere worth being. Moreover, none of them even takes me past a shallow, fairly empty vestibule. Do I consistently choose the wrong door, and if so, why? Or do I choose the right door but lack the keys required for passage to anything real?

Why do I always seem to end up involved (yet only very superficially, remember) with clones of Lil’ Miss Frostybox? It’s starting to get monotonous. Boy meets girl, boy wows girl, things approach significance, girl erects frost wall around herself. I mean, things fall apart before they’re even really put together. These preemptive collapses can get disparaging.

Things fall apart, I remind myself, and in this way I manage to stay pretty unsurprised when the expected occurs. A side-benefit is the relative absence of drama. Which is good, I think. I sneer at those people who have drama addictions. You know, the people who “break up” with their significant other every other week and still somehow manage to be surprised each time. Or maybe just act surprised. I guess I can at least be thankful that I’m not so desperate to feel alive and real that I need constant, regular injections of melodrama. What a charade.

So anyway, I try to be the opposite of those people. And it pretty much works. At the same time, I think I’m not so risk-averse as to need my own ice walls and to be unwilling to stick my neck out there a bit. Surprisingly, though, I’m rarely the one who beats the hasty retreat first. No, I feel downright emo compared to most of these ladies with whom I end up lightly entangled and from whom I subsequently become quickly banished.

Why? I’m not sure. The best answer I can contrive is that they’re unhappy with themselves, for whatever reason, and all the attendant problems with intimacy come into play. Now believe me, I’m not oblivious to the “she’s just not that into you” factor, and realize that this is the first possibility that jumps into my calculus. But that’s just not it.

So how come the chicas I find myself pursuing seem to me to be the rarest jewels, mentally, personally, even physically, and yet they also harbor such cold hearts? Did they achieve their current luster only by way of significant past trauma? Trauma that scrubbed them shiny, that forged them as they are today but at the same time indelibly marred them?

Or is this ghost in them something visible to most but invisible to me because I suffer from a similar condition? I must admit I aspire to stoicism. The tree that weathers decades of fierce winds grows the strongest roots, right? Get uprooted and start over, but endure the weather and gain strength as you survive. That’s what I shoot for. Does this philosophy engender coldness?

A couple months ago I visited the National Arboretum; they were featuring a bonsai exhibit. I’m no veggie-lover, but there were some impressive little trees in that windowless, fluorescent-lit exhibit room. Trees over a hundred years old with tough, gnarled roots, but that hadn’t grown taller than a foot. Some were clutching triumphantly to a small rocky precipice, victorious and aloof. Or is that battered and alone? Regardless, they were certainly stunted: alive for a century and still barely a shrub. Are they monuments to strength or merely abandoned, twisted, shrunken oddities……

I think it could reasonably be concluded that I might have the ghost too. What happens when two black holes drift into each other’s influence? But I think I have the ghost subdued. I thought I had it subdued.