Tunnel vision

1) Why did it hurt?

Yesterday was an "off" day. I couldn't meet, or even talk, to anyone other than P., and felt like I am alone in the world. Sometimes I want to call someone, but there is no one, I look at the contact list on my phone and it is incredibly short, but I admit that it is partially, or even wholly, my own making. It is me who isolated myself all those years, and continue to do so. It is not that P. isn't enough, he is great - he even gave me flowers the other day, the most beautiful roses I have ever seen (pic to be uploaded soon), and we can talk, laugh, debate, about everything and anything. But sometimes I miss having other people in my life. Not because something is missing between the two of us but because I need to know that there are more people out there looking out for me, and I for them.

Anyway, I was again faced with a beautiful day and the feeling that I have nowhere to go and nothing to do but turn to the net. After a short Skype chat with my brother, in which I was aware of my sister in law presence in the background, which made me guiltily uncomfortable, a feeling which I tried compensate for that by indirectly addressing her through my conversation with him, I tried to think if I want to go to the UK for a presentation in just over a month. My brother invited me to stay with them en route to my destination, to break up the long train-flight-train haul, and was at the opinion that I should go ahead and present, because it's always better to do something than spend energy on debating it within yourself (and anyway, he said, it is always better to do something that to refrain from doing it; energy spent is energy returned, in other words). I know, or rather fear, that I will be super-nervous if I decide to go and apply for the funds and the thing itself, and also be stressed, on top of my performace and travel anxieties, with the "mizing business with pleasure" aspect, in the sense that staying at my brother's for a couple days prior might tax me emotionally: what if I don't sleep well, what if I am again overwhelmed by the tensions of their wierd relationship, and my own barely disguised impatience and distrust of eher (actually of the both of them, when they are together), and what of they are inconsiderate and I end up resenting them bitterly, like I did in my last home visit (despite my inner struggle with this hostility). And what if they are accomodating and supportive and wonderful, but I am nevertheless tormented by my own demons, and have no one to blame?
And what it I don't dare to venture, and continue to stew in my own doubts and fears, how will I feel then, knowing that I wanted to do something but couldn't get over myself, is surrender even an option anymore, after all I have been through?

2) Today I cycled to the new branch of my gym chain, which is in that part of town that I was supposed to move to with Z., and join him in his long-awaited housing corporation two room apartment, in the third floor of a cement row of low-rise apartments over looking a wide canal and a few factory warehouses, on the edge of town it seemed. I didn't know how to cycle then, and having tried many times and failed, also when taught by a couple of boyfriends, I reconciled to the idea that I can always hold my parents to blame for the fact that no one had bothered to teach me to cycle as a child (and in general, I was pretty much neglected until the age of 6 or so, when my mum started taking me to special classes for gifted children, but by then it was too late, and by age 7 I was referred to a psychologist, who made me talk about my fear of clouds and draw pictures, but I am digressing wildly here). I didn't know how to cycle, but I was obssessed with moving in with Z. and proving to the world, and to myself, that I was a normal 31 year old girl woman involved in a relationship and living with a man! Z.'s nasty, grease coated place before he got the new apartment was even further off, to the opposite direction, and I used to get there after long days at work and hours working at punitively perfecting my body at the gym, in the dark, icy cold, howling November nights by two busses from the city center where I worked. Since the walls in the makeshift "house milking" scheme I was sharing for an exaggurated rent [I was not and still am not a wooning corporatie - subsudized rent corporation - member, so I was, and will be as long as I stay in the Netherlands, at the mercy of the mostly merciless private housing sector]. I was adamant though to do what it takes to get, and keep, Z., who seemed to me the most beautiful man on Earth at the time. I accepted his sexual deviances, even though I knew that he was objectifying me, but I made the separation between how he was in the bed and how he was literally a couple of feet away, on the couch watching TV or in the insanely filthy kitchenette - which I had spent hours one day scrubbing thoroughly while he was working out. I accepted that my life had take such a turn, that I had found myself - yet again, and in complete accordance with my personal narrative - stranded in a strange unwelcoming place with no friends and no one to give a flying fuck or even know what is going on with me.

3) Z. was a homophobic, and I recall one debate about gays, can't remember how it started, whether it was provoked by a movie we saw or whatever, in which he became quite insolent, and gave off a strong message that I had crossed the red line with my provocation. No hang on, I think he mentioned that once a guy had tried to pick him up at a bar, though very subtly, just smiling or chatting him up or something like that, and how horribly repulsed he was by it. And then I said that he should have take it as a compliment, and that just infuriated him, and he was sulking and I was - unbelievably, but quite in line with the self-depreciating way in which I let myself be handled by men in my early years in "the game"; I had broken out of the pattern, but the loneliness of the last years and the devestation after O. had cheated on me and that whole disaster, which I won't go into right now, had made me lose all esteem, and to a certain extent with B., and much more with Z., I let myself be repeatedly humiliated. I was just so... fucking... tired... of... being... alone.

4) So Z. got the promised proposal to better his housing, after 4 years of waiting in the beaurocratic bottleneck of the housing corporation, and although he had said that I should move in with him when he got the new place as soon as our second date, and although the idea of him moving in with me - instead of my roommate, who was going back to Italy - he didn't bring it up. I was so distraught that I spent a lengthy amount of time discussing it with R., and even with my nosy, annoying, obnoxious then-roommate at work, who pounced on my troubles like a famished boar. I ended up having a very tense phone conversation with him in which nothing was said directly, and then we met that evening in a nastly little doner kebab joint downtown, and somehow the conversation took a turn, and it became clear that we were, after all, about to move in together, after little over a month since getting to know each other. I remember how thrilled, and victorious, and yet inexplicably tense - I was terrified of him having a sudden change of heart - I was as I was waiting for him to get back, since after that dinner he took off to see the place, and I was killing time by playing pool with R. I even dropped my mobile into a pile of planks next to the table, and had given up on finding it and called Z. from R.'s mobile, telling him my mobile is gone (me and R. later managed somehow to retrieve it).

I have to go jogging before dinner, so I will leave this now...
To be continued....