Hello friends. Lately I’ve been thinking about my condition which requires a comfortable distance even to the detriment of those who may care.
For example, recently a college friend reached out through text – and I understand not everyone likes long phone calls, or phone calls at all. Sometimes I muster the energy to reply in a most melodramatic description – but sometimes it takes a lot of energy to come up with any response at all. Maybe when you’re used to masking all the time and you know all the thoughtful responses you used to wish for, you’ll follow through even if takes some energy. Though sometimes such pressures make it easier to put the phone in the drawer for awhile.
Shouldn’t it make you happy to make others happy? Maybe, but if they only appear as strings of numbers or arbitrary usernames everything turns a dimmer grey. It is hard to hear their call.
Thoughtfulness and warmth aren’t necessarily the same thing if you give it enough time. You can be thoughtful but comfortably distant. You can be warm and unabashedly unthoughtful – the same as a mother dumping ice-water for your first days of sleeping-in highschool. The intentions are there, so you suppose, even if intentions often masquerade as imposing one’s will on another.
Maybe there’s a lack of any warmth at all for a good bunch of people – maybe even myself – and so the two are easily mistaken. A thoughtful response, however faint its glow, floods in against the tundra of a usual day. A beacon in darker currents, even if it is the siren call. Even if it leads you into a bedrocks of yore.
Because these lines are so easily blurred, so it makes more sense to rarely if ever engage. In a barren oasis so it’s natural to turn off all the lights unless you want to be another siren. To break boats and saddle a melancholy on attached captains. This is why ultimately one may putter out; this is why one may ultimately cave in all the walls.