hollow man

i don't remember much from "the wizard of oz" but i think l. frank baum chose correctly when he made the heartless one a tin man. not in that it's a man (christ, i'm not that sexist), but how he's made of tin. it's weird how when you're very deeply hurt you can actually feel your heart. it's a physical thing. your chest feels hollow. and... everything is more flat. the moment of the initial blow, you feel / hear / think nothing else but of how differently your heart feels now. and worse yet, your heart aches for the rest of the "mourning" period (heart ache, there's another one that was hit on the head).

maybe i'm weird, but normally after something bad happens to me i just feel sad (this is specifically about relationships). i don't feel angry. just sad. and hollow. and different. afterward i kind of wait to see how i'm going to feel next. i think that after your first reaction, most of everything else is voluntary. you can choose to become angry, or sad, or forgiving.

a few nights ago something happened. that initial moment was a killer. it was... infinite sorrow. and after... i was hollow. normally after this sort of thing i like to get away and process. unfortunately i couldn't get away in that situation. and the next day, i still felt hollow, but i was totally functioning, you know? then something else semi-related happened and i just... and i didn't really react to it. i was still just sort of waiting.

today i was asked to talk about it. and i didn't want to. i felt like i hadn't yet put enough distance between me and the event. i hadn't talked to a friend about it yet. i hadn't worked through how i was feeling. or even how i wanted to feel. how i was going to choose to act about it. of course, i didn't get to not talk about it. and i fucking erupted. i was really really goddamn angry.

i'm not actually angry tho. i think. i'm not sure. he didn't say this, but i think he thinks that once i make my mind up about something, i stick to it and it doesn't matter what he says he was doing / saying / meant. and so he wants to explain things away, right away. and maybe i do make up my mind unfairly and without his input. but i try to take a lot of time to think about / wait for how i really feel about the situation. i run it thru in my mind. why it happened. why he did it. what it really means to him, to me, for us. i like to take my time. and when i'm denied that time to process i don't have anything else but sheer primal feelings.

and honestly. i sometimes feel like it doesn't matter why. you did it, that's all. or you lied, and that's it. it's not why you lied, or why you felt like you should, or what truth your lie was covering up. all i heard was your lie, and so that's all that matters. ...this of course doesn't work in most situations. people are too complicated, you know? i think rarely is something done out of only one motive. but sometimes you're just so damn tired of figuring things out that you decide to stay with the initial moment. that moment when you know you saw something true.