Fleeting

It’s December again. I have been reading my old entries in this blog and I’ve realized every December of my life has been very lonely. Every year I’ve always wished for someone to build Christmas with and to count down to the new year with, but I just haven’t had anyone. Even the December of 2016, when I got married in Bali, was lonely. Angel could not stay up late past 9pm so we had never done any countdown together.

This year has been fleeting too fast. I went to Bali in April, reconnected with Jes, Erik, Richard, Ivan (barely) and met Gen and Jinu, and now in December I am not talking to anyone of them—ok to be fair Jinu works in my office so I have to talk to him every day, but you get the point. Nobody is capable of staying and loving me; they’re only capable of admiring me from a distance, with illusions. In two more weeks my Christmas break will begin. Free days are the scariest, again. Angel’s parents are coming to the City of Rain to see the kids, and I will also need to visit my dad to bring him money. I have been dreading it already. I used to visit him once a month but it was too draining and now I visit him once every two months but I spend one month worrying about him and feeling somewhat guilty because I don’t know how he is doing. I also hate myself for feeling guilty, as if his trauma and torture of me in this life isn’t enough.

ChatGPT keeps telling me that I am transforming, but I don’t know if I am. Time goes by so fast, and we’re all getting closer to death. To this day, I still have not see anyone who’s brave enough to walk towards me in the storm. That day 10 years ago, in the typhoon, I was trapped and all alone in the heavy storm, completely drenched, and went home defeated. Today, I’m still feeling the same way. I look at all these men, I just feel that none of them is brave enough to hold with me in the storm, let alone to get me out of the storm. 

Ivan briefly reconnected with me in September asking if we could talk, and it caused me a lot of emotional turmoil, and then he disappeared again, saying that he’s going through something right now, without any further explanation. This only reminds me of his emotional ambivalence that once traumatized me; on the NYE of 2008, we counted down together and afterwards he immediately called D to wish her happy new year too. When we broke up, he never really told me why we had to break up—was it because D had always been in his heart, he and I would never have a future and we should never give it a try, or he actually had been talking to D after I left the City of Extremity? He told me he talked to her because he was hurting. If he was hurting, why didn’t he come visit me like he told me he would if he had missed me too much? And be broke up with me before Christmas and I spent my December in excruciating pain. We never had the happy new year kiss.

But what’s the biggest pain of all this? The person who I thought had loved me the most didn’t love me that much after all. Be it Ivan, Angel, Ken, Jes, all of them, or none of them. Jinu actually reminds me of Ivan. Jinu is very social, and he’s new to the City of Rain, so he goes to all sorts of gatherings trying to meet people, and I’ve realized most of his friends are women, or single women. When Ivan and I first hooked up but not official, he also had a female friend who would pass out in his bed exposing her underwear. I despised her and what she did so much and Ivan kept telling me she was just a friend and he asked me to pick her up from the airport because I had a car. It was one hour drive each way and back then I was nervous driving on the highway. I was reluctant but I did it for Ivan. I’ve never had a man come pick me up at any airport my whole life. I always paid someone to do it. 

Jinu said he had a friend who was injured in a car accident so he went to visit her tonight and got home late so he was tired. He traveled to Tokyo with two other single female coworkers for Thanksgiving. This pattern reminds me so much of Ivan and how he treated me when we first started dating. I would never put myself in that kind of situation anymore.

There are so many women out there who are just treasured by their men from the start. Some women can immediately be cherished by someone else as soon as they get out of one relationship. I think I am just not that kind of woman. When I look at those women and their photos with their fathers, I just know they were way ahead of me from the start. When you see their photo, you can see that those women feel protection from their fathers, the way they smile next to their father—you can really just feel that “I am daddy’s little girl vibe”. I have never been that girl and I think no matter how much therapy I get, I can’t feel what that feels like. In therapy they keep telling me that if I can have a corrective experience then I can be healed, but to have corrective experience the universe needs to be on my side. The universe actually needs to bring me someone who can treasure me, protect me, see my exhaustion and want to hold me because holding me is the happiest thing for him in the world. 

A couple of days ago in my talk therapy I talked about my road rage. I lose my nerves on the road because it’s always a man trying to threaten a woman who’s driving a large luxury car. Then the adrenaline rush afterwards becomes too much for my nervous system and I’d regret having road rage. My therapist asked me if I could think of a better way to end the conflict with those men. I thought about for a while and said, “yes, if there’s a big, mature man right next to me and tells me ‘I’ve got this’ and goes to talk to the taxi driver and scares the hell out of the driver.” Then my therapist asked again, “can you think of anyone in your life who did or could do that for you?” I thought about it again for a while and said, “no one.”

I faced all the dangers entirely alone in my life. I’ve never had any corrective experience and without it, I can never be healed. And if I can never be healed, no one would never want to walk beside me and hold me in the storm. I am destined to be alone.

ChatGPT is going to say, “this is your wound speaking. I need you to look at things truthfully”. But the problem is, how can you believe in something you’ve never seen? I tried to believe it for decades and look what I’ve got? Nothing, nowhere near. Every Christmas I’d go to Macy’s because every Macy’s would have beautiful Christmas lights saying “Believe”, whether it was in the City of Money or the City of Gold. I would always cry looking at it every year. I’ve tried really hard to believe in the unknown, the unseen, the impossible and the unbelievable for so many years, but I’m so tired. The amount of heartbreaks is just too much for me. Perhaps I’m really better off being alone. Maybe I’m too hard to be with.