Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2003-09-08- 10:27 p.m.

Like Water Under Bridges

I’ve lost everything today, although perhaps I have lost nothing. It has been, I must say, a rather strange day.
I still have the new job I’m supposed to start a week from today, but I lost the position that I was hired to fill. The role I have there is one I would have been happy to get two weeks ago, before I got the better job. But now that the better position has been taken from me, the job I’m starting feels empty to me. My employment victory has become Pyrric. Pyrric is simply a fantastic word, isn’t it?
I’m welcome to stay at my current job too. In fact, they’d love to keep me. But even now that the new job has been hollowed out, it still holds far more promise for the future. And how could I stay, and be left with any pride?
I asked Rachel to come over tonight, to comfort me through all this. I told her that I didn’t want to talk about any of it, that what I really needed was just to lie about, to laugh, to get high, to make love. She told me she didn’t feel she should come. She was afraid that if she did, she would disappoint me.
I did something really stupid then. I tried to tell her the truth, to explain to her how I really felt. I tried to tell her that I am disappointed about everything. I tried to tell her how nothing, not her, not my job, not my friends, not my life is anything like I hoped or imagined it would be. My entire world is an endless disappointment to me. I tried to explain to her that this isn’t really as bad as it sounds. The silver lining, I told her, is that while nothing is as I hoped, there is still great, sublime joy, which is all the more amazing for its having been unimagined and un-hoped for.
It went about as well as I might have expected. She cut me off, asking me not to talk about it anymore, because I had hurt her feelings terribly. Which, of course, hurt my feelings terribly. How could she possibly not want to know the truth, which I had never dared to utter aloud to another person before? How could this person who claims to love me so utterly fail to understand how I feel about this life, and the task it is for me to love it?
Rachel asked me at one point why; if she was so not what I had hoped for, that I do not simply break up with her. The answer that I couldn’t find the words to tell her is because those hopes are merely daydreams, while the love that I feel for her is painfully and utterly real. And that while life is almost always a disappointment in comparison to fantasy, I would choose life in a heartbeat over dreams.
Even if I had been able to summon those words, I doubt it would have made things any better. The truth that is inside of me is, as I have always suspected, a brutal and horrific thing.
It doesn’t matter that much. My best friend will find out in two days whether he will be moving to Berlin for ten months for work. My best friend from high school has begun interviewing with firms in Arizona, and will almost certainly be gone by the new year. By the time I begin my new job, Rachel will be gone from my life for good. What little life I have carved out for myself will have slipped beyond my grasp.
I’m twenty-six years old. I’ll be twenty-seven soon. In all that time, I have never learned how to make anything better. I wonder how long it will take before I simply die from the shame.

previous |next |archives

If you want to make me
famous or just complain: Jay Elias -
jelias@diaryland.com

Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

Diaryland

join my Notify List and get email when I update
my
site:

email: