I Might Regret This.

"I'd gotten to a certain point in my adult life where I felt that maybe I wasn't cut out for it. For this thing, this phenomenon that seemed to happen to everyone else. This monster that overtook my friends, my co-workers, random people on the subway, and swallowed them whole. I started to think my heart might be made of solid rock, impenetrable."

"There was this underlying sense of loss within my body, for an experience I knew was essential to being alive. I was sad, but I shoved it away, pushed it under the day jobs, the random hookups, the comedy. Something was absent."

"... there's a difference between intellectually understanding love from a distance, and being inside it. I couldn't pinpoint exactly what was wrong with me, what was off, why I wasn't able to connect on that level with another person. This connection seemed to come with great ease to everyone else. I felt disabled and ashamed. I thought if my skin was pulled back I'd be revealed to be the robot I was, unable to grasp the human beings around me."

"I didn't and don't like wasting time with someone I know isn't for me, so nothing ever lasted very long. I'd end things swiftly, not engage fully. I've really liked a lot of people, even loved some, but I wasn't in love, hadn't found someone I really craved being with, anyone that I saw as the other half of my team. I never felt a sense of togetherness, never than yearning to dive deeper. This was just how it was going to be, and I was starting to be okay with it. 
A few years ago, one of my best friends said to me, nonchalantly, 'I can't imagine you with anyone. You're so set in your ways.' She didn't mean it to be harsh, but it was. I took her words about me in like fugitive. Like a fugitive whose story you believe, but maybe no one else does yet, so you take them into your home, shove them into the closet with the water heater while the police search your block. Not like a killer! Like a wrongfully accused fugitive that wasn't dangerous or anything - you know what I mean. Anyway, I fed this thought, talked to it as I went to bed, lived with it for years. If one of my best friends, one of the people closest to me, honestly feel that she could never see me with anyone, maybe it was true? My friend was right, I couldn't imagine me with anyone either. I was set in my ways, I didn't know how else to be. I stopped hiding the secret (innocent) fugitive of an idea and embraced it. I brought it up out of the basement and started making coffee with it in the morning, going on walks with it in the afternoon. Maybe things would be fine like this?"


HEARTBREAK CITY - Abbi Jacobson (excerpts)