I Think Everything Counts a Little More than We Think

10 December 2006

Chelsea 1 - 1 Arsenal
Flamini 78' (F)
Essien 85' (A)

This is the kind of game that only Chelsea can hand out; you think victory is yours, you're 12 minutes away from taking down one of the top dogs, but they scramble back and equalise. The immense depression that sets in after these 7 minutes is indescribable: it is like seeing fate, a very bad fate, crush itself upon you, grinning, bile dripping from its mouth onto your face. It's like watching the Patriots decimate the Jets; you knew it would happen, but goddammit, you kind of hoped it wouldn't, maybe this time, things would be different, maybe this time your fate would be different. Matches like these wear your spirit down; like so many things in life, you can only take so much. When you think about it, there are so many teams competing, just in the English Premiere League, twenty to be exact, that the odds are pretty low of being able to wipe enough of them out to win anything. I say this towards the end of the season, as Arsenal quietly settles into fourth place, the same as last season: we're better than 16 other teams, sure, but three others have spat in our faces. We wipe it off though, indignantly. We continue to fight. We can't push any further forward, but stranded on our island of humiliation, the worst of the best teams, we shout into the night that we won't cow to you. I've spent so much time in the last month struggling to accept being dumped. Michelle gave me the old "it's not you, it's me" routine--not in so many words, but that was the jist. No one believes that when it happens to them. It's probably ego, the belief that everything which happens around you is because of you, not someone else. Of course, it's hard to avoid that. I read an interview today of Carl Newman, the conductor of The New Pornographers, and he talks about how he deals with criticism. "If it's a bad review, it makes you sad, so, well, that doesn't help. And if it's a good review, well, what does that do? Does it make your ego bigger? That's not so productive either." Getting dumped is like failing a class or getting fired. You might fail the class because you didn't had disagreements with the teacher, and you might get fired due to layoffs, but it doesn't change the fact that you were cut. It catches you off guard and suddenly you're stuck with overwhelming feelings of being insufficient. To combat my feelings of worthlessness, I've been wandering the same corridors where I met Michelle: online dating. I have a fair amount of free time at work, so I spend a good portion of it strolling the halls, looking at pictures of women, breaking down any flaws I notice off the bat, noting anything I like especially. I contact a few, a smaller few contact me back. My compulsive checking becomes an addiction, as I seek any confirmation of value: please, someone tell me I'm still good, sure Michelle left me, but she's only one girl, I have likeable qualities, please, tell me it's true. It wears me out: like watching Arsenal give up an equalising goal to Chelsea, as these girls rotate in and out of my interest in a revolving door of insecurity, I slowly hollow out. The attractive ones become empty, the unattractive ones fade into the internet. I grab my hair and check the websites again: there is nothing here for me, but like a sick person who can't stop throwing up, I check, and I check, I check again, maybe this time I will be vindicated. The internet has turned us all into representations of ourselves, and I scoff at these two-dimensional digital portrayals, but I need them to tell me I am something. It's a natural reaction I think, it's like the rebound girlfriend of the 21st century. Instead of dating whomever I can snag at a bar, I spread my wings out through the internet. It's poetic in a way. I am seeking confirmation of my self in the same venue that I first found it via Michelle. It as if I am trying to figure out which of us was the outlier: was it me, with my high standards and shy attitude, or her with her personal struggles to find herself? Maybe neither of us was unique. Maybe our relationship was the outlier, the estranged part of this reality. Like most things in my life, I've CSIed this corpse of a relationship into oblivion. I've examined more angles than exist, I've pushed my moods up and down, granted myself freedom and shackled myself with depression. I've tried moving on and I've tried accepting it, but I still think about her as I go to sleep, I still have one of the hair pins she left over here. We don't talk (aside from one quick indiscretion on my part), which has been a great decision: I'd be in much worse shape now if we did. However, we do still read each other's blogs, which is almost just as bad. I want to stop reading it, but I can't, God help me, I can't. I decided today that, in order to try and stop reading her blog, and to stop looking at online dating sites, to cleanse my palate of girls, if you will, I decided that I would immerse myself in sports. I would spend as much free time as I have at work looking up stats, checking scores, reading histories: I don't care if I have to start following the Chilean Premiera Division (which I have: Colo Colo for the win!), I will drown myself in sports. Magnificently, mercifully, it worked today. Only as I left work did it dawn on me that I had not once, not once, even wanted to look at Michelle's blog. Of course, with that notion hounding me, I became possessed more than ever to check her blog. As soon as I got home from work, I looked: I was rewarded for my failure with the most confusing, most hurtful thing she has ever written. It wasn't, on the surface, about me, but I got vertigo as I juxtaposed her thoughts with our relationship. I felt as if I had been sucker punched. For the first time, I feel a little mad at her. A little angry. So many things she could never, or would never, tell me. The results of this sucker punch are that I begin to feel like I never really knew her, the true her. Maybe these are aspects of her personality that are only now coming to light, but I feel sad that she didn't feel comfortable enough exploring them with me. Maybe she didn't want to. Insecurity rears its ugly head again. I feel more confident however in my plan to focus on sports, to continue running, to wrap myself up in my music, to keep writing, to strengthen my vision of myself. Everyone thinks “the break-up” is their fault because, to a greater or lesser extent, it is: there is a design of perfection that they don’t meet. But there might not be anything they can do, because if the design of perfection is loneliness, well. Like everything in life, like failing a class or getting fired, being dumped forces you not to accept the event, but to accept yourself. A sliver of your true self. I am this person, who was not right for this class, who was not right for this job, who was not right for this person. The ego is damaged: oh, right, I am human, I am imperfect. I don’t like that Michelle broke up with me, and I don’t like that Michelle is different from what I thought she was, but that just shows you I was not right for her or vice versa. I move forward: shaken, but standing. I will not look back, I will not feel sad any longer. I will throw out this extemporaneous hair clip. No longer will I pine over her writings. I am done with this. I am done.