nearest & dearest

Taylor Swift fandom did not catch me as early as it did the person I used to talk about Taylor Swift with a lot. The person I have in mind collected all her physical CDs from the very first.

Recently, I have not heard much from that person. It kind of hurts that she doesn't really know much about what's going on with my life anymore. I know she's been going through burnout and fatigue, but it has been a thought process over the past couple of weeks to realize that even though she has kind of removed herself from my everyday sphere of thought that there's a part of my heart that is hurting for her absence.

It's not that I don't care about her, and I believe that she probably thinks she cares about me. I just think that she has this very immediate-local-reality locus of attention these days for herself. I know that a couple of years ago, she was a bit more online again, and it burnt her. But she and I met online, and it's like she used to understand my way of life and that my relationships are, by necessity, fairly online-focused.

A couple years ago, during that getting-burnt part, she thanked me for being there for her and indicated that had it not been for me that she might have been much worse off or in real danger due to the fallout of that situation. But then, as she cocooned away to try and begin the process of healing, she just pretty much vanished from my life.

She pops in every now and then, and for a while, I left her breadcrumbs or dead bird offerings, like a cat, hoping that when she bothered to check her discord notifications that she would respond to my thoughts toward her or care to show her things she liked. Sometimes, it worked.

For the most part, however, she would come in with whatever new thing she wanted to say with little or no acknowledgment of the backlog of links. And I get that the longer she was away, the more daunting 10 or 12 links might become, over the course of weeks and months. However, something kind of punched me in the chest a little.

I told her about Charlie's passing. It was just a small message. I thought she might notice or care, as her pets and stress over her aging dog has sometimes been a reason for her long-term absence or stated inability to have deep conversations. I know that, in the past, she has told me about how she only has "meme sharing" energy for people. And, to some degree, I can relate and sympathize with that. I try really, really hard to just keep telling myself that this is such a time for her and that she is dealing with what might be some kind of chronic fatigue disorder.

I try my best to reason with my emotions. But she didn't even notice the message. When I asked her if she'd seen it, she even excused it as having gotten lost in the shuffle of my sending her other relevant-to-her links. So, I told her something to the effect of, "Well, if they're too much for you to go through at this time, I'll stop sending so many."

This was two-pronged in a way. On the one hand, I mean it for both our sakes. If my efforts are not any kind of comfort to her and are just some kind of thing to maybe or maybe not bother with when she has 15 minutes of energy for interacting with me, quarterly at best it seems, then I don't think I should curate anything for her with the thought that it will be well-received or that I should give her some hypothetical social obligation to fulfill or not. On the other hand, I was really hurt that she doesn't even look at my messages closely enough, before sending one of her quarterly messages, to see if I have left a comment there about anything major in my life. Even something like losing a pet when, as I said, she has more than once put a pin in everything in her life in a very vocal and clear boundary-setting way about dealing with her pets.

When I said this, she said something like, "Do whatever's best for you."

I don't think it can be much more clear that there is a kind of dismissal of my importance and feelings there. At least, I have to assume there is.

If our relationship is ever solid enough again for me to send her this post to read, I hope that she doesn't feel angry or slighted by the fact that I am talking about her in vague terms to my online journal that's really only read by a handful of acquaintances. Because it's not like I can talk about it with her with the expectation that I will be heard anytime soon.

I kind of anticipate that she'll reach out in a few days when she's had time to listen to and digest the Taylor Swift album. That's one of "our things" together. It's a shared interest we know we have with each other even when other people in our lives don't share it.

But what counts as "in each other's lives"?

I get that people, especially married people and people with "professional" faces on their careers, have this tendency to compartmentalize and only come back to certain aspects of their lives when they have the time and emotional space for it. I do the same thing... to a degree. But I can't help but feel like I've been through two or three deep crises since she kind of dropped out of regular circulation in my life. And sure, maybe it's because her own crisis of energy and deep burnout is somehow so much worse than I understand.

But friendship is a two way street.

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