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Portrait Of An Empty Future

…

it strikes me, in her other relationships K— is used to always being the older, smarter, more self-assured and sophisticated party—and in absence of any real grasp on this “emotion” thing, her whole way of engaging with others involves memorized or workshopped playbooks that control the crowd in any situation, ensuring that everyone sees how impressive she is before she selectively allows them to engage with her and receive her depths of wisdom and experience.

problem is, with me basically none of that applies. the statistical factors all are flipped, and i have zero interest in social manipulation or following obvious cues or messing around with superficial displays. i just want to sit and have meaningful conversations and be open and enjoy in each other as people.

and i think that sits so outside of her carefully structured theater of social performance that she has never known what the fuck to do with me. like, her bullshit doesn’t work here and instead i’m casually asking all this unreasonable ad-hoc stuff of her, like to read the poetry i write her or acknowledge the random thoughts i share, or to spend actual time with me or discuss our feelings or maybe sometimes once in a green moon tell me something nice about myself—literally any aspect of me that she genuinely likes, just once.

and i think that scared her. or intimidated her. or irritated, or triggered some kind of envy or feeling like i was showing her up somehow—even more annoyingly, without my trying and in apparent total innocence toward any kind of game even happening around me.

she frequently expressed bewilderment at her inability to predict how i would behave or react to literally anything. which makes more sense to me now if we flip that around and extrapolate that she was continually trying to get ahead of me and predict my behavior so she would know what script to follow in order to get control of the situation.

i’m only just seeing these shapes now—but i think on some level K— always kept me at arm’s length because it freaked her out that i was largely immune to her games and that she had no clue how to just relate to me directly as a real person. i think i made her feel self-conscious, defensive, uncomfortable in my lack of a facade or any apparent understanding of or interest in the social cues she spent so many years gaming and mastering to her material advantage. as if my existence was a living criticism and counter-example to her life’s work, nullifying and invalidating without even having the decency to see or acknowledge what i was stepping over on way to have a fond unguarded conversation about whatever.

how dare i not even have the decency to compete against or criticize or argue and debate the merits of her careful manipulation. i didn’t even leave her an opening to make a case or get angry for judging her. i just skipped right to direct honest vulnerable human intimacy. which, i’m not sure that she even fully realized was a thing before she met me.

so for around ten months after her visit to see me and slowly realize i actually just was exactly what i represented myself to be, every time that i tried to interact with her she would become guarded and behave like i was doing something to her by engaging with her at all. she would go to weird, frankly hurtful lengths to avoid or discourage conversation. refuse to schedule any of her precious time to spend with me. get angry if i tried to talk to her unsolicited. refuse to include me in anything, and act weird and tense if i involved myself anyway. actively discourage me from paying my girlfriend any romantic or sexual attention, and pointedly i don’t think ever once initiating anything with me.

and she just constantly took shit out on me that felt like it came out of nowhere. but it kind of makes sense if she thought of me as some kind of continual low-key existential threat or dismissal, to her mind both showing her up and challenging her to relate to me in a way that she had no tools to understand, didn’t begin to know how to approach. all she knew was that despite and maybe in part because of all the fondness i showed her, i made her question herself—and she not like what i called to her attention. it’s like i made her feel inadequate and icky in ways she didn’t have words or framework to articulate to herself, and i think she just projected that all back at me, resenting me more and more as the hurt she was causing me grew more and more obvious. how dare i further implicitly criticize her, just by passively existing for her to compare herself to?

i made everything so complicated for her, by being so uncomplicated. so she spent the best part of a year doing her best to ignore me and projecting on me all her doubts and insecurities. treating me like that one girl in class who actually did her homework, bringing down everyone else’s grade in the process, but who was so sweet and clueless that being overtly mean to her just made you feel even worse about yourself.

everybody be like azurelore! see the quality of her work? see how far her attitude goes? class, make sure you study her example.

but i’m just over here, in love with her so that i’m bursting, wondering why she refuses to tell me that she likes me, wondering why she pivots and leaves a room the moment she sees me standing there, why she snaps at me for telling her about my day when she didn’t ask, wondering what i ever did to her. wondering why despite the odd sterile memorized self-contained statement, she so clearly doesn’t love me back—not love as i understand it. how clearly she has zero interest in me, and so much less than zero concern for my feelings that she responds with hostility when i express them, seemingly no matter what they may be.

… i should have left her months ago. i almost did, once—until she harassed me to tears, spent hours yelling at me, giving me a full-fledged panic attack over the phone, until i agreed to stay. i thought about leaving several more times, but i didn’t want to get on that side of her again if i could avoid it. and, well, i was so deeply in love. i didn’t really want to leave; i adored her unconditionally. she was amazing. i just wanted to not feel like that, all the time. i kept thinking maybe after this or that rough patch, everything would be fine and we would figure things out together, learn how to communicate clearly, and she wouldn’t make me cry every other time she spoke to me.

but, yeah.

i think she just genuinely didn’t know how to reciprocate my feelings for her. i think she felt weird about herself because of how counter i stood to her whole meticulously playtested self-published role-playing game called “grown-up love & dating for the gifted & talented.” and with her absence of real emotional development, she wound up taking out her discomfort on me day after day, month after month, instead of challenging her own systems of understanding that had successfully led to so many dozens of shallow relationships that gave her the results she wanted without her needing to learn how to actually connect with another human being, or acknowledge that maybe she has never once done this in her life and would have zero idea how to go about it—leaving her vulnerable for once, unable to shape every element of the situation to her favor. unable to guarantee that she would win.

“you win,” she kept telling me in that final conversation. even as there was nothing to win. there was no game. there was just one person trying to have an important conversation, and another shouting at her about how unfair it was to them for her to express her feelings or explain to them her perspective on her own life experiences. did she not think of how doing so might make them feel?

but no, apparently i won. just this once i was permitted my own emotion about my own life, but that meant the game was over. she couldn’t play with a person who so adamantly refused to be told what to think and feel, who refused to be managed, who so insisted on an open conversation where two people just listen to and validate and care for and trust in each other. what kind of a fucked-up game even is that? it’s nothing but a trap she was “guaranteed to fail,” as she put it.

so by fiat, azure wins. fine, be that way. insist on basic consideration. insist on your own validity. insist on me showing you the same vulnerability and patience you show me. insist all you want, but this is my game and i’m taking it home with me. so if you think about it, who really wins in the end? haha, got you there!

…

seriously though, fuck her.

what a waste.