After putting a few miles on a bike with a freewheel, it usually takes me a block or two for the muscle memory to revert to sustained pedaling when I get on one of my fixed bikes. I was looking forward to the IRO, my daily bike, after the weight of the Volpe and everything on it. I tend to over pack. The funny surprise was standing up and my body wanting to throw the bike over sideways from being used to managing the weight on the Volpe whiplashing back and forth this weekend. For a while, I couldn’t even notice there was a bike under me. I want to lay down and hug it right now.

I’m ready to get to work, but I woke up with so many thoughts that I had to take notes to remember them all.

Father saying “I know you did.” is still resonating in me. My mind pictures a galaxy of bits of feeling suddenly being sucked together into a solid mass. I’m still tempted to bold “know” but then feel it doesn’t capture it. I want to bold more words, and notice I’m considering setting the entire thing to bold and realize that the words don’t convey how it made me feel. Which is why the words are resonating in me, it’s literally the feelings that they invoke that are resonating. For my father, who took little interest in my dating life, to pick up on the importance of this person to me, is simply striking. It’s not that it was really a secret, or difficult to notice. I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut about how I felt. But it’s particularly meaningful to me coming from my father.

Waking up early despite being up until two or so in the morning while camping made me open my blinds before going to bed last night. I didn’t get the seven or eight hours of sleep I usually aim for, but I woke up with a lot on my mind and in my heart and after a couple minutes knew it was an exercise in futility to try to go back to sleep for a little longer. I’m still waking up with a pretty upset stomach and it takes a little time (and maybe the couple Tums I take in reaction now) for it to settle down. Yesterday was more difficult, because of the mishmash of food and booze that I had put in my system throughout the course of the day. The feeling of wanting to vomit is getting too common. I consider that I should cut back on soda, coffee, alcohol, and get some solid food into me one meal at a time, but many of my actions right now are a crutch to get me through this, and I’m reluctant to get up on the table and start chastising myself for these things because I understand why I’m leaning on them.

I’ve been thinking off and on about the appropriate way to deal with how I feel. I made some overly emotion fueled attempts to get answers. This was a bad choice. I’ve always thought that trying to communicate when angry was a bad idea, because you’ll say things that aren’t exactly what you mean or how you feel. I see now that trying to communicate when emotional at all is risky. This shift also brings into focus that you can’t simply walk away when you’re too upset to deal with a problem at the moment. I leaned in that direction in years past, because I was overly focus on allowing my anger to subside before trying again. With so many emotions at play in the circumstance though, one can’t really wait that long. Dad, after disclaiming that he wasn’t trying to place any blame, offered that she had over committed herself, and that maybe she likes living that way. There was no presumption in his voice, and therefore the disclaimer wasn’t necessary, but it renewed thoughts about how I ended up here. My desire to understand is still usually undermined by the acknowledgement that none of this is understandable alone, and I am severed.

I’m not sure it’s worth arguing, or outlining even, if this is really for the best. It’s common and easy to jump to the conclusion that distance is best because it reduces the amount of reminders that trigger feelings. This is clearly negated by the regular reminders that my heart derives from connecting the smallest event in a day to a emotion filled memory. With her priorities being what they are, it’s likely best to minimize this at whatever cost.

I’m still troubled by that. Even with the above in mind, I’m tempted to explain why this happened this way. I want to be able to say something like “the feelings were too much for her and she ran away from me”, and have all of this be that simple. It isn’t, it won’t. This kind of rationalizing feels common in people to me, but I still believe firmly that what was between us was special. Because of that, there’s a touch of magic in it that I had no desire to explain at the time and in deconstructing the tragedy I have to acknowledge and let lay.

I’ve been unwilling in the past to let go of commitments. This was incapacitating a couple of times, and through process, I’ve learned to deal with it better. How we react to expectations, or assumed expectations is likely telling in some way. I think we have a tendency to believe what we want, because we need to order the world in such a way that makes some sense to us. There is of course, no “right way” for everyone to live, to feel, and to deal with the combination of the two.  There are the ways that we have convinced ourselves that we must act to cope, and it’s likely this is really a staged event for our own benefit. So be it. “I have to do this, even thought I don’t want to…” should be a warning sign to ourselves to stop, breathe, and evaluate importance at least.

I feel a little silly reading about love on wikipedia, but there are things written there that I feel parallel my feelings that are expressed in a way that’s less tainted by my emotions. “Because of the complex and abstract nature of love, discourse on love is commonly reduced to a thought-terminating cliché…” I had to click on the link, and I had to laugh due to the swell of completely getting this and not realizing it had been said so clearly before somewhere that was so accessible.

I have to drop this portion,

A thought-terminating cliché is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissention or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.

The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton said, “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

My thoughts about my parents lack of anything to say other than “Yeah, sorry” when I know that they’re deep and alive people (or were) have been intertwined with a bit of confusion as a result. This is a missing piece of a puzzle that’s sitting half completed inside of me.

Nearly twenty-seven years of being told I think too much just came to a head in that paragraph and brought me to tears. With this shift, my feelings have been reordered. I feel, exonerated, for feeling so much love and the world making me feel broken because of it. I’m going to end on that, despite having a couple more notes. (There’s been a minor attempt at organizing these thoughts to be fluid. My mind tends to wander as I’ve been writing, so they aren’t necessarily in the order they were written in).

I can’t help it,

So I would choose to be with you
That’s if the choice were mine to make
But you can make decisions too
And you can have this heart to break

I’ve thought a little be more about the hope inside me that she’ll miss me and decide life is too short to live each day without your heart. Or, I don’t know how to say that right and unbiased. Whiskey and Co. has some lyrics about staying up with a bottle waiting for a call, and while I’m not laying in bed drinking (I’ve drew some pretty hard lines years ago in regards to drinking due to the pain of growing up with my father’s drinking) these words still touch me in a place of relating.

Upon coming to terms with the reality that these feelings are not going anywhere, I found a little nest in there for this hope and stopped chastising myself for it so much because I see it comes from having these good feelings about her.

I’ve had a few people close to me in life that had pretty strong feelings, or, perhaps.. ideas about music. I’ve generally identified these people by how high their eyebow raises when they find out what I listen to. It’s as if they expected from who I was, that I’d have better taste. I’ve been turning to lyrics a lot lately for comfort, to feel connected, and a sliver of confirmation that I’m not alone or crazy in the way I feel. Not that I worry how I feel is wrong, but sometimes I feel like I’m alone in feeling it. I could post a good dozen paragraphs (meh) right now that I identify with. I won’t though. I did that once already in an email. I’ll just listen now. Even if the lyrics are a production and not a single person’s feelings that I can identify with… they are surely the sum of a group’s real feelings. Most importantly though, is that the words are a catalyst striking parts of me in the right way. They fit how I feel, and there’s beauty in that.