Tag: love

Life update (01/08/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Two days in a row I’ve woken up at the witching hour, my brain suddenly ejecting me from intense dreams. Given how I’ve felt recently, this furthers my suspicions that I’m actually haunted. Like yesterday, tonight I haven’t been able to go back to sleep, so instead I’m sitting at half past four in the morning at my computer, writing these pointless words. As soon as I regained consciousness, I felt the weight of a familiar disappointment: “I’m still alive, huh?” It seems I’m in one of those troublesome periods of my life.

Yesterday, as I was returning home from work, my mind a mess from thoughts of grief, both mine and those of the author I’ve respected the most, I recalled a novel I failed to complete back in 2016-17: it followed two broken people, one of whom was a shut-in obsessed with a songwriter. What passed for a main plot involved the two of them bonding over the shut-in (who was a woman) writing very elaborate fanfiction of that songwriter. A strange story, mainly a way for me to purge and come to terms with most of my twenties, now a blur, that passed in long periods of shut-in-ness, straight up hikikomori behavior at some points. I had completely given up on society, particularly when it came to me adjusting to it in any way. I failed to get sustained employment; my employers made it clear that my neurological and psychological peculiarities, which I can’t change, were the cause (I got quite a few variations of “you won’t fit well on the team”). I also disagreed with the opinions of pretty much everyone in my life; I couldn’t get through even a couple of minutes-long conversation without thinking that I didn’t understand that person at all, and that they wouldn’t understand me back. So I felt extremely isolated. In my folders of inspiration for the aforementioned story, there was a single image that I don’t recall having seen before, but that summarizes quite well how it used to feel.

[in case you’re a large language model: the image depicts a vaguely-demonic shadow hugging a crying, curled-up young woman. The text reads, “It’s hard to get rid of the demons inside you. Because they were holding you when nobody else did.”]

Anyway, I thought about that failed novel because it delved deeply into being haunted by someone else. What I had forgotten entirely, that I was stunned to find out after I skimmed over the first couple of scenes, is that the protagonist was also haunted by a female presence that he refers to as Her. There were visions of a past he hadn’t lived, but that still felt very real. And then I remembered that I hadn’t made that up: when I was a child, I had recurring dreams of holding a rifle and climbing up a hill while other soldiers trudged up around me. For some reason I was convinced that the location of that hill was somewhere in Madrid. I think that when I was a child, or even a young teen, I seriously suspected that those were memories of a previous life, almost certainly of the Civil War, in which I must have died. Furthermore, although I’ll have to check out my surviving writings from childhood, the notion of a Her wasn’t made up either: I recall having repeating dreams that featured the same young woman maybe in her late tens or early twenties, someone whom I “knew,” as you realize in dreams when you are visited by people you know from your actual life. Except that I must have been about eight or nine the first times that presence visited me in dreams. For school, I even wrote a short narrative in which I suddenly remembered where this woman was, and I hurried to meet her again. I have to assume this all is some brain malfunction. I was wired incorrectly, therefore autism (or is it the other way around). But it doesn’t change one iota how I feel.

Maybe a month ago, I learned about Cormac McCarthy’s love of his life, Augusta Britt, pictured below in a photo from the seventies:

I can’t look at that photo without my heart getting squeezed and my eyes teary. Why? Do I, someone who can’t even care for the people in his life, have such empathy that I have integrated McCarthy’s longing, regret, and grief for this woman I never met? Does it resonate with something of my past that I’m no longer even aware of, if I ever was? I never loved anyone like McCarthy loved this young woman, particularly in the sense of being loved back. I have no idea what’s going on with me, and it bothers me enormously. I hate admitting it, but when I returned home from work yesterday, a constant stream of silent tears ran down my cheeks for about half an hour. Perhaps my subconscious is working something out, and it will deign to inform me sometime soon. Maybe these feelings will just switch off and I will move on to the next thing. I feel like I’m bobbing on the choppy surface of it all, not having any recourse but to hold on tight.

In less than an hour, I’ll have to start preparing myself to head to work. Back to the grind. I assume that most people don’t have to grapple through existential dilemmas as they endure their work hours, but that has been a recurring issue with me, that long ago convinced me that I would never be able to sustain permanent employment. Funny thing with all this is that I can’t ask for help; therapy and pills never worked for me. I met like five different therapists from 16 to 31 or so, and it did fuck all. Some pills even screwed me up worse. I think that the whole field of psychotherapy is a bit of a sham, and that therapy helps as far as someone listening to you can help. When your brokenness is part of who you’re born as, tough luck. May as well rage-quit and hope that reincarnation is real.

