Tee plus six months

or... the Green Eyed Monster.

It's been six months, twelve days, and probably about eight minutes, but I don't feel like going into Google Timeline to see exactly when the perp-walk back to my apartment in the moonlight was, exactly.

It's hellacious.

Facebook is the devil.

Today, a woman I barely know, who is tiny and fierce and thin and pretty, and more or less everything I wish I was, posted that her partner, who shares my ex's name and who I once fancied, had bought a house. And now her housing stability problems were solved for more than six months at a time.

Cue me, 34 years old, trying desperately not to cry on a packed commuter train.

I am having to actively unfollow my female "friends" whose lives seem so charmed. One who has the husband, the house, the kid, the workshop, the high profile business. One who has the high profile, the business she owns, the jet-setting lifestyle. One who has the retirement, the workshop, the cozy stability of house and home.

I am having to actively unfollow my friends with whom I was once close. Because I realize that I have fallen into a realm so far below them; they only invite me to things accidentally, they're surprised if I turn up, they spend their time insensitively bitching about the problems I would love to have, they don't call, write, or ask to meet up when they're in town. They hide the fact that they are in town. They are successful, and if failure is catching then they're insulating themselves from the plague.

I have failed as a person.

I am still estranged from my family; it was supposed to get better with time but I feel, if anything, worse than I ever have about them. After the utter bullshit abuse heaped on my by my little brother in August, and my father's continued failure to protect me from any of it, my little sister's crazy BPD targeting of me and my mother's NPD setting of everyone against me - I just have nothing left for them.

I have nothing.

I have a grinding three-hour-twenty-minute daily round trip commute, a rent which saps my will to live, an allergy which prevents me finding a housemate, a job that uses my own talents and work ethic to keep me off-balance and bound to them, all while underpaying me. All of which was supposed to not be a problem because I was supposed to have someone to share this burden with. Someone to build a home with. And now I have nothing, almost literally nothing, to look forward to. I cannot even afford a vacation, and if I could there is nobody who has time/money/desire to go with me. There will never be a respite from fear. There will never be a feeling of stability. There is little but a grinding loneliness with a grave at the end to look forward to.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are now times when I fear for my own safety.

And that is the scary thing that I need to own, because only by owning it can you (readers) hold me accountable. I have been hearing l'appel du vide for months now, and so far pushing the thoughts away like the arm of an inattentive commute neighbor. Even now I can't write the name here and am reverting to the French euphemism. But I was reading The Depression Thing and I got to the point that ends "Huh" and I got cold chills because if he has to call it that then I have to call it that and putting a name to a thing that's haunted you for so long makes it too real.

I don't want to die.

I want to rest. I want to feel like I have some modicum of control. I want to make art. I want to be happy with work.

There is some part of me that recognizes all the good in my world right now (and in fact I keep thinking about deleting this whole thing, as the best part of my world right now will be reading it from the other side of the world), but that sentiment is being overwhelmed by the fact that after five years together, after four long years of loving someone, he can cast you off with barely a backwards glance and immediately get on with his life. With hardly a word to you. And I feel so cheated, so thwarted, as if every plan in my world had been destroyed and I am owed compensation.

I don't even get the emotional satisfaction of knowing he's hurting. He has no proper feelings and has acknowledged as much himself, repeatedly. He's already dating and the pain is morphing to anger, which, without any target, morphs back into despair.