...And I break at the bend...

Well...for lack of anything else to do while I sit here awake for probably another 3 hours, and having a lot of thoughts in my head, I'm going to blog. Which I haven't done in quite some time, and which I've thought about doing a lot, especially in the last few weeks...

My dad's memorial service is tomorrow. The big one, anyway. The first one was 2 weeks ago, for his family at their funeral home on the east side of the state. The one tomorrow (well, in 10-1/2 hours) is in Lake O, sounds like a lot of people are going to be there. I do need to re-write/hone what I'm saying at it. I spoke briefly at the first one, and I am planning on a doing a variation on that for tomorrow...I also have to finish picking what I'm going to wear, though I have it for the most part figured out. I suppose I could also paint my nails for the occasion. So I'd suppose, when I said I didn't have anything else to do, I was wrong. But my thoughts have just been overwhelming me, especially tonight, so I think I just need to get them out, and I feel like this probably doesn't reach a huge audience (even if it does, whatever I guess), and it doesn't make my hand cramp like writing in a journal would...

Turtle isn't coming tomorrow. I don't know why for sure? If I were to come up with a reason on my own, I would guess that it's because the idea of being there makes him uncomfortable. Which is legitimate. And even acceptable for all senses and purposes. It doesn't make me feel better about it, though. He didn't come 2 weeks ago because he had already made plans to attend a kiteboarding camp...I was all right with it for the following reasons: He had paid a lot of money to go to this camp and had been planning on going for quite some time, and the "big" memorial was going to be 2 weeks later, so he would be at that one... :/ The night of the first memorial I was a bit more...shook up?...than I had thought I would be, and after I got back to GR I just sat outside my brothers house and cried for awhile. I think I cried for a lot of reasons, but maybe I didn't really cry for anything specific. I had asked Turtle early in the day how the camp was going, and while I was sitting contemplating in the October wind he replied that it had sucked and Day 2 had been postponed so he was back home. I asked him if he was coming to see me that night and he said he wasn't, and I didn't know how to tell him without telling him how badly I wanted to him to come just sit next to me so that I didn't feel like my entire world was this huge space filled with people that I knew that had other people that were next to them. So I didn't. I just kept crying on the steps, until eventually I was too cold to be outside much longer and the tears weren't really flowing anymore.

He was the first person that I called after Ben told me Dad died. It was 3:54 in the morning on a Saturday, and I'd been on the phone with Turtle less than an hour before but we'd hung up because Ben had gotten to my house to pick up Kona. After Ben had called me back to tell me we were going to Lake O, I tried calling Turtle at least 6 times, had text him to please call me back, and had sent him a gchat IM saying the same. He called me back when we were between the M-21 and Cascade Rd. exits on I-96 and I told him. I called him again once we were in Lake O, it was probably almost 7am, and he was just getting ready to get into bed. That entire week he would answer me every time I called him, but his responses to my texts weren't as prompt as they usually were; sometimes he wouldn't text me back at all, which was completely out-of-the-ordinary.

Last week we went up to Mackinac together. The first night we were there I passed out drunk around 12:30, and I woke up around 3:30 when he came back from the bar. I'm not sure how it came up, but at some point we were sitting on the bed, and he said "You're just like him," and it made me cry. He said it was "so sad," and "such a waste" - I guess the things people usually say, but coming from him, to me, right then and right there, it felt like it had some...deeper meaning? I woke up in the morning and felt good about him in this situation, and felt like maybe I wasn't going to lose him in all of this...that evening, around sundown, I went to the boardwalk originally to find Turtle, but I ended up sitting there, by myself except for a couple that passed by me early on, watching the sun set behind the Mackinac Bridge. I was there for probably 20 minutes, maybe 30, and I was thinking about how much I wish that my Dad had come up one of the summers I was there, because he would have loved the Island and all of its pure natural beauty...at some point I wandered away and continued with the night. Late though, after the bars had closed, we found ourselves back by the boardwalk with some vodka, sitting on the rocks. I said to Turtle at one point that I missed my Dad, and we talked about it a little bit. It was a good conversation. I said to him that I would like for him to come to this memorial that is now tomorrow. He didn't say anything, and after a few moments I said "but if you don't want to, that's okay," because in those moments that he wasn't saying anything I felt like maybe I was cornering him, and I didn't want him to be uncomfortable or worse, say that he would and then later not come...

All this week, he's gone hours before he'll text me back, yet he's called most nights to say he was home, getting ready for bed, wanted to say goodnight. One night he abruptly got off the phone with me after saying his roommate had just gotten home, and it irked me for a few minutes, before I just 'let it go' because there's no reason to harbor resentment for little things, but I was annoyed that he'd just spent all day - had been spending all his time the last 2 months - with these guys, and he acted like it would ruin him if they knew he was on the phone with me or something. He called me today at noon and asked if he'd talked to me the night before, which he had...

