2

I keep having dreams where I am the lover instead of the one in love. They are chaotic. One night Joseph Gordon Levitt in 500 days of Summer is pursuing me the same quirky way he does Summer in the film. Another night it’s Michelle Pfeifer in _Cheri,_ crying out my name, and the next it’s Penelope Cruz whispering to me something apparently important in Spanish. I was Jonas in Broken Sky for a long while, sleeping with a slew of random people.
Ever since I can feel the Value I can’t seem to feel the neediness required to be the one in love.

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I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want to be here. It’s more like I don’t want to go back to my workplace. It’s full of crazies and I’m going to feel alone there. My coworkers can be caricatures: Mc___ is overly mothering, Ad___ is overly insecure and aggressive, Har___ is passive aggressive to himself, like he gave up on himself and his own dignity a long time ago, Lof___ is overly philosophical, like him knowing that stuff somehow sets him apart, Hin___ is such a college student, like how K___ seemed at first, thinking himself so innocent and intellectual.
People I’m afraid of becoming.

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I woke up at an odd hour to realize I’m not okay. It’s like a mystery how I got to this moment.
That’s what sucks about being strong. It’s not about not being weak, but instead dealing with weakness directly, accepting and dealing with whatever directly.
It boils down to my not feeling good enough.
That’s all it is, all it ever was. The story of it all kept me from feeling it so simply, because it made the fact that I’m not good enough seem obviously true.
Once the story was remembered and dealt with directly, it seemed to lose that power and all I’m left with is the same feeling all human beings deal with. My particular memories merely cause a snowball effect.
These last few weeks have lacked K__’s reassuring face, and his ability to turn what would’ve been a bad day of mine into a good evening. Is this what the trip will be like? The one I’ve planned for after the deployment.
Traveling solo can be the ultimate freedom. It’s terrifying, but it must be done. True freedom must be faced. The poignant bravery of the solo backpacker .. there seemed to be dignity in the implied terror of such individual freedom. Why does how I feel now seem to lack dignity?
I haven’t been working out. I haven’t been eating right. I’ve been sleeping on my off time. My showers have been irregular. I’ve been finding out how long I get away with not shaving.
I can be Tough and make out a plan, a workout in the morning, a project like researching a trip, or reading an important book, and I could do it, but I’ve learned being Tough isn’t a way to live.
I tried to be good friends with Mace__, but it will never be like it was with me and K___. When I realized this, I pulled away, started doing a lot of things on my own, without his company, including watching films -- something Mace__ and I had been doing together almost nightly.
Recently, as Mace___ and I were bullsh-tting, he said, _I don’t know, it seems to me like you’ve been trying to detach yourself lately._
I remembered how hurt I’d feel whenever K__ did that to me, how I had to muster up a straight face in order to be gracious. I felt bad about my behavior toward Mace__.
K___’s not coming back. I got an email from him, stating so. His red cross message had been extended. He’ll be de’mob-ing in a few days. His deployment’s over. Mine’s not. That’s just the way it is.
I became more gracious with Mace___, and watched a movie with him called Hangover. I read somewhere:
_All you can do is be brave and make the best of things._
Are you okay? I ask myself in each first moment of privacy. I just don’t know how to live my own life, with my own qualities. Ironic, for someone who’s always been on their own. Maybe you’re not supposed to be able to do that, I don’t know.
I looked over my jotted writings, in the margins of random pages, and began to sort it out.
Somewhere in writing is acceptance. I like being strong, I just get exhausted of the losses along the way.

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06JAN2010

It turned out to be New Year’s Eve as H__ and I took care of an incoming convoy and unloaded its equipment. I didn’t believe him when he told me, but he insisted, and we both laughed.
Afterwards, it seemed strange to just go on to bed so I went to the internet café. W___ happened to be there, and asked me if I wanted to get a few near beers and hang out in his room.
We had an accidental five hour conversation, where I gave him the account of the café’, which was really a glorified coffee bar, and E__ and Max___, and the whole lot of them, in my former life as an interesting person.
He told me cop stories. At four in the morning I walked back to my own tent, my stomach feeling uncomfortable from the hodjie near beer, and thought to myself about my behavior:
The nervousness that made talking with him so difficult and awkward is just old pain, that behavior is not who you are. It’s because he looks at me, that’s why I get so nervous. As I talk to him he looks at my chin, then my forehead, then back to my eyes. He’s always done that. When someone’s really looking at me, it makes me uncomfortable. Plus he knew me from before, he knew me back when I wasn’t okay.
Like how I would get nervous around K__ so easily now that he’s seen me freak out with distrust, now that he‘s seem me make mistakes, be unsuccessful. It’s all just old pain: the things of me that aren’t me; one day I’ll be able to feel it directly instead of just living it out.
W__ and I hung out again a couple night’s later, and again a couple night’s after that. The latter time we went to the local Arab restaurant, where another three hour conversation took place.

It can be difficult, our friendship. There’s a conflict between W___’s culture (living in the times) and my Story -- neither of which I want.
I just want to be Real. I’m a human being, and I know the world same as I know myself, maybe not in words, but in a truer way.
If I fit into the current understandings of the culture around me I lose the Real me. If I define and then become my own story, donning it like a robe, I lose the Real me. Still, I want to fit in, I want to keep my friends, the connections. It’s a strange balance.
Back in the days of the House, I was an okay guy, but I wasn’t myself. I could’ve made him work, according to the rules of the times, found little ways for people to like him, to accept him, but he wasn’t me.
I remember that old-pain abnormal-cy I exhibited as a kid, there’s a meanness behind it, a refusal to play along, a refusal to play at all. I refused to make it work, this supposed identity and supposed sense of identity forced upon me, created out of unnatural events.

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