gloomy.

obviously i’ve been moping around in general and feeling genuinely sad.  it’s not that interesting or introspective, so i’ve just been keeping most of it to myself.  i’m at that numb point when it isn’t worth it to think or write or care about anything.

i can’t even get up enough gumption to slam that tedious _gatsby_ baz lurhman thing.  man, way to make me hate a great work of literature!  all the poetry becomes trite and tedious in his hands.  nick seemed a holden caulfield type in the worst way.

okay, i had a little gumption.  i think the pizza i ate earlier gave me strength.

mean people suck.

let’s just try to avoid the people that make us feel bad. 

that’s one of those affirmations you always see going around and i’ve often ignored it because i feel like if i don’t put up with these people, i will be

completely

alone. 

that’s a little scary, particularly now that maureen is gone.  but i would rather be alone than with people i can’t trust. 

i try my fucking best every day to be REAL.  i try to be honest and to do the right thing–maybe a lot of the stuff that i like to do other people might think is wrong, but, you know, i just don’t do things *i* think of as wrong.

i try, but i don’t always succeed, of course.  i get all pissy and sometimes i just say things to make the world easier for a while and you know honest isn’t easy.  i’m not a superhero or anything and i don’t expect anyone else to be, either, but i just wish they would try a little harder to just…not be so fucking petty and  mean.

 

anger is confusing.

so many people are angry right now.

it’s so fucking funny that i was so angry with her when she didn’t do it and now that she did, i’m not mad at all.  that’s kind of fucked up sounding, but i think you’ll know what i mean.  it hurt me so much that she shut me out, didn’t tell me other than veiled allusions to what had happened, pushed me away and told me to worry about myself.   i was mad, but mostly just hurt, and i guess that’s what most of this is for people, too.  they’re hurt that she’d leave them.  i was hurt that she pulled away from me.  i guess it’s not so hard to understand.

moving forward

did i mention that i forgot my fucking ATM pin?  you know, the one i’ve used practically every day for the last year or more? and, yesterday, as i was leaving the house to bring jimmy’s keys to him, i shut the gate behind me and just stood there because i couldn’t remember where i was going.  so, yeah, things are still tough, but time is passing.

maureen’s grandpa came in yesterday and gave me everyone’s keys and such to redistribute, and we talked for a while.  tomorrow i’m going back down to the apartment to help the claire bag up all the clothes to take to charity.  saturday we’re going to take care of the bed and stuff and then it’ll basically be all done but the shoutin’.

had a drink and a snack with a retired and a current coworker from the high school this afternoon.  it involved a little misting up, but i don’t think i totally lost it, so that’s good, right?  and when kathy came to my office to pick up her key…well, yeah, that wasn’t just misting up, i totally cried when i said i was “okay” and she said i didn’t look okay.  i don’t think she meant i was ugly, but, either way, i cried.

i guess i’m not surprised, because people say things like this and i read about it a lot and all that, but i just don’t understand all the anger toward maureen for doing this.  i am almost inconsolably sad about this happening, but i understand that she did what she thought she needed to do and i am happy that she is not suffering any more. i think it was unkind of her, not leaving her grandpa and family a specific note just for them.  i feel badly that i got three or four and they got nothing–that’s just mean.  but, since she’s not alive for a mild chastisement about being a nicer person, whatever.  i was angry and hurt last month when she originally planned to do this because she shut me out and wouldn’t talk to me, but we worked it out.

but a lot of people are very angry…at the fact that she would do this, at the way she went about it, because they think it’s wrong, i guess.   i don’t really know.

i certainly have nothing i need to FORGIVE her for and i am not angry.

i am just sad.  lonely.  disturbed that i can’t eat or sleep more than tiny amounts.  wondering what i’m going to do with all the time i spent with her and who i can share with the things i used to share with her.  i worry that i’m going to close up again and cut myself off from people.  i’m trying to let my friends take care of me and they have been amazing, but i know it’s easy for me to get isolated and when grief isn’t the flavor of the month, my other friends will need to take up their other lives again.

maybe i need a new hobby.

i went back to work today.

every time i left the library and walked down the office hall to the bathroom it was a little like running some emotional gauntlet.  everyone is sad and everyone is worried about me.

so many awkward hugs.

i was excused from the faculty meeting after school, which i appreciated.  i gave out the last of the labeled bags maureen had left to people, i just have one dvd left now and i think i can weasel on that and give it to someone or mail it.  i don’t really know the woman that well and i just…ugh, whatever, i just don’t want to deal with any of this anymore.  i am so tired of trying to coordinate information and balance everyone’s feelings and spiritual beliefs and all that crap.  i want to just be in my selfish grief space and throw a tantrum, but that’s not what i do, so i just bitch about it here, i guess, since i certainly can’t complain to maureen about it.

tomorrow my LTA has a field trip with his son, so i’ll be on my own all day.  hopefully it’ll be quiet and i can just get myself together and do some fun library stuff, make posters or something.  i’ll figure something out.

maureen

maureen was young and smart and funny and beautiful and almost always game to try something fun. we met when she was working at the high school, but she was also a student there, just not one of mine.  one of the idiotic admin from a couple years ago sent out an email about graduation gowns, wanting to know “masters and disciples” instead of disciplines and she was my disciple from then on. we loved to make fun of auto correct and had a ton of stupid word things we would say that were a collection of so many movies we’d watched together, so much television, video games, everything.

i’ve always been like that with people i spend a lot of time with–we develop those references–but i haven’t been close with anyone like that in a long time. i’m going to miss that more than almost anything else, i think.  other than romantically, she was just totally my partner, particularly for the last year. she saw me through my surgery this summer. it was nice knowing i always had a go-to person to take me to a stupid colonoscopy. not that tons of you wouldn’t do that for me. i get that. but you know what it is to have a partner.

she was also young and depressed and dramatic and unable to enjoy a lot of things enough, i guess.  she would replay our fun times over and over, the way she would her obsessively replayed playlists and i wonder if she didn’t suck the life out of it so desperately, just not thinking there would be more?  she wore them out?  i don’t know.  i certainly run out of eloquence in this realm.  i gave her as many tangible, physical things that i could that showed i loved her when i wasn’t there.  i made her blankets and things.  sent postcards, made her those bunny slippers.  being loved couldn’t be enough inside there.  she was just still sad and it was so hard for her to just keep going and so she stopped.

that’s really okay with me, in the abstract, because it means she’s not suffering through this anymore.  but it is awful because i had so much else i wanted to show her and share with her.  every moment i think of something else and it’s like the stabbing pain i get when i think that my dad will never walk me down the aisle when i get married…let alone that i never wanted to get married in the first place.  it’s just the gone-ness.  the grief.  the fact that it will just never happen and *I* will never have this thing, as much as that they are gone.  selfish love and grief.  it’s not pretty, but so it goes.

cleaning up

i went down to maureen’s place today to pick up stuff she wanted me to have or to bring to other people.   i wanted to try to help her friends and landlords, but i’m not sure i was very much help.  i’m typing this on my newly inherited computer, though, and i set it right up–she would have been proud of me for figuring out my own wireless password.  the wallpaper says

“annette–you will always be my miracle oak.  i love you to bits–maureen,”

in chartreuse green.  i’m sure i’m not going to find out very much more about maureen than i already know because she’s gone, but listening to all her playlists is something.  it is just wrenching to know that i can’t tell her things like, “you know that’s a leonard cohen cover, right?!” because she’s never coming back.  it just breaks my heart.