silent all these years

As I’ve written in a previous post (I think it was actually the first post – let me check… yep, it was the 1st one indeed), one of the reasons I had in mind when starting this blog was to have something to come up with for Sloth of the Slow Adventures in Slothville (I’m refraining from giving a link to her site because due to the wonderful conspiracy of the traceback & google, she’ll immediately be notified about such an action and we wouldn’t want to hurry it, do we now?).

So, as this is just a splendid lazy Saturday I’m enjoying, having all the time, my tea is ready and everything, let me tell you about her. First, here is what she looks like:

Isn’t she’s just like Laura Linney, full of grace, giving joy in a Wes Anderson movie? Isn’t she lovely? (Datarock meets Stevie Wonder, ladies and gents)

(wait while reader ponders… Ready when you’re ready. Here we go)

This is the list she composed upon a break-up (everybody hurts, sometime):

1. The Most Important Lesson of All:
The intensity of your love for another human being will in no way prevent him from dumping you.
At a bus stop.
In the rain.

2. The Silver Lining:
It is truly astonishing, when the grief of being dumped by the only man you have ever loved (at a bus stop, in the rain) prevents you from eating anything at all for many days, how much weight you can instantly drop.
Best. Diet plan. EVAR.

3. The Almost-Most-Embarrassing Bit:
If you are the type of person who gets a little nauseous and poopy when under significant amounts of anxiety and fear, do not underestimate the power of being dumped by the only man you have ever loved (at bus stop, in rain) to make you shit your pants.
Literally.

4. Phrollicking in Pharmaceuticals:
When you present to your therapist with only two possible emotive states – flat affect and outright sobbing – she will medicate you.

5. Phrollicking in Pharmaceuticals Part Deux:
When the only man you have ever loved dumps you (bus stop, rain), and in the process of doing so calls you a “self-medicator,” do not miss out on the irony of then being prescribed enough anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medication to kill a Clydesdale.
I have lovingly dubbed it “The Divorce Cocktail.”
(Lexapro, Trazodone, Buspar, oh my!)

6. Female Problems:
When the only man you have ever loved dumps you a day before you are supposed to get your period, do not be alarmed by a significant delay in menstruation.
Do not, by any means, begin to worry that you are going to give birth to the spawn of a man who dumped you at a bus stop.
Above all, do not begin to wonder if being pregnant with his child could serve as some sort of bargaining chip to get him back. Because that’s just sick. And also, if you indulge in that very wrong and bad fantasy, when you do get your period you’ll feel like you’re dying all over again. Also sick.

7. Don’t Believe the Hype:
Honesty: apparently, not always the best policy.
(P.S. I’m wearing a blazer that I couldn’t even button a week ago………and it’s a little big! Shyah!!)

8. The Most Embarrassing Bit:
(Maybe not to you, but certainly to me.)

If you are so unwise as to fall in love in the first place (not recommended by this reviewer), keep it under wraps until you’re actually at the altar. Just, ssshhhhh. Because there is really nothing quite as humiliating as having to admit to everyone who cares about you that you’ve been dumped at a bus stop by that guy you confidantly shouted to the heavens you were going to marry and have a baby with.

Current project: understanding my future as completely different than I previously perceived it.

9. Sage Advice:
When dumped by the only man you have ever loved, it is helpful, if possible, to skip the bargaining stage and move straight to anger.
Very, very helpful.

10. A Valuable Reminder:
If you have to be perfect all the time, never make mistakes, subjugate your own opinion, or pretend to be different than you are in order to keep him, he doesn’t really love you. In hindsight, it may even be giving him too much credit to say that he loved some fabricated idea of you.
So pick your sorry ass up off the rainy sidewalk and get on with it.

So, in summary, life isn’t a place – life is a thing and that thing is called a bulldozer.

Also, please keep in mind that, these were posted 3 years ago – but then again, on the internet nobody knows you’re over the matter already, years ago.

And there’s also this entry she had posted between rules 5 and 6:

Holy shit, you guys! You will not believe what just happened to me!

I came out of a store, paused to fiddle with my iPod, and this wine buyer who had been in the store while I was in there came right out after me and, my hand to God, said, “If I may? You are stunning. Absolutely stunning.”

I swear, I actually gaped at him and said, “You know what? I was just broken up with last week. Do you know how much that means to me, that you said that?”

He got all rueful grin-like, pointed to his ring finger, and said, “I’m a married man, I’ve got no designs on you, but I just had to let you know: you take the breath away.”

I thanked him and he walked off! Can you even imagine that?? You all know that I don’t believe in fate or destiny or any of that, but I sure as hell believe in good timing.

I’d actually have volunteered for the role of that wine-buyer if I had some courage with me. But nowadays I’m hanging around with a girl named Dorothy and she promised me she’d fix me something. But then again, I know I wouldn’t even if I could. Meeting people you’d like to know more about isn’t worth being disappointed and turn the interest sour. Nothing good(/better at the very optimistic case) can come out of an act that’s so good in itself.

(Now let’s see if I could post a link without setting the alarms off…
shhville.wordpress.com/2006/11/15/hello-timing/
- I deleted the “http://” bit but have to check to make sure.. yep, it seems like working.)

PS: Two quotations on the state of grief and despair – they are sincere (written under a nome-de-plume, on his beloved wife’s departure) and the author died 3 years after writing these (Life is very long, when you’re lonely (and with the Queen dead)).

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job – where the machine seems to run on much as usual – I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions – something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting.

I said two quotations but forgot what the second one was whilst writing the one above. Anyway. Oh, and by the way, the above quotation is from C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed”.

Later Edit: I remembered what it was, here:

I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.