So the day after I felt so good I went into a deep decline. Wednesday was terrible. After my workout I started crying and cried off and on for about an hour and I had a repeat of that later in the day, crying for a few hours.
About what?
Missing my best friend. Missing having anyone willing to check in on me regularly. Very narcissistic pains. Feeling alone in the world. Believing that I'm going to die alone and unwept in a city I despise.
I'd started off the morning thinking I would write about one of the great friendships I'd seen, admired, and envied. A friendship I thought I'd be able to copy someday but never have. The friendship of Bruce Loebs and Bob Swanson at ISU. They had coffee together at Elmers most mornings through at least 30 years.
Whatever it is inside a person that makes that kind of friendship possible, I've never had it, though I've hungered for it.
Because I was thinking about him I looked up Bruce and found out that he died in 2022 and that his son Blake, a person I remember as a beautiful young man but hadn't seen since the early 80s, had preceded him in death. Bruce was a great boss and helped me get out of Pocatello. When I was first in the theatre department there, I was part of a group that teased Bruce by being noisy outside his office and making him run out and shush-yell at us. Then in my masters program, when I turned from Theatre (with its awful teachers) to speech, he became my thesis director and boss of my first teaching gig. When I became a teacher, I turned into the person who ran out of my office to shush people.
And that's the kind of humorous insight I can have this morning. On Wednesday the mental pain was so severe that I could do little else but cry and walk the dogs. The mental pain was physical in that I couldn't stop crying -- the sobs came from my gut and wouldn't quit. But I didn't call anyone and I wasn't suicidal nor did I think about cutting myself. And even in those times when I have been self harming, I haven't really wanted to die or hurt -- I've just wanted the interior pain to stop.
I also decided to unfriend the folks on Facebook who didn't have time for me and not think of them as my friends anymore. Both of them gave me nice presents in the past that I'm now going to take to the Humane Society because they just mean sorrow to me now. One of the presents actually frees up wall space so I need to buy another picture of a Scottish loch.
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