Flood of emotions.

I feel like some modern-day Noah steering his ride around on an endless sea of emotions, unable to find land. All the parking spots on Mt. Ararat are full up from previous floods. I just have myself and one animal on this ark, a few meager possessions, and maybe some baggage, but I don't mind if that needs to be thrown overboard - I'm just tired of the constant swaying and drenching I'm getting.

I miss my daughter most importantly of all. Miss her so much, it's nearly impossible to bear. I was with her nearly every day of her life for over ten years and then one day, poof, gone. Saw her sporadically and now I cannot see her at all. Talking to her on cell phone, IM, or email is very rare, and it's been weeks now since the last time. It's agony for a parent to lose a child, to constantly wonder whether she is ok, not being taken advantage of, not an emotional mess in need of a big hug, not in need of a shoulder to cry on or an ear to hear her vent. I was all these things and to not be able to be them now is killing me. Sue, if you're reading this, I MISS YOU SO MUCH. I don't know what I can do until you're 18 and/or contact me and want to see me, but I assume we're on good terms and you still think of me? Still love me? I love you more than anything. I just want to see you for a few minutes or at least hear your voice. You mean everything to me and the worst part of this breakup going on three years ago is all the time I've missed getting to be your father. It's not fair and I hate it! I still wake up several mornings a week thinking I'm in the old house, with my wife to my side, and you asleep in your room or more likely already up feeding the cats or checking the computer. It takes me a minute to orient myself and realize that, instead, I'm alone in an apartment, and my "wife" is my cat Jackson, and you are gone. I cry on those mornings, wondering what the hell happened that we all couldn't get things together and make it as a family, or at least that you and I have been precluded from having a regular relationship. This is hell not being able to get hold of you for weeks or even months at a time. I am reading a book about grieving the loss of a loved one, just so I can recognize the emotions and deal with them. Sometimes it feels like that, like the death of a loved one. Don't you still want me to be a part of your life?

Next is the whirlwind that is my female friend from Calgary. She's blown into my life again, and I am glad, in fact I am ecstatic, but it brings lots of confusion and tumult as well. She's fiery and opinionated like me, and we talk, and argue, and agree, and even at times feel very close, but she is there and I am here. And I've been up there before and it didn't work out. And her current male friend is treating her coldly yet she bends over backwards to make him happy. He pisses me off. It's frustrating to see her sad, see her angry, know that she is probably crying. Sometimes I want to shake her or knock some sense into her, but it's her life to live, and besides, what sense do I have to give anyone else? I'm just as much a fool for her as she can be for others; how can I fault her for that? She knows how I feel about her - if only we could have met that time. I know she would have seen it in my eyes, would have felt something. If she is the rare kind of sentient soul I think she is, she would've known it right away in me, too. She found my writing, after all, way back in the beginning, and saw something in it. I know she cares about me and we talk nearly every day, but the distance keeps us apart and in the meantime she has her schooling to worry about and friends, and anxiety, and parties, and the future, and math, and boys, and... me? Does she think of me the way I do of her, at least some of the time? I know there was a time when she did, she told me. And she still says sweet things and is the kind of sensitive soul that drew me to her in the first place. But it's this stuck, unlikely-to-change-soon situation we're both in that prevents anything more from happening, as much as we may belong together or at least deserve that chance of finding out. If you're reading this, Nic, know what I say is true, however idealistic it may sound. Just because most people in this world are crude and corrupting, doesn't mean there aren't people with good hearts and exciting minds out there who are worth waiting for.

I want to be a doctor, a psychiatrist or a neurologist, someone who can fight the ugly side of life that is mental illness. Whether that is by having a practice and prescribing medication, or by doing research to benefit even more people but in a less direct way, I want to use my talents, such as they are, to help people who have grown up like me sensitive to the pain of life and living in the dark. The understanding science has of the brain is so rudimentary at the moment, it is begging for talented thinkers to come into the field and push the boundaries, even spark a golden age of mind-brain understanding, a bringing together of allopathic medicine with its reductive, mechanistic models, and emergent information-theory born stratagems for understanding how sentience (and emotional suffering) arise from the actual chemistry. I don't dismiss Buddhism or Taoism because I believe in Western, material science. I don't dismiss Western, material science because I innately feel the correctness of Buddhism or Taoism or some sort of hybrid, true, Eastern holism. The two are different parts of the same elephant, I know they are. But I have doubts about schooling, about money, about debt, about stability, about discipline, about going into practice. I am as I have always been. Confident in my ability to understand, to perform when asked to, under the heaviest pressure shining even more, like a diamond forged of pencil graphite, but... scared of responsibility, of being alone and having to successfully navigate the banal, logistical side of life, any life, even while succeeding gloriously in the "hard" stuff. Life is experienced backwards for me than how it is for many; I know I will ace the test. I know I can beat people at basketball, or whatever you name. I have trouble in the things people do automatically and take for granted, like cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, showing up on time, keeping my car running and my bills paid. I somehow missed taking that class. Life 1A. I'm an armchair autodidact with little practical knowledge of the real world, a sort of Mycroft Holmes. I'm an alien who has become an expert on the human condition by watching a thousand documentaries.

I have two friends in England whom I have in a short time grown enormously fond of, and who have done more than they could have ever been expected to in supporting me through a rough time, in reading and participating eagerly on this blog, and being just generally good, down-to-earth people, the kind you want as your friends if you have any brain at all. And yet I don't participate on their blogs nearly as much as I should and though I intend to rectify this, what does it say about me that thus far I have taken much more than given? Am I that selfish? I would hate to think so. I do care for them both a lot; I'd so love to visit them! I conjure one or the other or both often throughout the day as things come up, thinking I know so-and-so would find this hilarious or roll the eyes or be saddened. Sara, Dunc, if you are reading this I owe you more than I am currently giving. I am lazy and I don't do for my friends what I cherish when it is done for me. I need to place more emphasis on my relationships with ALL the people in my life, and not drop everything for a romantic interest or a fire that needs to be put out, or lay in bed because an all-consuming anger over one person has seeped into me through my death-star exhaust ports. No one is perfect, though... Goddammit, why not??

I want to be perfect in every way; instead, I seem to have made a mess of everything.