Seeing The Signs

I’m sitting up in bed typing this, something I haven’t done in many years. I stopped this to help me distinguish between work and leisure and to establish regular hours. It’s served it’s own purpose but today I give myself a little leeway. I wanted to say this in September and wake up to October on a fresh note. I’m noticing the signs.

I’ve been unwell. Seriously unwell. I woke up on Saturday with the kind of sick feeling that you feel inside your cells, painting your very mood green (because this is the colour of bile). It was so bad that for the first time in my life, my doctor paid a house call. And for the first time in a long, long time, I’ve just sagged into my pillows, into the sofa or wherever I’m breathing allowing time, sickness, medication and words to drift over me.

I know I need to get some tests done, given how often I’ve been falling sick lately. But I also know that my body usually echoes what my emotional state is. I think I’ve been unpacking a lot of old traumas since December, starting with the domestic abuse event that SXonomics conducted(very successfully).

So many things have come up since then, like they were just waiting for an outlet — including external factors. This boundary business is a lot more effort than it seems, for me. I struggled with it and now I’m not but it’s brick-by-painful-brick labour.

I’ve written about how there is suddenly an influx of people and references and conversations around me about my ex. He’s existed on the periphery of my thinking, popping up in my thoughts occasionally during PMS or residual bad moods. But the last few months have been an onslaught of being forced to think about him, about the relationship and about what it has done to me. I can only assume that this is good; I have to.

But since my birthday month, other tightly packed traumas have been unravelling. Last year I had to let go of a number of close relationships and I realise now I’ve been carrying the heavy hurt of that all this while. I’ve been struggling for closure. A friend once told me that closure would always have to be one’s own secrete recipe. And I’ve accepted that but how then, does one achieve closure? Now I know.

My closure comes when I give up on the person. Where I can no longer see any value in their being, feel no sympathy, no hurt over their actions, just a mild irritation that they are still standing in front of me or in my mind. It’s very undramatic. One moment they are saying or doing something quite trivial and the next I cannot tolerate another minute of their existence. So I erase them from my world. It’s happened before and I don’t know why I never learn that I cannot force or rush it. It always happens and it happens on its own timeline.

In my birthday month, I met someone on a dating app. It was supposed to be a casual coffee and it turned into an 8 hour conversation on politics, music, people, family, culture and more. We disagreed with a lot of friendliness and mirth. And it freaked me out when I came home. He reminded me so much of my ex. The passionate political viewpoint, the quiet sardonic approach, the ideas on consent, even the exact same damn dysfunctional family problem. It was so many things to consider. I remembered what made me fall for my ex and it terrified me that these traits could still hook me in willy-nilly. I tried to distance myself after that. But oddly, we met again. And again. And it was just as bizarrely good. It was really quite traumatic, finding myself enjoying a moment with the heavy dread of “I know how this turns out and it’s not good, not good at all.”

Mercifully Mumbaiker schedules have given me pause and time away to think. I’m in a better frame of mind now, not terrified at the thought of this person’s existence. I’ve had a chance to tell him the reasons for my reticence and he has listened with that mild-mannered acceptance that I now remember can also exist alongside Capricorn’s ruthless opportunism and cold-blooded people-trampling. I will probably keep him at arm’s length (I always thought my ex and I would have made for better friends and now we are nothing but a poisonous, monstrous thing). It’s better for my emotional health this way but I don’t have to fear him so much that I’ve to run away from him.

The person I was in love with last year, showed up on my radar. I gave him one last chance and he let me down again. I didn’t even feel bad. I think I was expecting it and this chance came from a sense of fairness, not affection. I was even able to move into a work discussion with him. And there, he faltered and faltered so badly, I knew I had reached the end. So I opened that door labelled Closure and I walked out.

Recently I met someone on her birthday. All in a flash I suddenly had a name for the unease I was feeling. It’s Libra month, a sign that has always made me uncomfortable with its smooth, diplomatic manipulativeness. One of the biggest traumas of last year came from a Libra person. And here she was again, in another body, the same pretty looks, the same fussing over perfect body proportions, the same artful juggling of classy and relatable, the same charm masquerading as warmth. I held her at arm’s length too. But she slipped into my life in that smooth (I call it sneaky) way that Venus people have.

I told her it was difficult for me to be reminded of someone who hurt me in the past. She hmmmed reflectively and said, 

“We draw in what we fear the most.”

She pointed out my pattern of violent relationships, comparing it to her pattern of liars. And when I told her I was scared of Libra’s twisting of the truth under the garb of diplomacy, she said,

“Yes, we do that. I’m confronting what my pattern of lying boyfriends says about me. Lies, that’s my lesson.”

See what I mean by sliding in? How can I not like someone who understands and articulates this so? As the evening wore on I relaxed into the conversation, the events around and other people.

I realised much later that some of her habits irritated me already. Venus people are full of excessive fussing over how they look, how other people, how things smell, what colour things are. I indulged it with my previous friend and called it love. And she discarded me like I was a slightly offensive crumpled tissue paper. I’m holding on to this thought now. I can choose to keep these traits alive in my memory. I do my best to treat people well and that includes not judging their personal idiosyncrasies. But I don’t have to be blind in my affections and then left hurt and bewildered when they don’t accord me the same depth of feeling.

I know the adage goes that you cannot love someone when you judge them. But maybe I need a little better judgement and a little less love-bombing. Walls are built between people, from such petty things. But a wall that serves as a protective boundary, does its job well. 

I am clearly drawing in situations that I need to examine or which afford me the chance to re-examine my own feelings. It’s bringing up all sorts of feelings of terror (I am such a scaredy-cat) and grief. But curiously, they aren’t lingering as long as I feared. They come up like large signs bearing the names of people who terrify me with how easily they’ve hurt me. And then the signs float by and I realise they’re just paper. I don’t even need to turn them into paper planes.

And that’s goodbye with thank you to September.