Twenty thousand leagues (TinyLetter Archive)
Dear ones,
There is only so much that a person can do when it comes to falling in love. You can ignore it, you can fight it, or you can charge headlong into the wave that is wanting to give yourself to another person, but once you're in it, the world reorients around this feeling and its source. Which is all to say that I have fallen for someone, and my world is not the same.
I wish I could say that things were going great. After many months of passionate starts and fizzles with different men, he was the first where everything was completely amazing when we met. And not just the first time but the second time, too. Like really on each others' wavelength, steaming up the car windows, talking about building a backyard cottage together, total honesty fantastic. There were some big things we'd shared with each other in our honesty. For me? Mostly my illness, which is not nothing, and my dad's alcoholism. For him? Bipolar disorder and addiction. But we're both adults and have managed pretty well in spite of our problems.
Until he changed medications. And Trump was elected. From that point on, he started to spiral. Relapsed. Went into a major depressive episode. And that's where he's been for the last month. Someone so in his own head and own pain that he looks at me completely blank sometimes. There but missing. The excited, beautiful man I first met has shrunk, become skittish, withdrawn so much that we only talk by email or text every few days. When he comes up for air enough to send me a message, they are cogent, mollifying, and self-aware. But I know it has taken him days to get there. He has given me outs, has admitted that he can't sustain anything meaningful right now. And truthfully, I no longer feel like I'm in a relationship. I know that such a thing isn't possible for him. That the timing for us is fucking terrible. I am in love with someone who isn't there. And he is the shadow that needs to be stitched back to his other bright self. The self that's in the light and unreachable.
I am trying to give space to someone who is drowning in it.
Yours, Underwater.
p.s. Soundtrack for this message/my submersion is here, courtesy of The Blow:
https://youtu.be/VKWhO9g86fU
I wish I could say that things were going great. After many months of passionate starts and fizzles with different men, he was the first where everything was completely amazing when we met. And not just the first time but the second time, too. Like really on each others' wavelength, steaming up the car windows, talking about building a backyard cottage together, total honesty fantastic. There were some big things we'd shared with each other in our honesty. For me? Mostly my illness, which is not nothing, and my dad's alcoholism. For him? Bipolar disorder and addiction. But we're both adults and have managed pretty well in spite of our problems.
Until he changed medications. And Trump was elected. From that point on, he started to spiral. Relapsed. Went into a major depressive episode. And that's where he's been for the last month. Someone so in his own head and own pain that he looks at me completely blank sometimes. There but missing. The excited, beautiful man I first met has shrunk, become skittish, withdrawn so much that we only talk by email or text every few days. When he comes up for air enough to send me a message, they are cogent, mollifying, and self-aware. But I know it has taken him days to get there. He has given me outs, has admitted that he can't sustain anything meaningful right now. And truthfully, I no longer feel like I'm in a relationship. I know that such a thing isn't possible for him. That the timing for us is fucking terrible. I am in love with someone who isn't there. And he is the shadow that needs to be stitched back to his other bright self. The self that's in the light and unreachable.
I am trying to give space to someone who is drowning in it.
Yours, Underwater.
p.s. Soundtrack for this message/my submersion is here, courtesy of The Blow:
https://youtu.be/VKWhO9g86fU