Relationship stories and questions of self

For most of my life, relationships of all shapes have been difficult for me. It started at fourteen with the boyfriend who found me too serious, and that refrain has carried on through friendships and love affairs alike. Too intense. Too much. Too difficult. From teenage onwards I had the keen sense that most of my interactions with people would depend on my ability to fake it. If I failed to be comfortable and convenient to them, there would be no one. I developed a story that I am no good at relationships.

There have been people ready to play this story out with me at regular intervals. I doubt they will ever cease to show up and expect me to be exactly what they want, when they want it, and to turn it off like a tap when that’s not convenient. They want the work I can do because I care passionately about things. They want the raw creativity and sometimes they want the ego boost of being the focus of my intensity, but they want to be in control, un-obliged and easy about not bothering with me when it does not suit them.

So, I learned to hide. I learned to mask intense attachments and passionately falling in love with people. I learned to mask hunger for specific company, and wild delight in being around others. I learned not to say things like I miss you, I love you, I wish I could have more time with you. Every so often I’d take a risk on someone and let them see something a bit more authentic, and nine times out of ten they would turn out to prefer the carefully faked me. The one in ten folk have been precious beyond all words, and are not, it turns out, afraid to be that valuable.

What makes it tricky is that there are people who play at being serious, intense, wholehearted and authentic. They wear it as a costume, because they like how it looks on them. They often enjoy drama, which I don’t. It’s all too easy to get drama and intensity muddled up. But, after the arm flapping and the big words, there’s nothing to back it up, and they move on to their next little game.

I’ve found along the way that other intense, deeply feeling, passionate people don’t do this. They aren’t quick to self announce, often having been through the grinder themselves. They don’t want drama. I discover that my longstanding story is wrong. I can do relationships, but only interact well with certain kinds of people. Give me people who feel keenly and think deeply, and good things will tend to follow. I can’t deal with superficial folk, drama queens, or the ones who are there for cheap kicks and inclined to move on when they’ve taken what they wanted. People who feel threatened by the idea of love, who are panicked by the suggestion of being needed, and who can’t bear to let anything mean too much.

When you think no one can accept you as you are, it is easy to get locked into trying to appease people who are never going to be ok with you. It’s not a good way to live, it sucks the joy and colour out of life. If you are a passionate, wholehearted, intensely feeling sort of creature, then only people of the same ilk can and will answer the yearnings of your soul.

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Running forward with alarming enthusiasm

Not so long ago, I saw someone in the street to whom I have not spoken in a few years now. A reminder of the things I do not do well around people and relationships. None of it is easy to think about, or to look at, but I promised myself honesty this year, and that means not dodging the things that are profoundly uncomfortable.

Based on observation, I’m a good person to have as an acquaintance. I can show up and be helpful as required, I’m not too intense, passably entertaining and so forth. I do fairly well with acquaintances, and there are a lot of people in my life who I know a little bit, have small amounts of contact with and who do not seem to find me especially problematic.

Generally where it goes wrong is where there’s any move to make that more involved. The people who move closer most usually move away again – and the faster they moved in, the faster they leave. A few years ago, in the space of a few months one round of this went from ‘we should be the new Inklings*’ to ‘our lives should never cross again’ and the extremity of it, both ways, still troubles me. I did not utter either line. This year has brought other rounds of people who moved forward and then away.

Mostly I stay still. I worry about being excessive and difficult to deal with, and increasingly I don’t share any of the more awkward bits of me. I am, if anything getting worse at putting a hand up to express fragility, or need, especially if I’m depressed. I know this would trouble me if I was watching someone else do it.  But what I do best (in terms of how I impact on other people) largely, are the less involved, less emotionally intimate connections with people. The exceptions to this are few and only one of them spends significant amounts of time with me in person.

It’s not lack of care or open heartedness on my part, I realise. There are a lot of people I care for deeply, a fair few people I would go so far as to say I love. Any move forward suggests the possibility for a balancing retreat a little way into the future. It’s a dance that has badly damaged my confidence, and I just don’t have the energy for it anymore. I think if anyone else ran at me, suggesting we could be some kind of fabulous thing, I would simply run away and spare myself the inevitable consequences.

