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There is a girl weeping in the office next to mine. She is being
comforted by the xerox machine repair man. I don't know who she is, but
she's been screaming something about how "she had no right to be there" in
between sobs. Jimmy crack corn and I don't care...
I expect that Calliope and I will put an end to our relationship in
the near future, at least in its current form. While I have always known
that she deserves someone better than me, the true tragedy of our
relationship is that she has succeeded in building up my self esteem to the
point where I recognize the fact that I too deserve someone better. She
is not happy with me. There are a variety of reasons. From
conversations with her about her previous relationships, and just from
knowing her as intimately as I do, it's obvious that Calliope is happiest
in a relationship in which she is clearly superior, intellectually, to
the guy and in which she can never be completely sure that the guy
actually likes her. Not only do I start out with one strike against me
because I'm obviously intelligent and am going to a "better" school than
her (not that I deserve it), but I made the mistake of convincing her
completely of how much I care for her. With courting over, the allure of
the relationship is apparently gone for her.
The biggest problem, though, is that I am too nice to her. When
she is unreasonably upset, I let it slide. That has had two very
unfortunate results: (1) She becomes more and more upset more and more
often because she knows she can get away with it and (2) she is fully
aware of how hateful she's been to me after the fact and so starts hating
herself and then taking it out on me. It's a vicious cycle.
Calliope acts differently around other people, and I worry that my friends
will not understand, or perhaps not even believe, the reasons for which we
are breaking up. She claims that I am the only one with whom she can be
completely open, that I am the only one that won't hate her because of how
depressed and hateful she usually is and sometimes is, respectively. So they
might not understand quite where I'm coming from since they've never really
seen how depressed Calliope generally is. So basically, I'm not making her
happy, though she pretends to be when around other people. And that's bad.
We talked about this a whole lot yesterday and it turns out that she is
not only unhappy with me, but that she's been waiting for me to dump her
for two months or so now. She's tried to dump me a couple of times but
she can never make it stick; she doesn't have many other friends and she
has this dependancy on me. She knows she's dependant, too, and that
makes her all the more depressed and mad because she feels helpless. She
says that it will be a relief to go off to school, to be away from
me. And I understand that she means no malice in that statement; it's
the only way for her to let go of me. Once she is away from me, she will
be forced to make new friends and to cease being dependant on me... And
I know how she feels. I've been secretly, very guiltily, looking forward to
her leaving, because her dependancy has been weighing heavily upon me. I
can never not hang out with her after work, or she'll get all depressed
and mad and start screaming at me about how I only spend time with her
when it's convienent for me. The thing is, I spend all my time with
her... I never, ever, even just have a few hours alone at home by my
self. Occasionally the need to have some space overwhelms me and I decide
to go home after work and rest for an hour before having dinner with my
parents and *then* coming over to see her. That mere two hours is too
much for her; nearly every time I don't see her immediately after work she
starts yelling and crying and threatens to break up with me. She always calms
down after about 45 minutes and the next day it's like nothing ever
happened, but it's still really hard on me.
Update on the sobbing girl. It turns out it was Martha, the woman
who works the front desk and answers phones. It appears that her oldest
daughter, who is my age, is dead. She was in an accident last night
involving a tanker truck that exploded, they're not completely sure it
she's dead because they're having trouble identifying the ashes... but it
was her car. The xerox machine repair man turned out to be Martha's
husband. I've been thinking for the past few days about how I have so
little empathy, and that frightens me. But this I feel... this burdens
me. Thank God I'm still human, thank God I can still feel this.
So Calliope isn't happy in the relationship and, increasingly, nor am
I. Being the messed up individual that I am, my unhappiness is not
reason enough for me to dump her; her unhappiness is, though. I care
about her and I want her to be happy; since I can't do it, I'll make way for
someone else to try.
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