Why is it so hard?

To interact? To relate? To be in the same space as another? Why so insular, so protected, so excluded? But I find this is the case with many people, who prefer email, texting, instant messaging, to actually speaking, prefer a virtual relationship to a real one…the never ending conversation on facebook ha provided me with entre into the lives of long lost family and friends, but it has also created a voyeuristic sense of interaction…you tell me what you want me to know about you, and I get to react to that small slice of the reality you have provided me with. We are all, now, our own PR firms…I am beginning to wonder what I am so afraid of. There is a very large hurdle to surmount, the social Everest, of meeting and getting to know people, of committing to friendship, relationship, anyship, of allowing my heart to open and extend to others, risk rejection and indifference, or better yet, reciprocation. I would like to chalk all of it up to Aspberger's syndrome, but really it's not. It is the bumbling, fumbling, retreating safety of an insulated, it shan't hurt life that I so desperately try to create for myself. If I am to live the life of "the fool" the life I claim so strongly to desire, then how on earth can I restrict my interactions to these quips and well researched retorts, to the photoshopped and hipstmatically altered photos of all the good times I am having. If I were to tell the truth about my life today it would look like this: snotty, unwashed and wrinkled…I am sick with the flu - going on day 8 - and I look like crap. I am out of work, enrolled in community college, out of money, fumbling through a divorce, and aside from the snot and coughing, generally very very happy. My days amount to, when not languishing under the virus, being a housewife and tending to my partner. I clean house, cook and make love, all with great passion, I watch too much television, run about 20 miles a week, and fold a lot of laundry. And I am painfully underachieving right now but not entirely ashamed of it. I have so much I am "meant" to do, and yet I find little desire beyond my bread baking and vacuuming. I am not deriding housewives, but I am not really one of them, I am more aptly described as "on hiatus" from my real life. I am making short forays back, but they are not without angst. This week I attempted to connect with my oh-so-distant (he lives in New Zealand half the year) father. He pounced on the fact that I had the flu and asked me not to visit. It was so thinly veiled I had to laugh (privately) at it. It seems he suffers from stay-away sickness as much as I do. Alas, if I believe what I say I believe, then I must continue to love my father and continue to be a generous hearted daughter, without ever getting what I "want" in return. If I am to live with an open heart, I must unfetter myself from the conditional love, the meted out in teaspoons love, the tit for tat love.

I don't know if others have their own love barometer, but I do, I get to a certain level of millibars and suddenly cannot go farther (further? I never know which) I do not allow myself to venture into the territory of unabashed, unrequited, unrelenting love. Scary monsters like rejection and broken hearts live there, gnashing and panting in ghoulish anticipation of my "wet red stain" of a heart to saunter unawares into their lair. Not I, in my red riding hood, there is a wolf at my door. And he is hungry for blood. I stay a breath's distance from the edge, peer over the precipice but do not take in the panorama offered only from the cliff. Vertigo kicks in and slowly I back away, taking my heart back with me in a tightly clenched fist. Or do I? This life that I have been so blessed to be given, freely and in such great circumstance, is "wild and precious" and I will push myself closer and closer to the edge. So, if I call you, please pick up.