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#5

I’m gonna block him.

Yea.

I have to.

I don’t have to, but I’m going to let the immature side of me win. I communicated that I’m sad he didn’t call me yesterday. No response. So I block, correct?

Correct!

Thank you, echo-chamber that has me and only me in it. Ever the reliable friend.

EDIT:

He had a really super good and legitimate reason not to text me. I take everything back. In fact, I might love him! K, goodnight 🤍

Whenever we spend time apart, I nitpick. Every conceivable thing wrong with him is put forward by my brain, eventually leading me to the conclusion that I don’t actually like him.

‘The spirals are warranted,’ I tell myself. I think of the TikTok girlies telling us about the red flags they ignored. I think of my own past relationships and how the writing was always on the wall… written in blood and in all caps. I just chose to ignore it.

I’m this 🤏🏿 fucking close to ghosting this mother fucker.

Sometimes, when I’m trapped by indecipherable emotions, I think about my dad. He’s a deeply generous man, both with his time and his resources. He likes constructive fun: a puzzle or maybe a Lego set. He plays the guitar and reads the Bible. And, on the occasions that he gets upset, he gets quiet. Really quiet. The whole room becomes chilly. I hate when he gets like that, but I get it.

When my father was a boy, he escaped his home country with his mother and five younger siblings. My grandfather had been murdered by the powers that were, and the country was rocked by civil war. And as my grandmother pressed forward, my father learnt to emulate her.

‘Forward!’

And forward he did go. On and up. ‘God heals,’ he had said to me when I asked how he deals with his past trauma. Translation: ‘forward!’ And I learnt to emulate him.

Zee requires a lot emotionally

It’s no fault of hers: parents don’t always provide all that they should. She operates from a place of deficit, and the deficit leaves her ravenous for any kind of connection.

Physical touch isn’t enough; she wants to live in my skin. And it’s not just quality time, she needs to have her eyes on me 24/7. Gifts are always a huge and elaborate event, never intimate and thoughtful. She’s constantly reaching out, utterly starved of affection.

What I require, I suppress.

Reaching inside, what little I manage to access is foreign to me, nameless.

Not nameless! Rather, it’s illegible to me. Indecipherable.

Zee accesses her shit so easily. It’s always bubbling right at the surface. I admire that. I am also disgusted and perpetually overwhelmed by it. I run, she chases. Break up, make up. Sex. Lots of sex. And both our stomachs churn what feels like hot stones.