What I have always wanted, were deep, enduring, open hearted friendships that were based on honesty, and trust. What I can do well are fairly superficial, open hearted, lightly available but be careful at all times kinds of friendships. Those of you who will respond to this with warmth and encouragement are people who are only slightly involved with my life, internet people, or people I see occasionally. Lovely people who I value, but who I increasingly believe are only ever going to be in my life as distant and occasional features. What I get alongside this are odd people running at me proclaiming that they will be all the things, and then running away again, and I do not know why. Why this is what I attract, and why I can’t deal with it better.

There was a brief moment of eye contact in the street, with the person who would have been the new Inklings with me. I looked down, and I kept moving. ‘Our lives should never cross again’ except of course that they do because it’s a small town and we have people in common. A final request that I do my best to honour, and which haunts me nonetheless. I’ve spent years not knowing what to do with any of this. I think the answer is to accept where my strengths are – being a certain kind of friend at a certain kind of distance, and to let go of the idea of having really close friends who would choose to be involved in my life in more than a brief run forwards and run away kind of style.

 

*Literary group involving Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Forever People

If you’d asked me twenty years ago who I thought would always be in my life, I’d have got it very wrong. It was the sort of thing I used to think about as a teenager, although from a position of inexperience and not much insight. The three people I might have hoped would be around, and had grounds to think might stay part of my life, didn’t. Others did, and some of that’s been very surprising, in awesome ways.

At any point in your life, all you have for reference is what you’ve experienced. The most in love you have ever been is your measure of what’s possible on that score. Twenty years hence, will the people I thought were forever still be in touch? Some of them may not live that long. We never know. I’ve lost several people to death who I did not at all expect to lose, but their impact on me and my memory of them binds them into the continuing fabric of my life. There have been people I’ve spent little or no time with in person whose legacy will stay. Some of them died long before I was born and are only available to me through their work.

As a teen I would have thought about my forever people in terms of actual people I spent time with. The internet was not a feature of my life then, and even though I was besotted with Beethoven and George Eliot, I would not at that point have considered them part of my emotional tribe. It’s taken me a while to figure out that I am much more shaped and defined by who I continue to love than by who I necessarily continue to interact with. In that context, death and absence are no real barrier at all. It is enough sometimes to love the work, the ideas, the legacy or the memory. It’s about what we choose to let in.

There are people who have affected me so deeply that who I have become is in part consequence of connecting with them. I cannot know if I am always fully conscious of that process, and sometimes an influence is slow to show itself. There are also people who have caused me to grow in order to move away from them, and while I do not want to honour them as people who are part of my heart tribe – as they have been far short of honourable – that refusal to be as they are or to co-operate has also become part of me. In choosing who to honour, and who to forget, I am engaged in a curious process that shapes how I feel about my life and myself.

Very few of them have any idea of how important they are to me, of the ones I know, or suspect are forever people. It is often unsettling enough to a person to say ‘I love you’ when that isn’t an amorous proposition. Perhaps being this intrinsic to another person is too disorientating, too strange a thing to know and carry. Somehow, when I was a teen it was easier to talk about these things. I have become more careful with age, and also more aware that ‘forever’ is something I might be able to say truthfully, and not as a moment of misguided hyperbole.

Unfriending

Once upon a time if you fell out with someone, there was no simple mechanism for expressing this to your wider community. No symbolic divorcing was available, and either you avoided them in person, or you couldn’t and life went on. The word ‘unfriend’ did not exist, nor did the concept. I am fascinated by the way facebook has changed things for those of us who frequent it – and those other social media sites as well.

There have been seven people in my life who were known to me personally and whom it became, at various times over the last five years or so, necessary to unfriend. We’ll leave aside the spammers and the random internet connections that didn’t work because those would never have existed pre-internet anyway. Seven people I just didn’t want to interact with any more. There were reasons, some more serious than others, but it boils down to a quality of life thing and not wanting to be messed about or made needlessly miserable. In many ways the whys are irrelevant, and also too personal to share. The mechanics of it are the more interesting bit, along with the emotional impact.

Unfriending is in many ways a ritual and symbolic action of rejection. If we have friends in common and do not go so far as to block, there will remain a degree of mutual visibility. Even a blocked person in touch with mutual friends does not disappear entirely, sometimes. So the tools of the internet do not deliver total separation and freedom from the person who was driving you nuts, if they are part of your wider network.

