Well, here I am at the blank page and I have nothing to say again. I’m sad about what I’ve lost in the last year. I’ve lost the confidence that people would believe me. Just the other day, a person I hadn’t talked to in a year, since the last time she called and I realized that she wanted something from me, since she interrupted me as I tried to tell her how I was when all she’d done was ask the obligatory question. How are you? This time, she didn’t want anything. I tried to tell her how my year had been, so full of pain and increasing weakness.
“Yeah, it has been that kind of year,” she said.
No, I told her. I’ve given up so much.
“We all have.”
Every time I opened my mouth, she started talking before I got to tell her. I tried throwing out more details than I’d intended to divulge. Some people don’t want more details. I had thought she was a friend. She’s not a friend. Just someone who was told to check up on me and get back to somebody in that group of friends. Too late, I remembered that a year ago, when I told her I was sick, she’d bouldered right through what I was saying to ask me to do something for the group. She’d been a little angry I hadn’t agreed to do it, that I’d made excuses.
I’m supposed to be that person who gets things done. Not anymore.
When I got off the phone with this person, who said my difficulties were all probably just stress, who sounded dubious when I mentioned doctors I’d gone to see, who negated every single word I tried to slip in edgewise to the conversation, I felt worse than I had when she first called. She hadn’t called me for me. She had called to make herself feel better about having called.
It saps my energy to talk to people, some more than others. It sucks it right out of me to put my best face on and smile and lean forward into a conversation, to work at it. Afterward, I could feel that I was going to lose a whole day to that call. I was depleted, flattened.
I’d answered the call because I needed a friend to care about me. I’d answered because I’d hoped I would be believed, finally. The group of friends she came from knew themselves to be compassionate to a list of people they named. I just didn’t muster the importance to get on that list. I’d answered her call with hope and hung up without it. Afterward, I went back to reading my pandemic book Wanderers by Chuck Wendig. Good book. I interrupted my reading and leaned my head back, counting through the names of people who did believe me and care about my newfound state, starting with Mike and Nick.
When Nick was a little boy and trying to fall asleep, I used to tell him to count through the names of the people who loved him. He could repeat any names he wanted. He could keep going round and round with the names of the ones who loved him the best. I’d tiptoe out of his room as I heard him whispering his list of names.
I whispered my list of names and the sunlight shifted over to shine on my face through a skylight. My list was small. It repeated on itself a number of times. But it was my list. There were people who loved me just the way I was right now, not as they expected me to be to make them comfortable.
I repeated my list of people
who still love me
as I am
now.
Thank you for listening, jules