In Twilight Regalia

I’m really sad lately.  Desolately sad.  It’s not like it was before where there was so much stress and I knew a lot of it was my lack of success and my necessarily empty job.  this is different.  Now I just feel so pointless.  Bereft.  I don’t really actually try to think about it, but a hundred times a day I wonder,

Why is this me? Why am I me?  Why did I end up like this? 

Why do I have no one who actually really wants me, loves me, wishes for only me?  Why is there no one who sees this?  Sees, really sees me? 

How did I never have a child?  I only wanted the best for my child’s situation, but the situations got worse and worse and then there was nothing, and now all I have is a strange old form where I used to be, and too old a body to have anyone come from me.  And even if there were someone else’s child, it would not be for me, it would not be from me nor for me, because I would always know it was going to wonder who made it.  I would love it, but it wouldn’t necessarily love me back, even if it were from me, anyway.  But I miss it.  I miss the little things I would have had.  Small shoes, little wrists on a swing, a happy inexplicable feeling.  A feeling that no matter what, I would have a need, a point, a conscience, a consciousness, that there would be no choosing whether to go on or not.  Not like now. 

I can’t tell anyone this; they don’t have anything they could say that would help and it would just upset them.   Especially the ones with children.  But the more I test the people I love in small ways, the more I realize I am peripheral to them now.  I really don’t need them because they really don’t much need me. And yet I need someone, something, all the time, deeply, and it’s never going to be met.  I can’t fill up the hole, it’s just too big, and nothing they will say will make it disappear.  It just keeps bothering and paining me all the time, and I just want out of this whole framework that makes me so constantly troubled with it, so aching all the time, so longing for that kind of thing I could just stop and be calm in.  That calm is just gone.  I knew it for a little while, but it wasn’t true.  It just left. When I try to mention anything of it, it’s just too big for them to discuss with me, I’m just too much weight, too difficult.  I just want a quiet safe place where they will all let me be the real person I was meant to be, and I am wonderful inside and not hurting constantly, and that place is not here, not here anywhere. The place where I am seen. I feel certain I am someone else, not this.  Not here. Not like this.

I know, I know, other people around me have life threatening illnesses, or have custody battles, or have new life changing chaos invading at every turn (infants being only some of that).  Jobs lost, great fortunes emaciated into hollow assurances, yada yada. Roofs falling through, yes I know.  But today I want to whine about something no one else thinks important enough to whine about.  I’m fully cognizant that this is going to be a self-indulgent passage.  I think in this case I deserve to be indulged.

That topic is: that nobody is ever really making an effort to physically see me anymore.

I have become an underage shut-in practically, and that is in part due to two problems as I see it.  Ok three.  Well maybe four.  Ok there are just a bunch.

1) No one I met while living here (that I want to come visit me) lives here anymore.  Anyone I met in the last four years who I actually liked has vanished without a trace or made themselves so successful as to be completely unavailable.  While San Francisco is a town of transients who never leave, this town is a city of movers and shakers who vanish every three months, it seems.  And oh yeah, the successful types are now all scrambling to hold on to what’s LEFT of that, so they’re even more busy this year, for sure.

2) None of the people who come to L.A. ever seem to arrive with the sole agenda of visiting me.  It’s always Disneyland, Universal Studios, a job offer, a gig, a gem show, the morgue, who knows, all I know is it’s me that ends up second.   Can I give them another call on Sunday and they’ll see if we can at least hit a Starbucks?  Ya. Whatever.

3) All of my true friends who are sincerely happy to see me are completely broke, and have always been broke because they are generally artists, screenwriters, musicians, intellectual perpetual students, entrepreneurs, or want to change the world and donate almost all of their time pro bono.  They are the diamonds in life, the substance of my life itself, but somehow none of them ever manage to have that guy with the giant cardboard check arriving at their door every week so they can get on a plane and see me.  I, with my hands soiled from being a minion of the Evil Kingdom, must appear on their doorsteps to become purified.

4) The rest of the worthy and devoted friends have all decided to simultaneously shower the surface of the earth with a rain of newly popped-out progeny.  They are much too incoherent from 3:00 feedings to give me a conversation that makes much sense.  They generally start any phone call with OMG!! HOW ARE YOU, (bouncing), and then discuss the joys of their new infant for 10 minutes (which is fine by me, I’m all for being an informed Auntie), and then OPpps!!, gotta go, they’re:
( [checkbox] screaming)
( [checkbox] pooping)
( [checkbox] needing a burp)
( [checkbox] going to fall off the couch and split their head open)
( [checkbox] getting into the drawers), etc.

When you hang up mid-breath, you realize nothing ever got said.  At all. And you go back to wondering who else you can wake up from a comatose post-feeding nap.

5) Then there are the Facebook Myspace Friendster Yahoo connections who insist on Twittering you every two minutes with the details of their projects or meals, but have no inclination to every actually hold a conversation with you in the first place.  They probably have befriended you for the sake of
a) shamelessly promoting their business endeavors
b) showing you their rugrat pictures
c) showing you how many exotic places they visited instead of your dump of a town
d) giving you glib comments about their great life so as to appear more glamourous
e) figuring if they knew your high school friend, you must be someone they’ve momentarily forgotten; what the hell;
f) sending you lots of cartoon icons instead of actually verbalizing; or
g) actually remembering your name from high school, and after two sentences, putting you on their forward lists for e-mails that promote a, b, or c and somehow will inexplicably invite you to increase your penis size later.

I guess I have a couple of things I could do to regain my connections.  I could:

1) Win the lottery;
2) Make a scene on Oprah or Dr. Phil (oh but then I’d have lots of Unwanted friends);
3) Start hiring myself to clean my friends’ houses instead of my current job;
4) Become a acclaimed supernanny; or
5) Write something very long, informative, warm and heartfelt, and hire a helicopter to drop it over the Marianas trench, and see if something intelligent responds.

I think number 5 is my best shot.