Greetings from Flutopia
I’m sick. Hurray. Just what I needed.
My son came down with something a few days ago. I thought it was a case of food poisoning, but having now caught it myself, apparently, I was wrong.
My poor son spent the better part of Tuesday night throwing up. Poor kid. I felt so bad for him. He has a loft bed, and I have a queen-sized bed, so he spent most of the night sprawled out on mine. Climbing up and down a ladder between runs to the bathroom only made it worse, so he just spent the intermezzos stretched out next to me under a pile of blankets.
He’s a senior in high school now. It has been an awfully long while since he has been really sick with something. Taking care of him was a bit of a bittersweet throwback. Not that I enjoy cleaning up puke, but doing so brought me back to when he was little and got sick sometimes.
I just adore that kid more than life itself. I love being his father. There is nothing about being his father that I have ever not loved. I hate when he’s sick. I’ve always loved taking care of him. That hasn’t changed. I suppose it never does.
He was down and out for a solid day but then sprung back in the way you do when you’re young. I started to feel ‘off’ yesterday morning myself and was in bed by 11:00 a.m. I slept for the better part of the next sixteen hours.
Somewhere in the middle, I got up to try to finish the draft I left open on my laptop. I made it to the living room… started shivering like I had hypothermia… and went running back under the three-ply stack of comforters on my bed.
Chills are the worst. I don’t mind the usual assortment of symptoms that come with a stomach flu, but the chills… those I could do without. That ‘freezing cold, can’t get warm’ feeling is just the worst.
I just crawled back in bed and showed little more than the top of my head until this morning. I’m up and around now though, so I suppose that’s progress.
I am just so wrung out at the moment.
I have the series I was working through to finish – and it needs to be finished. Everything about it is just a soul-draining wringing of a towel that has already been wrung out quite enough, thank you very much.
I need to complete it though – and for several reasons. The first is because I have a real problem in my real life that isn’t going to go away. It has been my reality, my real life, for a year.
Unfortunately, it is going to continue to be my reality.
I just can’t have it continue to be my whole life.
A person I dated briefly nearly two years ago is not well.
They are operating from a place that this is purely narcissistic.
They are in a state of persistent delusion.
They will not go away, and they will not stop doing things that harm my actual life.
They have entirely fractured from objective reality when it comes to me.
They are in a state where they believe a fictitious, delusional. alternate reality – which they manufactured entirely in their head - is actual reality.
In that state, they truly cannot process…
They are out of my life…
They are not welcome in it…
That it is my right to remove them from it…
and that I have done so.
In their disordered state, they believe there is still something between us… that we are still interacting… that they are not only on my mind but central to my existence.
They truly have no contact whatsoever with *the actual objective reality* where they are not in my life and are violating my consent by forcing themselves into it against my will.
I cannot get this person to go away.
I can’t get them to stop doing things which are harmful to my actual life.
I literally can’t go two weeks without being notified about some new harmful thing they’ve done.
I need to finish the series I’ve been writing because all of that is simply… my actual life.
A severely unwell person will not leave me alone.
And all I can do is… live with it.
The best I can do is having at least *here* as a refuge.
To make that possible, I need to:
1) Bring my own community to understand the actual reality of my life; and
2) Remove people who reject that actual REAL-LIFE REALITY because they prefer their own fantasies over actual real-life reality.
To say all of this has been an absolute nightmare is the understatement of the MILLENIUM.
It has been Dante’s effing inferno.
Someone who was in my life physically for *THREE MONTHS* has now been the worst thing that ever happened to me for *SIX TIMES AS LONG*.
And she won’t go away.
And that is my life.
I’m sick. I’m tired. I have to finish this series, and then I have to immediately pivot to worrying about how I’m going to get through the next few weeks.
I just want my life back.
I just want a chance to get my life back.
That’s all I want.
A chance to get my life back.
If I can just make it through this, it’ll get better…
If I can just get my community to understand…
If I can just get through the next few weeks…
If I can just get clear of this, if I can just get a little runway…
If I can just…
I am so tired of “If I can just…”.
This time, though.
Maybe this time it’ll be true.
On the other side of this is life again.
If I can just.