ｓｏｌｉｔａｉｒｅ ｉｓ ｓｔｉｌｌ ｔｈｅ ｏｎｌｙ ｇａｍｅ ｉｎ ｔｏｗｎ

12 Jun, 2026

I've been wandering... reading blogs from the top. I tend to explore wide first, but I'm eager to read deep... to see the beginnings. Were you all as messy as me? The temptation to sit down and blurt out a whole book.

Did you?

Did you awkwardly announce a really polarizing fact about yourself straight out the gate, and then lay in bed wondering what kind of line you're trying to draw? [I'm thinking it's probably one with safe people inside it. I am exhausted, a bit, by how strange my life has turned. How warped I fear my lens has gotten.]

I don't know if I'm trying to keep people out or in anymore. I miss feeling known, but I'm also in one of those seasons of life where being known sometimes seems to require a lot of fucking translation... even with people you want to feel close to. Even alone in a room.

I am so scared this whole thing is about my fucking mother.

I'm sorry in advance... I can be a little prolific when it comes to volume. I am not referring to substance. You will not scratch your literary itches here. I am no Sherpa. But I feel this swell of confusion... this need to scream. I didn't mean for you to slip into my void. I hope the screams dissolve into something musical by the time they reach you down there. At least once. Today... is not that day.

Overthinking, paralyzed, insane bullshit. I'm tired of mental health today. I'm tired of feelings. I'm tired of what a self-absorbed asshole I feel like for taking time on any of this when there's still so much happening to people every day that is so much worse than my fucking midlife crisis.

So... write for Jesus. Write until I don't feel the ache. Write until my heart stops trying to explode because I thought love was real and I thought life had a point, and maybe I need to stop watching movies about multiverses because thinking about possibility at a time when I also feel the bars of my little cage so well has been a bit much for this busy brain. I'm critical of my own self-indulgence. I'm the cynic in the room.

I'm hurting. I'm lost. I'm embarrassed I'm lost. I'm angry I'm lost. I'm frustrated that I am married to someone who is not lost, because it made today day 702 of being in a different relationship than him.

He has different boxes. They seem checked. He is not bursting at the seams with all the lives he is not living. He is enjoying some light reading and playing through a game he loves, and he loved the chicken I cooked tonight, and he is grateful all the time to have a best friend who loves the same silly things, the same deep things, the same snacks.

In so many ways, it's all we should hope for, right? In so many ways, I have something open and free and easy and loving. But I tried to warn you about the contradiction. Handsome loves differently than me. It can feel... lonely.

Sometimes it's hard to be the heavy one. It's hard, maybe, to have broken into pieces and reassembled differently. Harder still when you made that a lifestyle. Some days, I'm precious and want to be encased in feathers. Some days, I am so obviously worn and second-hand. Sometimes I wish I had proof that it's also a little unfair to ask for.

I push people away and miss out on love because I want you to show me you won't hurt me. Sometimes the trouble is, I'm pragmatic, and I know you will hurt me. I just want to hear you promise it won't be one of the bad ones...

Sometimes the right thing to do is extend trust, but your trust wires were blown out so long ago that whole years can pass and you can still be fussing with your favorite person about how and where they need mending. Sometimes you can think it's better to just give up.

It's 99 days now and I am not sure if part of this writing exercise is giving my mouth a rest. I was so afraid of being in one of those marriages where something quietly dissolves... I was so afraid of feelings slipping into silence.

I have been having a hard time and my little tin can on a string isn't working. My husband isn't understanding me. Tonight, even when I spoke straight and plainly to his face... even when I said I felt lonely, that I needed something soft because depression is winning... I was embarrassed when I said I wished he'd have seen me crying and come to hold me. He asked if I'd really want that. It became a whole conversation. It became an argument. It became me on the couch. It did not get me held.

I'm sad to be sitting on my couch when I said so clearly I just wanted arms around me. I'm sad that when I said I needed us to make time to really work on intimacy because the work I do has worn me a bit, he thought that meant waiting a couple hours to mention sex. I'm sorry that I see more humanity in him watching a Duplass Brothers movie than when I looked at him tonight and said in real time, "I don't know how to relate to you when my version of love looks like someone who comes to their crying partner and you don't come."

I want him to hear me when I say that I fell in love with a man who knew that inside me there is definitely still a hurt girl who sometimes needs to stomp her feet and leave the room and know that someone will follow. It's not a thing I'm proud of, but it is a disclaimer I offer early. I'm aware of it and also don't like it, so it's honestly something you can kind of make me laugh with... if you know me. I offer the disclaimer because I want that badly to be known.

He forgot her. It cuts deeply because she loved him most and now she's cold. The work we do keeps her close and I tried so much to make him understand that. If you can't reach an understanding with someone you know is rare... when is it incompatible? When do you just need a breather? How can you tell if you're just afraid that it's a bad time to make such a permanent decision?

The trouble is, I'm not here without understanding. I'm perhaps here with too much flexibility. Perhaps this life journey has stretched me so far that I don't know how to see it as anything but absurd. How almost everything can be everything and also nothing. We make boundaries and constructs and time... we imagine up a thousand ways we think we can control any of it... I'm rambling again.