I don’t think my lack of feeling anything means I’m depressed. I don’t feel hopeless. But I don’t feel “hopeful” either because hope, as I understand it, doesn’t feel grounded. “Hope-free” might be an accurate way to describe it. These last five or so years I’ve dedicated myself to honesty: living honestly and without illusions. Hope is an illusion that things will get better, will get to be some way other than what they are right now. For me that seems like the opposite of how I’ve been living, which is to be aware of how things are, and to proceed without pretending they are any other way.
Could we say there is hope in planting seeds? That when I plant them I hope they will sprout in the springtime; I hope they will have abundant flowers; I hope it will bring more birds and bees and butterflies this year? But it’s in a seed’s nature to sprout. Given, not every seed will sprout, but some will, and those some will be enough. I don’t have any illusions that I’ll have this over-flowingly abundant garden, but I’m going to do everything I can to do the things necessary for that to be a possibility. Is that hope? Or just pragmatism?
When I say “I hope he has an easy recovery” is that hope in the above sense, that something is one way and I want it to be another? Or am I just using “hope” instead of “wish”? As in, “I wish him the best, which would be an easy recovery”? Or am I really using “hope” in place of “desire” because no matter who you are, whether we once knew each other or still do, my desire is for people in my circle or tangential to it to heal easily after they’ve had bypass surgery.
Whether we once knew each other implies that we don’t anymore. When you understand, after unrelenting honesty finally makes you ask the questions that matter, that a person you thought might be your friend has really been acting towards you in a way they think will prevent you from having “unreciprocated feelings” for them (as if your feelings were somehow their jurisdiction), you don’t know them anymore, because you didn’t actually know them in the first place. They weren’t being themself with you if they always had their guard up keeping you at arm’s length, or before that when they always said yes to keep from hurting your feelings even when they didn’t want to, or before that, when they would give you excuses your hopeful web-spinning mind could always resolve with patience and logic, instead of the true, grounded words that would end it.
When there’s a sudden retraction from the illusion of closeness, I want to write letters, and sign them with my full legal name. It’s a metaphysical shove out to the furthest reaches of my universe, because that is the most formal way I can be addressed by anyone. It puts the offending person in the same league as the DMV in terms of how close they are allowed to be to me. And in signing a letter this way I would be indicating to that person (and to myself, formally, ritually) that our relationship has fundamentally changed.
This has happened before. In college I used to study with someone called Juan Fernando every week for an entire spring semester, until we kissed at a party and then there was a sudden and irrevocable silence for which I never found answers. I wrote him a letter, signed it with my full name, and dropped it through the mail slot at his apartment.
I don’t know if he ever got the letter. Through the window next to the door I saw an empty living room, with nothing but a vacuum in the middle of the floor. I slid the letter through anyway and wiped my hands.
The next and last time I saw him was as a ghost.
So when I got the text the other day from a mutual friend that one such person I didn’t know anymore was in the ICU because they’d had a heart attack, I couldn’t help but think there might be a story inside of me called something like Spider Woman’s Kiss of Death.
Several months ago, following our last and most honest conversation, I considered putting the book he’d lent me into his mailbox at a time I could do so undetected, with a letter inside requesting my key and the book I’d lent him to be returned at his earliest convenience (and without my awareness). I imagined what I would write, in my most formal voice; saw myself signing the letter Jennifer, or even my full name, firmly indicating the distance that was finally real to me.
But I never even got to the point where it was put down in ink. I had only imagined it. But the distance and the understanding of no-longer-knowing were already there. The metaphysical shove had happened just by thinking about it.
I don’t think I actually believe that my disillusionment from someone, or even the symbolic act of signing my full name, could realize itself as harm to them. I don’t even have to wish people like this out of my life because they go on their own. I think for my own sense of completion or closure, I like to drop them off in the same place they met me, out in the far reaches of the universe. That way if we ever meet again it’ll be as strangers, and it’ll be due to forces beyond me.