Phrases like ‘you’re not my friend any more’ have echoes of the school playground to them. The youthful ease of acquiring and rejecting people perhaps has online parallels. Perhaps the ‘adult’ version is to be more tactful, less honest, more passive-aggressive in our dealings with people who are physically present but no longer liked or valued. Perhaps there was more honesty, integrity and utility in the childhood drawing of lines, the willingness to be affronted and the aptitude for walking away. Perhaps being socialised into tolerating what drives us mad, accepting what wounds us and putting up with those we find offensive is not as wise and mature as it’s presented.

I’ve tried it both ways, online and offline, and I am increasingly a fan of deliberate, considered unfriending where appropriate. The world is a big place and there are more people in the small town I inhabit than I could ever meaningfully interact with. Why not walk away when people do things I am really uncomfortable with, hurt by or unhappy about? We are not such a small tribe that we must of necessity work together.

The counter arguments are many. The challenge is supposedly good for me, they’re doing me a favour really. Well, I’ve come to the conclusion this is for me to decide and not for anyone else to tell me. I’ve run into the ‘this is a good person so you shouldn’t be hurt by what they do’ line a few times. That’s bullshit. If it’s necessary to defend someone as ‘a good person’ I think there’s very good odds they’re a lousy person who makes a lot of noise about how good they are. I get plenty of helpful, meaningful, growth-inducing challenges from people who do not make me miserable, so I’ll be sticking with those. I’m very suspicious now of anyone who thinks I’m so crap as to need taking apart and knocking down, but who still wants to be around me. That’s a combination I now run away from as soon as I spot it.

The other argument is that maybe these people need me in their tribe, to challenge and help them. I’ve had it suggested to me, and I’ve given it some thought. I just don’t have enough of a Jesus complex to hang around martyring myself for people who don’t seem to like me much, or value me, or have any actual use for me. There are plenty of other people, why expend all my energy on the high-maintenance few who don’t even like what I do? That’s just silly.

The ritual of unfriending has a lot of symbolic and magical power. It is a strong statement, not to be used lightly and better not deployed in haste or in anger. But sometimes, drawing a line and saying ‘enough, thank you,’ is a powerful and liberating thing to do. Now, onto the good things with the lovely people…

Knocked down, getting up

I start today tired, and wondering how on earth I’m going to manage the things that need doing – some of which are large and hard to make sense of. Some of which have floored me. Life is full of knock downs and we all get them. The rotten luck, the tragedies, the being crapped on from a great height. So here are the things I’ve learned.

Good friends are precious beyond words, and when you’re on your knees and life threatens to break you, friends are everything. Sometimes there’s insight, experience and perspective that can help turn a problem around. Sometimes it’s the sheer power of having people who believe in you and won’t give up and will sit with you and hold your hand and help you try to get up again, and support you when you wobble a bit. Friends who cheerlead. Friends who refuse to let you quit even when you’re so beaten it seems the only option. Friends who carry hope for you when you have none of your own.

Often what will keep me down once I’m knocked is the belief there is no point getting up again. That’s not always a depression issue. That’s for the days when three toxic things rolled in one after another and I can’t face another panic attack and there doesn’t seem to be any way of fixing things. There is no getting up unless you can work up some faith and hope things might get better. Belief like this can be wholly irrational – I’ve been through enough things I was told could not be done. Sometimes what it takes to get up is the skill to magic up irrational belief that it can get better.

I have to believe that I do not deserve the knock down. I do not belong on the floor. That’s been hard to get to grips with, and is not an easy thought to hold when things are bad.

Then there’s the decision about what sort of person I want to be. I don’t want to lie on the floor in a snotty heap, whimpering. I would rather die fighting. While there is breath, while I can act in any way, it is better to have the metaphorical sword or the actual pen in hand and to wield them. Thus far, every time I’ve thought I could not possibly bear any more, I have eventually managed to drag myself up for another round. I have taken beatings, emotional, psychological. I’ve been pasted physically by illness. I get up and I do it again. I won’t sit down, shut up and consent to being a victim. Never again.

Second Chances

I don’t tend to assume that life will deliver second chances. Some opportunities repeat, but many do not. I’m all too aware that sometimes you say goodbye to a person, and you never get to see them again, and you do not know at the time that this will happen. Chances to experience things, to connect with people, to fix problems, to learn… anything that turns up can be a one shot deal. There isn’t time always to follow every lead, but making those choices conscious that there may be no second chances, helps focus the mind rather.

