this town is like death

It's like there's a little black cloud hanging over me the last couple weeks. I came home on Friday night and had some spiritual catharsis moments that were probably good for my soul but also exhausting, and midnight dinner with a friend and by that time I was so tired I ended up sleeping on the couch, curled up under a bedsheet and an afghan. I was lousy company, drinking tea, frustrated with living in a town where everyone worships sports and booze, wanting to go somewhere where this isn't the dominant culture and realizing that the only places like that are places like Al-Shabaab-controlled neighborhoods in Mogadishu.

I'm sorry I'm no fun. You should know by now that I can't be fun all the time. You think I'd want to play depressing music if I wasn't depressed and needed a way to release it? I wish I could escape the way everyone does. Maybe it'd be easier for awhile. But since I don't I take it head on all the time and it makes me tired.

I don't self-medicate the way everyone else seems to. I don't drink when I'm depressed, I've never done a drug stronger than caffeine which if anything heightens the sense of everything being not. I eschew parties of all kinds this weekend because they bum me out. No birthday celebration, no Super Bowl. Your friends already think I'm lame for not smoking weed or getting wasted. I think they're lame because that's all they do. It wouldn't bother me that much if it wasn't to such excess and if I wasn't treated like a narc for not partaking. That means more for you right? Who cares.

I go hiking in the woods to clear my head. I go to sleep early. I have late night phone conversations with friends who've lost more people than I have in more tragic ways and don't even know what to say.

 

I'm at the coffeeshop last night with one of the girls and we're giggling at the absurd conversations of art school kids in love, and she asks me if I'm seeing anyone and I say no, spilling that usual frustrated litany of brain drain and general incompatibility. I come home and realize that something in my arm is acting up, maybe it's the massage I gave someone where I skinned my elbows on a t-shirt, maybe it's the climbing up the side of a half-frozen riverbank, it hurts like hell and I feel weak and vulnerable and think about a future of getting old and being alone and how that feels like more of a reality.

I told someone once that I've never had my heart broken by someone, but I'm realizing that I'm wrong. Everything is breaking my heart. I could blame Cleveland but I think this could be anywhere.