Hey Relationship, Where Did You Go?

Don’t be lost until I say you’re lost

Trigger warning, my dear lovelies!

This might hurt if you don’t like thinking about the death word or if you’ve been avoiding making up with someone before their time comes.

References to suicide too.

Starting now.

Demons on the trail

If there’s anyone living a life without demons on their trail, I haven’t met them yet.

• My cousins got home from school to find their mother lying in a bath full of red water. They dragged her out in time but those kids aged a decade in an instant. No-one ever talked about it again.
• My best friend left home to see the world and traumatized her parents into an anger borne of grief. They disowned her, wrote her out of the will. Reconciliation took four years but the pain had turned the family bond to eggshell. No-one ever talked about it again.
• Another friend fell out with her sister. Twelve years passed full of the usual family joys and sorrows but the ice between them still stands rock solid and unbroken. They both feel they’re due an apology from the other first and this keeps them stuck because no-one controls what they’re due, only what they owe. Neither of them talk about it.

They won’t talk it, but I will.

I said to my friend, “what if your sis died, would you go to the funeral?”

Her look proper killed my dreams of being the world’s best psychiatrist.

She said I was being crass… I don’t know why, it’s not as if I was making out she’s going to do a Kerry and Kurtan lol

So angry, she was. Said I didn’t understand, blah blah blah.

Fact is, it’s not that hard to understand

It’s horrible to DISCUSS feelings for real! What a shame you can’t just SPEECH out a TED Talk and have the other person just get it.

Feelings are a bugger for leading you somewhere you can’t find your way back from.

I am not lost, for I know where I am.

But however, where I am may be lost.

— Winnie the Pooh

It always seems to be the closer the relationship, the easier it is for people to lose their way without knowing it. To take offence at stupid things. To expect the other person to bend to their will.

Even me! I dropped my golden halo once and it got proper mucky. The story involves my husband because, really, who else would it be?

We were together for five perfect years before we got married. I think wedding rings come with a personality transplant built-in. The actual story is an article in itself, so to cut a long story short, we had a bust up one day and all the pent-up stuff came out.

There we were in the dock parading each other’s monster-shite wrong-doings in front of each other for a fuck-load of days. People are so forensic when they’re telling you their pain… and they just don’t stop!

All you want to do is shake them and tell them to stop bringing up the past. But they won’t because it’s all there very much in their present.

Those type of conversations must be the worst in the world. It’s not just your own hurts and pains you have to sort out, it’s theirs too!

My husband had pain and hurt too! Who knew!?!

It was hard taking ourselves out of the equation while the other person was talking.

Lots of talking, lots of stomping out of the house for air. Lots of sitting in the car not wanting to go back home because there’s no energy to go through all that again.

But once you start, you have to finish, take all the poison out and clean up the wound to prevent re-infection.

Only then can we see where we are and we’re not lost anymore. It’s coming up to 30 years soon, so it worked.

No-one wants to feel pain. Everyone wants to feel special.

But special doesn’t work because it’s too self-obsessed. Special means wanting the other person to come by with their ears and not their mouth and nod at what you tell them.

Never going to happen.

So the temperature stays at freezing, the ice hardens more and grieving tears at the funerrrr… oh wait, that’s what got her angry to begin with.

People aren’t special — LOSS is special

Relationships find each other again when the feeling of loss becomes bigger than the anger.

The need to mitigate your loss helps you take yourself out of the equation while the other person is talking.

The ice has to thaw to see the loss and it’s only then that people can decide how far into the pain they want to reach to mend things.

Sometimes you have to rethink the things you thought you thought through

— Winnie the Pooh

• The aunt who tried to top herself is still alive and while her children don’t talk about it, they’re thankful their loss was salvaged.
• My best friend and her parents don’t talk about those “missing years” and both sides are careful to avoid trigger topics, but their bond shows in all the things they do for each other.
• My friend and her sister remain frozen in ice. I wonder if they’re protecting themselves from feeling the loss that would compel them to talk.

I hope the ice thaws before a funeral tells one of them that anything they were due is never coming and everything they owed can never be repaid.

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