I tend to give second chances where I can. I’m acutely aware that people mess up, and mess up for good and honourable reasons and the best possible intentions. If there’s anything to suggest that might have been the case, I’ll cut a lot of slack. People who mess up in that way are usually keen to fix things and get them right, which makes it well worth having the conversation. However, people who are sure they know better than me how I feel and what I need may have convinced themselves of their noble intentions, but do not get to pull that stunt repeatedly.

The majority of my closest friendships have, at some point been tested to breaking point, through challenges, things I’ve done, things they have done. The determination to come back and fix is key here. The person who says ‘how do we put this right?’ and who takes the time with me to do that, or to listen to my request to do that if I’m the one who messed up… these are the people I keep. The measure of a person is not their capacity for perfection, but what they do when things go wrong. Where we own mistakes, there’s scope to work with it and move forwards. Where there is genuine remorse, there’s every opportunity to sort things out.

However, where the desire is to blame, to score points, to ‘win’ I quit, as fast as I can these days. I’ve tried reconciliation with folks who like to score points, and sooner or later they do it all again. If the appearance of being right is more important than the actuality, I walk away. If the other person’s aim is to blame, or duck responsibility, to never admit to being wrong, I walk away. If I think for a moment that someone enjoys inflicting pain, I am out of there, fast. If there are double standards, and someone excuses in themselves something they find unacceptable in me, that’s another sign to leave. I do not stick around for ego trips, melodrama, scapegoating and people who like having a whipping post. Since I’ve adopted a low tolerance to this kind of behaviour, my life has improved considerably.

Not all of the losses of people and opportunity are about conscious choice, or mistakes made. Sometimes life draws people in different directions, and the slipping away is a slow, accidental process. Sometimes other factors change what’s available. Sometimes we don’t realise the value of the person we lost until there is no way back. Often there are no second chances with these, once contact is lost, there’s no scope for rebuilding it. And yet… the last week or so has raised the possibility of reconnecting with two people who were hugely important to me in my teens.

Second chances are precious things, rare, and worth being wide –eyed with awe and a little bit daunted over. Not something to take for granted.

Peace one day after

Yesterday I started out in a place of pain and confusion. I don’t usually blog so directly from what’s going on in my life, but there are times when it seems productive to share. We spent time for Peace One Day, sitting on a hill with likeminded folk. I had about 4 hours there of walking, talking, sitting, sharing bread and ideas about both peace and conflict. Then afterwards, more talking and sharing insight. There is no peace until the pain has been addressed, but there is also, as was pointed out to me, a violence in the healing, and that’s hard to face.

Today I am actively seeking the things that leave me feeling better: Time in my lover’s arms, time on small jobs around the flat. I’ve set up some wine. There will be a walk and jam making along the way as well. Just being with my family in our little home and letting myself feel held and protected by that. It’s often the smallest and most practical things that help me feel peaceful and secure. It’s not big speeches and grand gestures, but a friend’s hand on my shoulder, a warm word online, extra time in the duvet.

I am an intensely emotional sort of person, and it is easy to let that turn into a focus on the large and dramatic stuff. Passion, inspiration, rage and rapture are attention demanding. They take over. I’m starting to see though, that while these intense things bring colour and a sense of direction into my life, they aren’t what holds me together from one day to the next. These are not sustaining forces. Far too readily overlooked, and perhaps far more critical, are the influences of kindness and liking. No one can sustain passion or lust full time. It’s exhausting. Having that in modest and manageable bursts is glorious, but what happens in between?

I started asking myself why this relationship I am in works so much better than anything else ever has for me, and I think the answer is, because we also like each other and care about each other. On the tired, scruffy, lacklustre days, care will keep a relationship warm, tender and close. A default position of kindness means that even when we disagree or misunderstand each other, we don’t end up hurting each other. It makes worlds of difference.

Liking and kindness go together well. These are sustainable things, feasible for the long term, creating threads of emotional engagement you can hang the whole rest of your life from. Equally, for me it is the spaces where that warmth and gentleness are lacking that I really suffer. I know there are people who believe in vigorous debate, in challenge, who take a combative and macho approach to all aspects of relationship, interaction and creativity. It makes me very sad. So I have come to the conclusion that if other people want to be strenuous in their debates, ruthless in their creative approaches, tough and hard-nosed in their beliefs – they’re entirely welcome to that thing but I won’t be showing up for it.