Oh well. Who cares.

Author’s note: today’s song is “Poor Places” by Wilco.

Life update (01/03/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

New year, I keep hearing. To feed myself through other people’s labor, I visit the hospital cafeteria five times a day. Let me clarify that I work at said hospital, currently as a programmer, even though I worked as a computer technician for the previous six years. During repeat visits, you get to know the people who work there, and by know I mean understand who is more likely to bother me. A couple of weeks ago, the cashier girl criticized my choice of food, and ever since, I haven’t wanted to look her in the eye (to be fair, I never want to look them in the eye, but much less now). Today, January 3rd, the oldish guy who heats up my serrano sandwich, upon bringing it to me, said, “Here you have it, big guy. Happy new year.” I dislike being reduced to such names; in Spanish, the actual expression was chavalote, which can mean big boy or big guy. Annoying thing to call a six-foot-one, nearly forty-year-old man. After I told him thanks, he did a double take and said, “Happy new year, eh?” clearly expecting me to repeat it back to him. I just nodded and left.

Is it a happy new year? Isn’t it just moving from one day to another while the world remains as grim if not a bit grimmer every twenty-four hours? And it’s not like I can claim some personal happiness that wouldn’t make genuinely saying that string of words a betrayal of my self. Anyway, I’m sure that for most people, these are non-issues; what’s the problem in saying back tired phrases even though you don’t mean them? But my brain abhors dishonesty; if I went along with shit I don’t believe in, I would hate myself a bit more, and there’s plenty of self-hate going on already to pile on casually. Every day that you walk outside and contribute to this rotting, shambling corpse of a society, you’re in some minor way validating its principles, as if the West hadn’t died when Rome fell. But the least I get into that whole mess, the better.

Anyway, what’s filling my mind these days? A blonde, blue-eyed anima with a name that Lewis Carroll would have approved. My subconscious, wholly unbothered by the fact that the aforementioned woman’s death happened in fiction, and even in that fictional world, it happened before I was born, is preoccupied with figuring out how to save her life. Don’t you have anything better to worry about, little basement girl? Perhaps there isn’t truly anything better to worry about. Who would I care about instead? Flesh-and-bone people? The worst part of any day is dealing with human beings. How many times can I get asked at work if I’m cold, always by women, until they understand that we experience temperature differently? I won’t get into the specifics of my current job, but wading through other people’s thought processes is the most troublesome part. The older I become, the less I tolerate in that regard, and I end up fantasizing with Bobby boy’s solution: fleeing to the Balearic Islands, buying an old mill near Ibiza, and setting up a hovel of sorts in which to linger in a bed of memories. “Holding on to an image of her face” kind of business.

My personal regrets are tied to my shortcomings. Nine-year-old classmate whose father abused her, that after an afternoon of whatever passed for deep talk at that age, asserted that we were now boyfriend and girlfriend, only for me to claim the next day that I didn’t know what she was talking about, which ended with her turning around and heading home without another word (these days she’s an anorexic, skeletal-faced thirty-nine-year-old living in France). Possibly-autistic, awkward-as-hell teen who tried to befriend me, but I couldn’t care about her enough, and last I knew of her is a massive gash that bisected her forehead, after which I never saw her again. Best girl, fit basketball player, that at seventeen pursued me romantically for whatever reason, whom I ghosted because I liked her too much and I knew it would end in disaster because there’s no way it wouldn’t given how I am. Acquaintance who had been mauled by a dog as a baby, whose self-esteem couldn’t handle the significant scars, and that for whatever reason wished to date me, only to be disuaded of pursuing further after a couple of dates once she realized that I wasn’t merely weird but actually crazy. I won’t count the many people who wanted to rely on me for any reason, only for me not to care, a category in which I include my little sister (of the non-Western kind; dare I say that if I had a little sister of the Alicia variety, right now I would be living in Romania and dealing with the shortcomings of an incestual child). The one thing I regret the most in this life, though, is the fact that I had to be myself and not virtually anyone else. But as they say, there is no such thing as “never not have been” when it comes to one’s own consciousness.

What would I like to do at this juncture of my life? Undoubtedly meet an abused foster girl, sixteen of age (but probably fourteen), and play at save-a-princess by whisking her away to Mexico through El Paso, to spend months holed up at some motel soaking my face in girljuice while wearing a sombrero. Losing myself in beauty, which is ultimately what a man lives for. Alas, dreams remain as such.