two birthdays coming up over the next seven days… the first, on the 8th, of someone who is slowly drifting from friendship to disdain… a pensive thing, but seemingly unchangeable without an act i am unwilling to perform. the second, on the 11th, of someone who is slowly drifting from possibility to impossibility… which is almost as pensive, but for the fact that they are so precious a presence in my life that all but outright abandonment will be endured of them.
my own birthday arrives in august. needless to say, i have absolutely no intention of telling anyone when it is, or in any manner celebrating it. too much melancholy to do more than sigh for it.
the weekend was quiet. as many are of late. the habitual presence at the local billiard room has become something of a passing fad, my own interest waning in the face of being something of a ‘fifth wheel’… after listening to the oh… 20th or so conversation of some bit of fun no one thought i’d be interested in (or to which ‘asking if i might be interested’ was such a foreign thought as to be non-existant), deciding perhaps the inclusions to date were little more than politeness… and so it would seem… in the face of a phone that does not ring, and the manner in which it all sweeps merrily on by me.
i think i finally, inadvertantly, manage to put my finger on the sore spot.
there is no one in this world that actually has need of me. i could get hit by a truck tomorrow and beyond the grief of the senselessness of it, life would pretty much go on as ‘normal’ for everyone. even my daughter.
outside the years of raising my daughter, it has ever been this way. and i had not realised how painful it was until this moment.
there is not a thing i give to this world that could not be given by another. perhaps better.
i spent yesterday asking myself, ‘if you could do or be anything you wanted, what would you do, and what would it be?’ once upon a time, it mattered to me. it was a drive. but in this moment, i realise that drive was just Maslow. and in the absence of the snapping jowls of the wolves at the door (they, of late, skulk out of view, just beyond the treeline), i find myself strangely bereft of a single answer to that question.
i cannot decide if it is defiance or despair. maybe it is both.
just once, i wish someone, somewhere… meh. nevermind. not important, is it? (wry grin)
edit @ 8:36am — random quiz thingie returns the attached as its result. seemed rather par for the course. (is there really such thing as ‘random’? i think not.)