I like deep exploration of subjects. I enjoy the interplay between barely compatible ideas and exploring outlooks different to mine. I am open to being challenged, disagreed with, told I am mistaken, but I need that to be done by people who also care about me enough as a fellow human being to treat me with kindness at the same time. Or at least not actively be unkind to me. This, it turns out, is the price of peace in my life, and where I find what I need is unavailable, I’m going to move on. There is no need for anyone else to do differently, I don’t believe in asking people to change for me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I have a right not to be in spaces that make me miserable and ill, and that the only answer is to quietly leave them.

My thanks to everyone who shared yesterday with me, who offered wisdom and insight, kindness and friendship. Let’s keep doing those things.

Trust

There is a form of trusting that puts faith in the imagined perfection of another human, and then gets crushed by the inevitable reality. We are all flawed, we mess up, misjudge, and misunderstand even when we’re doing our best to get it right. For trust to be meaningful, it cannot be based on any anticipation of perfection.

I found myself thinking this morning about the handful of people I trust most. You’re an interesting set, let me tell you. All of you are damaged and troubled people, to some degree or another. All of you are a bit wild and unpredictable. I don’t trust you to turn up and do specific things, to remember, or even reliably to be gentle with me. Some of you are pretty challenging when the mood is upon you. You people who I love and trust the most, are a difficult bunch. So, what am I trusting? Nothing in there suggests what trust is normally considered to be about. It’s not about your reliability or predictability, that’s for sure.

Although in fairness, some of you are reliable about some things.
You are the people I can and do go to when I am in trouble. You are the tiny number of people I can cry in front of and feel safe, and feel no shame. I can let you see me when my body doesn’t work properly, when my mind is flaky, when my heart is breaking and all I can do is whimper.

What I trust, is that you have accepted me, flawed and messy as I am. You know what I’m like and you’re ok with that, and it doesn’t matter what facet of myself I put in front of you, you’ll know what to do with that. Probably because things in your chaos resonate with mine. I trust you because you are passably able, or in some cases remarkably able, to accept your own nature, whatever that is, and in accepting who you are, you have room to accept me.

Then there is the trust that comes from knowing that if there was a crappy way of interpreting what I said, and a well-meaning way, you’ll assume it was the second one. You won’t look at what I do when I’m ill, or tired, or in pain and assume I’m just trying to get out of something, or that I do not love you any more. Part of why I am able to trust you, is that you reflect that same kind of trust back to me. I don’t have to explain, and you’ll take me at my word. If I say I am ill, you will not worry that really I was bored and didn’t want to be honest with you. Or any of that crap.

I’m pretty good at liking and accepting people. I do it as much as I can. I try to see how the world looks from other people’s perspectives, try to take people on their own terms. I want to learn, and understand. Mostly I am not very good at trust, and that definitely isn’t because I seek impossible perfection in others. I’m coming round to thinking that a lot of it, is simply that I am tired of dealing with people who do not trust me, and this is a two sided thing.

Don’t trust me to be awake, or clever, to know or be able to do. But you can trust me to care and to try, to give it what I’ve got, and not to bullshit you.

Do not trust me with cake, though.

Honourable relationship

There is a certain irony to the fact that the people who taught me most about the theory of honourable relationship were not able to live it when the crunch time came. To be human is to be flawed, and the ideals we hold up are not always the things that drive us in our choices. I tend to feel that what we do in crisis is the best measure of who we really are. It’s easy to walk your talk when life is simple and straightforward. When there is pain and fear, when we are hurt, lost, threatened, walking the talk is harder. It’s easy to treat honourably those people who are nice to be around, but what does it take to act honourably in the face of something more challenging?

I kick this sort of issue around a lot. I feel very strongly the need to try and act as well as I can in all things, but I find myself questioning what that even means in the first place. Let’s take honesty as an issue. Outright lies we can put to one side, but most lies are lies of omission. Exactly how much honesty does another person need from me? The truth about a number of things – my history and mental state especially, are not comfortable to have to deal with, so for the greater part I’m not honest about that. I hide it, take it away, or handle it indirectly in less alarming ways. For casual acquaintances, that seems appropriate, fair and workable, sparing them a lot of needless hassle and me the shame and distress of baring that which hurts most.