:: He'd sleep-dialed me, which is cute. We'd talked for a few minutes. He said he'd talked to one of his old bosses that morning, and though he wasn't going back to work for him, the guy had "told the girls (at the bar they hung out at) he was coming back." I didn't feel anger, jealousy, hurt...anything, really. I just thought...how unsavory of him to again bring up some group of 'girls' somewhere in the world that apparently desired his presence. I've spent the last 16 months hearing about those fun girls, or that ex-girlfriend, or this beautiful friend of his...and sometimes I do feel jealousy, or am hurt, or have some other undesirably emotion about it. But not usually. It wears thin on my psyche sometimes though. Because it seems like he hides that I exist from anyone else in his life, he certainly does not refer to me as his girlfriend, and he's only ever told me that my glasses are cute. And normally I just brush it off, sometimes it takes a self-reminder that I'm the one he sleeps next to, but especially these last 3 weeks I have just felt so empty that I just didn't want to hear that first thing when I woke up...But that is neither here nor there at the moment...::

At 3:45, I text him to say that I'd fallen back asleep. Did it warrant a response? No. Normally would he have said something anyway? Yes. I got nothing back. At 5, I asked him what he was doing. Still nothing. At 7:30 I asked him if he was coming to the memorial. At 9pm he finally responded with "Just left Joshes. No." I waited for awhile, my brain was swimming in nothing, sometimes I felt like I was going to cry, sometimes I wanted to tell him it was fine but please come see me at night or Sunday, a couple of times I was angry...I was hoping that he would give me some explanation, or call me when he got home like he had been doing...Finally at 11:30 I just said "Okay :/" and never heard anything after that. And here I am at 5:06 still pouring over it.

I want him there. And I think that, because I want him there, he should be there...I give him a lot of leeway in the selfish department, and I guess I feel like this is one time when he needs to not be selfish and he needs to be there for me if I want him to be. To say I need him there isn't completely truthful, I will get through it without him, and I will have a lot of people there that care about me a great deal and will be supportive of myself and my family. But he is supposed to be someone who cares about me a great deal, and he and I are supposed to...be something?...whatever that may be. Emotionally, for me, him not being there will devastate me, already is devastating me, and I don't want to tell him that because it will make him feel guilty, and if I make him feel guilty he will be mad at me for making him feel like that...but I want him there. :/

Things lately have just been breaking my brain. I keep trying so hard to be logical, and think things through, and just go one thought at a time. But I find myself just wanting to sleep, not wanting to see so much as a full window of sunshine much less a person. One day this week I slept literally all day, only getting out of my bed 3 times to get food, get water, and go to the bathroom...I just can't make myself do anything else. I think it's probably depression of some kind, but it's not, like, suicidal-depression. I'm not asking myself "what do I have to live for" or anything...I ask myself, "what do I have to do today?" and the answer is "nothing." Who do I want to see? Nobody. You would think that, given the untimely death of my Dad, I wouldn't keep brushing people off with the thought of "I'll see them the next time around" but it's more like...the effort of making myself presentable? I don't have a job, so I don't have money. I can't currently pay my bills or eat, much less go hang out with people doing something. And sometimes I'm just...sad. Not really self-pitying? Self-loathing would be more accurate, though still not completely correct.

I'm trying not to feel anything. Because I know how I do feel, right now, all the time, where my brain and all the trying-not-to in the world can't touch it. It's just emptiness. Maybe that's why my brain can't logic it away, because there's nothing to logic. I feel empty, and isolated in this endless room of people and things, yet desolate, helpless, and confused, overwhelmed. Sometimes when I feel something, I don't even try to process the feeling because I know that in just a few minutes I won't feel that thing anymore. And I don't. But just because I stop feeling it doesn't mean that I've forgotten what it felt like, so it still plays a role in what I do and say later on..

I hate myself for it because I feel like I have had, and continue to have, so many opportunities to get closer to where I want to be. And I have so many people that want to help me get there, and I just keep holding myself back so far that other people can't get in. And sometimes I'll resent them for not trying harder, but why would they? They offer to help, and I don't say yes. Or maybe I do say yes, and then I never bring it up again. What are they supposed to do, come drag me out of my bed and dial the number for me? I've made this life that I have for myself, and it's here, and it's only going to improve for me if I make it that way...and sometimes I am ready to do that. I can't even say that something happens to hinder me. I just...don't do anything. Maybe I go to bed feeling ready to make tomorrow the day but when I wake up, it's not anymore? On the way home from Mackinac I was so ready to chip away at my to-do list the minute I got home. By the time I got there, I couldn't even see what day in the next week I would want to do some of those things. But even while I had been ready to go I thought, "I feel like this now, but I wouldn't be surprised if my mood had changed before I am out of this car" and sure enough...and I don't know if those thoughts are what are doing it, like they're self-defeating? I know that some people would say so. But those are my thoughts! I can't NOT think them! When I think them, do I let myself believe them, and that's where the problem lies?

And I don't know how I'm supposed to feel right now? The morning Dad died, Aunt Nicki said that I just have to let myself feel whatever it is that I'm feeling...but what happens when I don't feel anything? Or feel everything? Or can't identify what it is that I feel? I still can't most of the time. Regarding his death anyway. Just last night/this morning, I had the first dream with him in it since he died.. the dream was about being at my Mom's house, and it was supposed to be after he died because people were coming and going, a bunch of us were hanging out there, it was like a holiday or something. And in the dream, I looked over into the living room and he was sitting in a chair watching the TV just like he would, and Turtle's netbook was sitting beside him on the table, and I was confused in the dream because I knew that it was Dad's netbook, but I also knew that it reminded me of someone else's, and it wasn't until several minutes after I woke up that I realized how it sorted out. I've thought for over a year that Turtle reminds me a lot of Dad...

Let's see how today pans out...