luck of the irish

I'm so lucky to have these folks around. So lucky. Worlds.

But everyone's got a bubble around them, and though I could never quite see through mine, to tell that it was there (and to tell how really itching-burning badly I didn't want it to be), I'm prone to bursting it so easily.

Well, not easily. So...forcibly. So suddenly. So willfully, if not willingly.

In a way that surprises people who expect a bit of grace, a bit of professionalism. No, I'm clumbery, and I'm autistic.

And I have to accept, of course, that not only is not everyone there to mete the bursting, graceless or not, but not everyone owes me the entitlement of being my friend; of being open. It's not just that they're not available to it because they're too nonchalant, too cool for school.

(I hate nonchalance. I despise it. I saw it said that the longer you spend around nonchalant people, the cooler you get yourself - not a congratulation, but an estimation. Emotional unavailability. But it's not true. I don't even wish it were. I don't like to imagine it. Thank god I kept letting myself get hurt over, and over, and over again.)

Some people are just grieving. Some people are just on other planes that don't have space and time to wait for you, to let you in, to give you a chance to show them and yourself how much you care for them, and for yourself, and for the you that knows them and sees them and sits as patiently as possible for a perfectly imperfect opportunity at peer.

So I'm hatcheting on and away at the grief conglomerating a mass in my chest, at this person I can't love, because he's not like that. He's just a pair of shoes, a pair of glasses, a charming car. A jacket and a newsboy cap. A smile crooked and toothy.

(The horn, in the red case. Siegfried's call. Cormac's ceili.)

He doesn't gab like an old lady. He doesn't hobble like an old man. He's cool, so cool. I didn't know how old he was, but I bet he was 69. And turnabout later, I was right, or astonishingly approximately so.

But his knee goes, and his turtle'll outlive him, and I squirrel away each story like a secret.

This is what he told to me.

Conversation, so rare. Familiarity, even rarer. Even as he has the most characteristic and wonderful nickname of all.

I let him alone. I let him decide. I'm forever paralyzed by the time I asked something of him. It happened once, twice. I always tremble of ever letting it happen again.

What can I ask? What can I do?

There's something in there I can't know.

I assume this, though. I assume that his grief, long-buried, begets my grief, on a long trajectory to collision. I except away my frustration by way of postulation; it must be out of my hands if I'm to get it out of my head.

My head's sort of irrelevant to the chasm, though. It hollows in my throat, clutches in my chest. A black hole eating me alive, because I adore. Because I miss. Because I cry.

I hate the thought of being unpleasant. To anyone, but to him most of all. And there's no reason for it. I think I'm afraid more than I am especially considerate.

(I think I'm petrified, and I think I'm awfully callous.)

A teacher, long ago. A great one. A supervisor, so respected. A being of infinite compassion and patience, with just enough stamp on nonsense and just enough nonsense of his own.

He's so funny, witty, wise.

But he was a young person, once, too. Somewhat of a sadder thing than being old, I think. As fear relates to sorrow, that is.

Not everyone has to be happy. Not everyone can even be half as exuberant as you pretend half the time, half the time.

It's not that he isn't polite, isn't cheerful, isn't Mr. Positivity.

But I need big signals, and I can't have them. So I wait for luck to spin the wheel another crueling turn and tell me it'll be a good day, today. You'll get to love him, like you're good at it, and he might even know it so.

That's the worst part, you see. To know that whatever I'm feeling now, weighing me down and cutting me with bludgeons from the inside out, is only the barest fraction of the crush I'll feel later.

The tiniest sliver of the all-encompassing apathy that will swallow me listlessly whole when I can't even dream of loving, anymore.