no intention means no tension

one thing i’ll always, always give to my first great love is that as much as any person is able to, she was usually good at just letting me be. i’d say “Mezz im feeling like this or this way about myself” and she’d just say “okay sounds good.”

it’s not that she was servile or passive, no. If it mattered to her she’d speak her peace and stand her ground, it’s more like, if it had to do with me, and it wasn’t hurting her or myself really, she would just let it be.

a very simple practice in theory, but of course I have yet to even get slightly proficient at it, and I never once encountered it again until last year. From sophomore year of high school till last year is how long it took for me to meet another person, in any context, romantic or platonic, who could just let me be me. Just let me exist in all my neuroticisms.

I’m not quite sure when I became so high strung, such a germaphobe; but it has come to pass that i’ve turned into my mother in this regard.

I used to laugh at her and how ridiculous she was with such simple things that didn’t matter, but here we are now.

My roommate told the tiniest of white lies about the milk being fine so I would cook the soup they requested with it. Turns out, it’s two days past its expiration date. Two days, not at all a big deal! But here I am, totally fine until I learned that information, I’m nauseous, and I’m sincerely fighting back the urge to go stick my finger in my throat and puke it all back up.

The soup would have been fine without the milk, I was already using heavy whipping cream, it would have been fine! But here we are.

It’s not a big deal at all, hell it’s even wasteful and arguably morally wrong of me to be so neurotic about milk two days past its expiration date, but still, with all that being acknowledged.

to me it’s a big deal. to me it’s important, and not for a frivolous reason, not for reasons i’m voluntarily choosing to be difficult about, but for the fact that my mind and all my demons will use this to poison me.

here it comes, the stomach pain.

they know this about me and yet, here we are.

I wish I believed in karma because this would be a beautiful example.

“No matter how stupid or frivolous I think something is, if it’s that important to someone I say I love and care about, then I should honor that.”

A realization I came to only after everything had come to an end, and I watched my whole future disappear on a Korean airlines flight.

What a great way to hammer the lesson home it would have been, this milk two days past its expiration date.

Every time I think things are finally getting better, that we can move on from all the conflicts and finally be consistently at peace, and friendly, they do something like this.

A tiny thing that isn’t really a big deal, and yet cuts me so effectively.

I think this is a sentence my former lover probably said about me at one point too, as I’m now saying it about someone else.

I saw a video earlier today, interview with a homeless man. Said he ended up on the street because covid killed his wife, which made him lose his mind for a while, and therefore his job and subsequently, everything else. Said he’s now trying hard to rebuild his life but yknow, once you’re there it’s incredibly difficult to come back.

There I was staring at the same four walls I always look at, with my window cracked open and my space heater going so that I could have a perfect 75-80 degree fahrenheit room temperature at all times of the day and thinking

“wow, I have never felt more kinship or related more intensely to another human being the way I’m now feeling towards this poor man.”

An astounding lack of self awareness, an incredible display of foolishness, and yet, entirely sincere and impossibly earnest.

I always, always am.

Wallahi