Spective

There was no water this morning – the city is slowly repiping the Fan. The temporary water outage was merely a small nuisance, yet it reminded me of what it was like to live in Armenia in the 90s.

I am feeling particularly aloof today.

Yesterday I received a call from someone who I thought I had almost forgotten. The girl, now a grown woman, who once was a close friend – a friend from the 90s, now residing in France, with her husband and two children. I was on the phone for over an hour – she did most of the talking, I merely listened absent mindedly, while unpacking the dishes. She talked about her life, about living in France, her family, of being away from what we used to call our home... Despite the abundance of words that flowed incessantly from her end, the conversation felt awkward and somewhat disturbing. And yet, I was grateful to her for doing most of the talking, because it was easier to fake excitement when I didn't have talk. I was grateful for being relieved from the part where I had to pour the contents of my heart or share the details of my life. I figured, small talk wouldn't quite cut it. So I let her talk.

Earlier in the day my soon to be ex-husband had announced, for the umpteenth time, that I was a disgusting human being. After years of emotional blackmail, torrents of accusations and suicide threats, statements of this sort have become nothing but bipolar ramblings of periodic occurrence.

Both of them, people once dear to me, reminded me of times when I was deeply and utterly unhappy. And yet, neither of the exchanges stirred any particular feelings other than mild frustration and a kind of emotional detachment that comes from the conscious, almost instinctive at this point, habit of stopping myself from feeling what I used to feel then, reliving the past and stirring up memories that could potentially evoke pain.

I haven’t had any contact with this friend for over a decade. Last time I saw my husband, and only briefly, was three years ago. There are reasons why these people are no longer in my life. I cut them off, like one would remove a cancerous tumor. There are reasons why I don’t want to relive certain aspects of my past. They are painful and I no longer want to live in constant pain.

I am protective of the happiness that I feel now. I wish this happiness didn’t come at such an ugly price. I am feeling emotionally detached from what once used to hurt and I wonder whether there are any psychological repercussions to that.