Wasted Days

"I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them." -Ian Fleming

 

This is a quote I stumbled across a few days ago that goes quite well with Mead's recent post titled Recent Days.

 

Taking reasonable precautions is admirable, but, as I heard someone else recently sum this topic up, 'What good is it for me to live to be 100 if I haven't done anything in 100 years?'

 

This is a thought I try to keep in my mind, as things have gotten especially frustrating lately. I have finally made it past the most painful part of the healing process, healing the wounds of Danger's passing away, as well as some risidual rape-related hurt, but this new stage of the healing process brings with it new challenges.

 

Craving intimacy- not sex, nor romance, nor even love, but true, deep, personal, frightening, overwhelming, risky, interpersonal intimacy.... This is new. This is scary. Maybe this is what most people feel when they begin dating someone new that they really like. Me, though, I'm feeling it just contemplating opening up to anyone enough to trust them not to abandon me.

 

I've dated, I've been married (and divorced), lived in a lot of places, met a lot of people, and there's still plenty I want to do... but intimacy? That... just seems to detract from all those things I want to do. Not because I can't imagine having someone there with me as I do these things, but because it takes a lot of trust to believe that someone will stand by me through trips to India, through possibly changing careers or going through college or deciding I don't ever want children of my own or- scarier yet- deciding that I do. That's a huge amount of trust! How have I not seen this before?

 

Last night, I laid awake, late into the night, wanting to be held, wanting someone to be there, to listen, to want to be there while I cried. There was nobody, though, that I'd opened up to enough to feel as though I could trust them enough to ask them to do that. There was nobody I could think of that I could call that I would want and trust to hold me and be there for me. That's not to say nobody would have, just that the people who I'd allowed to get close enough to me to feel that way weren't people I wanted there for that.

 

This all feels even more complicated than it did before I got to this level... I thought this was supposed to be the easy part?