I got a call from the subject of the novel last night. He's getting back together with his ex-girlfriend, who I would like to argue was never his ex at all, but rather his girlfriend the entire time within his mind, explaining his craziness regarding me for the last three years. However. He did call me and we spoke of him getting together with this woman and I have come to a couple of realizations:
1. Everyone I know is getting hooked up with someone they really want to be with.
2. I am not.
Then after that, a couple of different revelations:
1. I always say I want to "be okay alone" but that's really not true. I say that because I think that if I am "okay alone" then I will be more attractive to a member of the opposite sex. So I don't really want to be okay alone, I want to be with someone else, but I think that in order to get there I have to somehow be happy without my goal. That's virtually impossible. I will never "be okay alone" if the only reason I'm doing it is to be "not alone."
2. My entire life is a Catch 22.
3. When I am sad, I produce work that is really complex and intense and has beautiful things as its subject.
4. When I am happy, I edit, write dialogue, write narrative, do the "writing" instead of the "creating," which to me denotes that I again must have the origin and the destination in order to produce art. I had a blog about that up once but I had to take it down for fear of someone reading it, but since he's in this blog anyway, here is a clip from it:
"He performed. For me, for everyone. He told me once that he only writes songs when he’s happy. It’s so funny, because I only create when I’m sad, or when I’m ready to approach something I’ve left alone for a long time, something deep or piercing. Why is it that we visit our art at such different times? It’s the way we deal with our pain. He reminds himself how he ignores his pain because he’s unable to produce in an artistic way when he’s upset or broken. He produces when he is happy, settled, content, still. I remind myself how obsessed I am with self-inflicted pain by writing about it, working it over, kneading it, weaving it, unravelling it, knitting it again, reliving it over and over and over again until I can’t see where the original thread even started.
And the girl, his Hannah, the knife- she told him at one point that she would have to know that she was more to him than the music. But the music was never even on the same scale- how unfair of her to make him choose between everything that caused him pain and everything that was organically happy for him. We must have both: the origin and the end. And the unfairness of it all is that the choice must be made if you're with the wrong person."
And the real unfairness of it all is that I made the choice for a long time, and never reaped the benefits. All I had was the Origin, never the Destination. Now someone else is reaping the benefits of the sacrifice I made. I supported, and supported, and supported, with the hope that I would be able to enjoy what I was helping to fix. I don't want it anymore, it's just so unfair that my presence through those years is being ignored.
Ah, but at least I have the Origin AND the Destination now.
