Passage Of Time

02/04/2023

Warning: This post will contain discussions of family death, grief, illness, and mortality. Thank you.

I don't think 2023 is starting off on the right foot. It's been a rough couple of weeks, and I've needed my distance to relax and handle the emotions that have come with it.

My grandfather passed away at home a few days after I had come back from visiting he and my grandmother. He had not been ill or lingered, which he didn't want. It was sudden, but considering his age, we were not entirely surprised in the same way one would be to find a young man stricken in the prime of his life. The funeral was a few days afterwards, and the rest of my time has been spent with family and at home, resting and trying to gather my own thoughts and get back to living. I've had very little energy as of late, and whether it's from my current mental situation due to events, or due to things I'm going through otherwise, I don't know. I just know that I've been fatigued lately, moreso than usual. I'm just... tired. I think I'm just tired, and a lot of it is not due to lack of sleep. I feel like I'm not making sense, just throwing words into the void in hopes someone can hear me, but that's the internet, isn't it?

Last year, almost exactly a year ago, I had a very serious medical event. This left me with a new chronic illness, more medications, and less comfort in my own skin. I'm alright, my medication works, and my metabolism seems to be returning to me in a way I haven't seen since it happened. But I feel like most people in my life completely forgot. When people in my family have medical events happen to them, we try to remember the date and tell them we're glad they survived. For me, no one did that. No one remembered. I mentioned it off-handedly a day after, and only got a passive, "Oh, yeah" and nothingness from that. I guess I'm complaining about boring shit that doesn't truly matter, but I think my current events have made me more sensitive than usual, so perhaps that's why.

Isolated is a good word for how I feel. It's like I'm on an island, waving frantically, but nobody in my life can see that I'm stranded. It's an exhausting situation, to feel so alone. People in my life will be comforted by other people in my life when bad things happen to them, and when shit hits the fan for me, I'm left to get it together on my own. People in my life will find people who understand them completely, they'll find partners and friendships and brotherhoods and sisterhoods and siblinghoods with other groups of people, and at the end of it all, I'm hanging onto a frayed and tattered rope that's coming apart in my hands, just trying to find some way to get people to understand me. Truly, deeply understand me. I have a few people I'm extremely close with, but when I see how many people those people have, or how many people other people have in their lives, I grow bitter. Sour. Anxious, envious. I haven't had a partner in seven years. I've been extremely isolated during most of those years, whether due to bullying or self-imposed isolation or isolation I can't escape due to external factors. The last friend I had IRL who lived near me, I haven't seen since January of '22. The other friend moved to a town an hour or so from where we lived. Another is so busy that I never hear from them, and that's about it for my list of connection to the outside world, apart from family. It's tiring, to see the world passing you by and nothing stopping. I wish I could stop time. I wish I could go back in time. I can't, so I post blog entries to Neocities and carry on with my hobbies and spend my time in the most boring ways possible.

Time is hell. It's not cruel, nor is it vulturous, but it's just hell. Apathetic, cold, unfeeling, ever-marching hell. And we don't have any way to combat that. Time isn't an enemy or a friend, it's just a thing that never stops. That much, I do know.