Are there moments in your life when you stand in the middle of your very familiar room and have no sense of reality other than the blaring of the TV? Recently, I been feeling like that---like I have somehow lost the purpose of my life. I don't quite know how to move forward if there is something like that. I also don't know how to stand still to let the stars re-align in my favor. I feel like I have to keep doing in order to keep being. But when that doing is adding nothing to my basic instinct for survival, why am I adding, I ask myself, even though I know the answer--this is all I can do. I cannot force my stars to re-align instantly and at my angry directives. I can only do what I am able. My "best" friend who I still have the hots for recently got a job that he wanted. I expected him to invite me out for a meal to celebrate. Instead he goes out with a non-friend for a meal that was legitimately mine! I wrote a one-line email: "I guess I am not your best friend." He called me back leaving the following on my voice mail: "You just took me on an all-expense paid guilt trip--let's talk." I didn't want to tell him but I did (as to why I wrote that line). To which he said, "I didn't call you because I am weak--if we had gone out, we would have ended up in bed and that at this time is not a good idea." Ah, well! Sure, we love each other but why when you claim to have this ridiculous emotion you have to discuss the improbability of possibility. I want to love someone and be loved in a way where meeting each other is not an exercise in self-restraint. I do want to be with him but I can't in the way partners ought to be. Betrayal is still that thorn in its side. I can be a friend to him where the rules of friendship, of giving and taking are defined by this relationship--where he cannot just take but have to give in some measure. Being partners with him would mean giving him access to my resources (considerably more than his will ever be) and a place in the family that he cannot have simply because he disrespected it the last time he met them. So no there is going be no partnership here unless he does something that makes me forget that insane episode and makes me a believer in the contriteness of man aware of his moral relapses. Finally, if he never betrayed the ones he loved ever in the past then in betraying me he confirmed that his love for me is non-existent. Yet, in all this intellectualizing restraint, I miss him. His voice, his sensibility, his kindness, his passion, his sexpertise, his child-like animation, his vulnerability, his ability to say the right word for a right feeling. And even as I don't desperately seek his company and actively cry out for his presence, I think of him. I have collected my moments of him so I can go rummage in times of angst and existential loss. I still am angry but its intensity has dissipated since I know people will be people working through their own demons even as they unleash these on others they claim to protect. I know life could be worse. I have seen worse happen to people here and now and everywhere. But I cannot feel for them while I continue to feel for myself. I have to first negotiate my own embodied feelings, my life in the way I experience it before I can direct my empathy elsewhere. My empathy means zero to others if it comes from a place torn and devastated. It has to be real and real. Right now, my real is off somewhere trying to find its way back to me or at least that is what i ought to believe.