I’m leaning against the huge oak—my favorite place in the park—filled with vague feelings of remorse, self-pity and confusion. It’s a clear, crisp mid-morning. The autumn sun is warm on my face, the air cool. The wind gathers in short breaths now and then, moving the branches in the old tree. Leaves float and skitter here and there, landing all around me.
I often come here alone—drawn to this spot—to sit against the thick rough trunk, eyes closed, and wait to examine the thoughts and feelings that always come up when my mind is quiet. I don’t know how, why, or from where they originate but they always surface.
After a while, I feel a dearth of self-chastisement coming, not the stuff I’m waiting for from the quiet place. I just want someone to hold me and tell me I’m loved. My problems are overwhelming. The deluge is beginning. I don’t want to stop it because if it comes out all-together, most of the time it leaves me emptied out for a while and I’m stuck with a stuffed-up nose and feeling a little better.
It’s on me now. I want to cry and feel sorry for myself, but at the same time I sense spurious intent. Deep down I know better than to hide in false emotion, but I do it anyway. It’s easier to be outside sobbing and lamenting in self-righteous babble than follow the little voice that says take a hard look inside to find out what’s really bothering me and do something about it.
My significant other is trying to possess me instead of caring about me and what I want; so, it’s got to be over soon. I realize this, but when I think about it the melting away of all the “together projections” gives me an empty place inside. I don’t like empty.
My job gives me no pleasure, no satisfaction; it’s boring and repetitious, and the people I work for don’t really care about me. They’ll just ride me like a horse until the business fails, or I get sick or old, unless I have the guts to buck them off…. Too risky.
My supposed friends are really only casual and superficial, talking at me not to me, reporting what they’ve done or what others have done or said they did, or what somebody’s going to do. Seventy percent of the time the subject matter in conversation is devoted to slandering the rise and fall of the libido, or describing parts of the body in explicitly lewd detail, revealing a base nature that dominates their thinking. Most of the time, I smolder in revulsion. I hate me for being another sponge of ignorance, soaking up sexual innuendo as if it contained pearls of wisdom just to fit it.
And I never do what I want to do; I’m always doing what everybody else wants me to do…. I hate that.