Then there are the small number of people who I spend enough time with to make it difficult to fake functionality. People who are going to see what happens when body, mind or both cease to be fully operational. Then what? Better, perhaps to have warned them in advance so that it isn’t surprising. Part of me still wants to hide it, to simply not have those closer friendships in the first place so that I do not have to deal with the things I feel uncomfortable about. Which is a bloody awful way to feel. I have a very close, open and trusting relationship with my bloke, and for the greater part that gives me what I need. But, to cut myself off from others, to hold a protective line rather than face the things I am embarrassed by and uneasy about… that doesn’t feel honourable or good to me. Then of course, exposure to me as I am, intense, complicated, still carrying too much pain and fear… that isn’t easy to take and I know not everyone will feel they can cope with that or want it in their lives, so every exposure is a risk of rejection, and leaves me feeling vulnerable. But it is fairer to let people choose, rather than letting them get dependent on me or fond of me only to find that I am, in practice, unbearable.

One of the things I struggle with is that I am not responsible for how other people feel or what they do. I am not obliged to be convenient and comfortable, and I have to keep reminding myself of that. No sane person is going to expect me to magically know what the best thing I could do for everyone, all of the time, is, and expect me to also do it. I’ve removed from my life the people who seemed to hold such expectations, because it’s impossible. I’d have to be superhuman, and I most assuredly am not. All I can do is the best I can come up with, given the realities of who and how I am, and what I have to deal with. What I need to learn to do, I suspect, is to apologise for that less, and to accept that some people will indeed walk away if I am too difficult. It is ok to let them go. I do not owe them anything.

I have come to a point of recognising that my energy is finite, and often not sufficient for the things I want to achieve. I cannot afford to spend more time trying to pretend to be things I am not in the hopes of not inconveniencing people. That often exhausts me, and means I push beyond safe limits, leaving me vulnerable to depression. Not a clever move. So, I’ll accept the trade off, I’ll do what I have to do, and try to be more honest about when I’m not functioning. Other people are responsible for how they respond to that. I would not shame someone else for being ill, tired or damaged, I will not allow myself to be shamed on those terms either. Well, it’s a theory at any rate. I can but try.

Laughing at Disaster

When the Gods close one door for you, they often make good and sure they’ve got your fingers in the doorjamb first.

Yesterday was just one of those days, watching thing after thing go wrong, fall apart, fall over, from the trivial – my punctured tyre – to the epicly bad – a promise dishonoured that puts us in an awkward position. When the final one came in, there was nothing to do but laugh at the sheer ludicrousness of it. I had said only that morning how little faith I have in any ideas of safety, security or things being dependable. Ah, the smug joys of pessimism!

The big, critical things I’ve needed to have go right, have done so. The last year or so has been an intense exercise in finding out what I can’t do without, and what is not so important. Every ‘disaster’ is a lesson in what really matters. Yesterday’s blow had really knocked my mother, but there I was, shrugging, figuring out the implications and how to work round them. Another day, another betrayal, another solution.

There’s been no shortage of blows and losses. With each one, comes a process of refining and clarifying. A paring down to the bone, that used to shock and distress me, but as there’s less and less flesh to hack off, it hurts less, and the bones underneath turn out to be strong and reliable.

There’s a strength and certainty that comes from knowing what is essential, and what is not. It’s so easy to be bowed down even by the small setbacks, the tiny losses that seem enormous if you don’t have them in perspective. I lost my home. Which is nothing compared to keeping my emotional freedom and keeping my child safe. Financially I’ve been totally compromised – but I’m still viable, and that’s all that is needed. I could go on, down a long list of things stripped away. The loss of community hurts, but I still have contact with people so that’s not all gone. Friendship holds even at a distance, and people understand why I’ve had to cut and run.

What can I not do without? My awesome bloke and my brilliant child. Beyond that, we need a roof over our heads, enough money for the basics, and the rest, if needs be, we can muddle through on. While we have each other, while we have love and friendship and plenty of imagination, we can get by without most of the toys and distractions, if needs be.

The Gods slam another door, fingers are bruised. We stop and swear, and we nod in recognition. Yeah, we see you. Fine, you’re sending us another one? We’re still standing and there are still plenty of doors. We’ve got what matters most – we’ve got each other. The rest really is just detail.