i love you, you love me

All my life, I've loved more than I've been loved. Much, much more.

I've been immature, clung on and whined and scrabbled and dug my heels in.

Ever a child. Ever the cast-out, homeschooled yet homeless child. Even if I'm three, five, ten years older than my target of affection. Especially when I'm ten, twenty, fifty years younger.

Always left behind, and I begin to wonder how I could have enforced this upon myself so universally - how am I so good at failing, that way?

Homeschool phys-ed, somehow the weirdest and most unpopular of all these unsocialized children and their co-ops. Middle school orchestra, a psyop for pajama-pants dress code. High school tennis, a bizarre snack-bringer and an injurious, sneak-stabbed superlative. High school orchestra, a greater ingratiation that ended with all the same. College, a stilted entrance to the dorms followed by a swift and unceremonious exit, never to return.

I didn't graduate with the class. Half of them didn't even know what I looked like.

This is all not to speak of adult orchestra, in itself, a veritable pantheon of shattered and crumbled platonic relationships.

A carpet crawler, a creature crycophanting on. A bubble ready to burst, from rising and falling off a chair. A narcissistic perpetual teenager, twenty-four going on fourteen, who loves to take pictures, and preserve the virtual happiness of the moment.

And I've always found that I'm too much, too much. I drive people away so easily. So maybe that's for the better best, anyway.

It's not a gameful social contract. It's nothing anyone really wants.

It's that "it's not that he doesn't care, it's that he doesn't know how to express it" and all.

I don't want people to have to know how to deal with me. An alien, am I? Too true, too true.

I just can't remember a single person who's ever been More than I was. It's not a medal of honor, by any measure of the gird.

First it was texting first. Then it was texting more. Then it was texting on the platform I insisted, stubbornly, to keep using.

Giving gifts unasked for - they call that lovebombing, I think. Making what I thought were earnest attempts that in actual fact just crossed natural, reasonable boundaries.

And always, always, always foisting my emotional complexities and social troubles (here we thought I was the extrovert, the savant of active listening) upon people who didn't ask and are not equipped and are too individually well-adjusted for this shit.

All these years, useless years.

I made people follow me around, but I made sure never to stop seeking them out, too. I tried to exert control - indeed, who among us is surprised?

Am I doomed to only ever enjoy the company of people who are crazy insane and primed for overwhelm, like me? People who incessantly apologize and compliment with equal profusion? People who aren't really people at all, but overmorphed sentient communicater Things?

Blocked on sight. Turned right down. Told "whatever" and "continue" and "get to the point" because I talk too much, I get that, I understand, but it's not like shutting my trap ever does me all that much good, anyway.

It should be so simple, so natural, so wonderful.

But if I can't keep people, then I wish I wouldn't love them at all.