(Phaysis)

The spambots love my website more than you do. However, I love you more than the spambots.

And that’s the honest truth!

I am not in the habit of discussing matters of the heart publicly, but if you’re wondering what I’ve been up to the past few months….

I’m coming out of this Thing I had with someone. It was never really defined, so Thing is what we’ll call it. By the strictest definition, yeah, it was a relationship, but it is what it was: enigmatic on the best of days.

She and I had a hard time throughout most of it; the open questions, the crossfire of intents. The pattern, as it played out, was “start, stop, start, crash, kinda start, kinda fizzle.” Although we’d been friends for years before we made a go at it, it just did not work out for reasons I’ll not describe in public.

I’m a little numb from the experience, and dumb on where to go from here. Relationships, good or bad, are disruptive to the status quo. Habits change, plans get pushed out, internal desires get sidetracked at the first glimpse of no longer going it alone. Now on the other side of it, it’s just me, sorting the pieces and remembering where I left off.

I will say, emphatically, that she still has my adoration, respect and friendship. Always will. She is a strong and dignified human being. I can only hope the feeling is mutual. Maybe time apart will help us to sort out our feelings and let us restore our friendship to something resembling what it was.

It’s a late Friday night alone, and my demons are talking at me. They’re telling me that since I am alone, late on a Friday night, that I obviously must have done something wrong with my life. That there had to be one missed opportunity, one blind moment, one bad mistake early on in my adulthood to begin a chain of events, decisions, and lost potential that lead up to yet another night alone. I can’t deny that our lives are more than the sum of our choices, but our choices nonetheless impinge on our lives and hammer us into the shape we are at the present.

I just cannot see where I may have turned wrong. Was it my volition (or lack thereof), or was it outside forces beyond my control (or lack of willpower)? Did I get too greedy? Did I not get bold enough? Did I not answer my hunger when the bounty was rich? I simply do not know, and even with counsel, I never will.

One event is all it takes to initiate a reverberating series of fumbles, misteps, and stutters. I want to recover.

I’m going to write about a dream. This morning, I had a fucked-up dream. I was in love; this girl and I were hanging out. Something small was in bloom. As dreams go, she dropped out of the plot as I went elsewhere.

I was in a big house, ostensibly a place I lived in. It was clean, the light was cold, the walls were white. Found a needle full of heroin. Someone told me to not inject it, but that’s exactly what I did. I walked off, found a vein in my left elbow, and shot up. Like it was nothing. Felt the cold warmth in my arm as it spread. Felt it take over. Felt it take control. I disposed of the needle and stumbled into my bedroom, fell into bed. Felt everything that’s ever been described to me: mental calm, inner peace, warmth, a sense of belonging, a feeling of love.

Maybe my life is so cold and lonesome that there’s an excess of the neurochemicals associated with belonging to something and being loved; that they manifest themselves in dreams. Sounds plausible. I also watched a movie last night with similar themes to the dream, so there’s that. Things like movies and shows always reassemble themselves into the plots of my dreams.

Everything is explained…except for the fact that I’d willingly shoot up heroin in a dream. Like it was natural. It’s a dream, so no consequences, I guess. Not something I’d like to do, ever, mostly out of the fear of sliding downhill, like I did with cigarettes. The first smoke came naturally, flourished in an environment of friendship and solidarity with other people, and slid down into a lonely 2-pack daily habit.

I never want to play with that kind of fire ever again. I want to feel loved, to feel like I belong, but not at that price. Never at that price.

On Valentine’s Day, in a twist of synchronicity, CNN published an article detailing a study on the neurology of love. According to study results, that new-ness and need for exploration I felt earlier in the week was a hunger for what can likewise be called an addiction. In the study, test volunteers, newly in love, were presented with photographs of their lovers and their brains were monitored. When they saw their lover:

the scientists found that the caudate area of the brain — which is involved in cravings — became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation.

I remember that craving, that high, and I miss it like someone in recovery. The addiction to being around someone is definitely neurological:

Dr. Helen Fisher put it: When you fall in love, “exactly the same system becomes active as when you take cocaine. You can feel intense elation when you’re in love. You can feel intense elation when you’re high on cocaine.”

The article goes on to state that romantic love isn’t really an emotion, but rather it is an innate need that works below reason, emotion, and logic. We need love at the root of it all. We also try to avoid rejection; love it or leave it, rejection brings us actual pain. It’s true. Another study by the same researchers found that when volunteers who had recently been dumped were presented with pictures of their exes:

The insular cortex, the part of the brain that experiences physical pain, became very active. “People came out of the machine crying,” [Dr. Brown] said. “We won’t be doing that experiment again for a long time.”

On the face of it, this research appears to suck some of the romanticism out of romance, but underneath, it actually supports the concept. Everyone has the need for it; everyone has the capability for providing it. The complication is found in all the layers of crap we place on top of it; the Ritual, the Dance, the waiting three days before calling the number handed to you at a party, the preening and posturing to be bigger and more cocksure than the twenty roosters before you and the twenty after. The best tactic is to relax and be your awesome self; be honest, be genuine, listen to your needs. It sounds like good advice. Maybe it is.