"There's no...modern romance"

When you first open a bottle of (good) whiskey, it smells like the taste of that stuff dentists put in your mouth with their gloves.  This is not what I intended to write about.

This is:

Everyone tells you that it's not going to be easy, that it isn't just love you will have to think about.  The daily rub of bills and dishes and rows will all play their part.  They will all take their toll.  It won't always be hearts and flowers.  It isn't all about feelings.  Anybody who pleads ignorance on that score is a liar.  Everybody tells you that.

What they don't tell you (or didn't tell me) is that the love itself isn't easily sustained.  The actual feeling.  It doesn't just thrum away quietly beneath your struggles.  You can't expect it to still be there when you find it underneath the real life stuff.  Actually it's a bit like an Oyster card.  Until you leave the city and trade it in, it will always have a basic worth but it needs constant input to keep it working.  When you don't have anything to sustain it, you can leave it there, doing nothing, waiting.  But for all intents and purposes it is empty in that state.  One day, you will pick it up.  For a while, you imagine you are holding the key to a whole city in your palm.  Then you find you can't open a single gate.

That's a dismal comparison, and I know it.

Sometimes I wish I had a girlfriend.  It's been nearly 8 months since N and I split up.  I came back here feeling collapsed and worn out.  Loud noises made me flinch and quiet ones made me bristle.  I needed time to get past that.  Then there was the up-crash and all the inadvisable stunts that that entailed.  This is me.  There have been temporary others.  Of course there have.

I think I am mainly doing okay now.  Blips and false starts are standard- ask anyone who has been through it.  I have levelled out a lot and the meds help better now that I eat.  Sometimes, though, when I look at things I feel a bit lost.  I am 25 and I live with my parents.  I don't have a job, or a clue what kind of job I might be good at.  I have a place on an MA.  I volunteer.  I run.  But last year I took so many steps backwards I'm not really sure where I am.

I have stopped crying at reminders of N.  Food doesn't make me sick and laughter doesn't make me jump.  The guilt is fading, the hurt is quieter, the anger has subsided and the sadness isn't constant.  I'm okay.  We don't speak much these days and it's better this way.

So... sometimes I wish I had a girlfriend.  But despite the betterness, I don't know if I'm capable.  I was going to write ready.  But that's not what I mean.  I am unfaithful, unreliable, intense or disconnected, clingy or non-commital. A little vain: maybe all I want is for someone to size me up and say I'll do.  And maybe lazy: too lazy to do the work to top up the card to open the gates and have the world in my hands or whatever.  Poor metaphor.  And of course, my attitude to booze is not really conducive to an adult romance.  So, even though I sometimes wish for permanence, I feel safer in a life of temporary fixes.