3AM.

Relationships are too painful to me. Not just the intimate, romantic or sexual kind, but every relationship and it’s because to call someone your friend, or brother or sister is to use a possessive noun in relation to yourself. ‘My’ sister, ‘my’ mother, etcetera and so on and so forth. It is not that we lay claim to the person, it’s that we lay claim to the things we observe that we feel are unique to our relation or ability to relate to them. It’s the little idiosyncrasies we lay claim to; we assign a value to them and I am like everyone else, I do the same thing. And then the relationship ends and it’s just too painful to me.

And make no mistake, all relationships end in some way, shape or form, whether it be some terrible event that renders two people irreconcilable, or death or whether personal evolution and maturity and development cause change, that then requires the relationship to change, in some way every relationship meets an end either by termination or by metamorphosis proportionate to the change in the individuals themselves, that is inevitable with the passage of time, life experiences and so on. The way a would be lovers brow would furrow when I made my interest in him known, the way the right corner of his mouth would turn down ever so slightly whenever I said something truly amusing. I planted my flags there in that terrible country where our relationship still resides. Memories beset by borders, meant not to limit them and their influence on past, present and future but to make clear that not only do they exist relative to all the other places in my own unique world, but they terraform it’s very landscape. They limit the scope of their power, much like international borders in the real world do ( or ought to).

While I may have been deported from that place I still feel its influence.

And so it is with me, my world, once fully conquered, now consists of places where I am not welcome, wanted or have been decidedly abandoned by myself. The proximity of borders are tectonic plates shifting, crashing and forcing one against the other, as my relationships grow, fade, or struggle against one another. My mothers disappointment with my infatuation with an atheist and our relationship’s subsequent recovery when my relationship with Daniel collapsed on itself like cold concrete and steel, set ablaze with jet fuel.

All this embellishment is to say that as a, (dreaded?) child of the new millennium, my generation has been taught that aloofness and utter control and repression of any outward show of emotions is direly important and we treat relationships as such. Casual sex rules this age. Sexual liberation, freedom and indulgence are peaking, as reparations for centuries spent repressing the rights and freedoms of all. Feminism is grating against stigmas and gender roles established sometime along with the dawn of civilization. Women empowering themselves by owning their bodies fully and sexually and holding men accountable for their responsibility in this new changing tide. The most important part of all this, is the way we distance ourselves from our responsibility to one another, to our scientifically inherent mandate to bear witness to one another,via technology and social media. Face to face conversations have been replaced with retina displays. Physical proximity replaced with chats and iMessage conversations. Confessions with a double tap: to like or not to like? The greatest debacle facing the prepubescent today.

Carefully crafted personas on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and tinder and whatever, filter out all the good things, all the grit and grime that one may lay claim to. Like purified sugar, it still gets the job done but it’s not as sweet. All the honey was in our unspoken obligation to one another, the hope for kindness and concern and most of all friendship. But when we and others fail at those things, we simply hide behind the screens. Ignore messages, fabricate imagined slights, pick and chose, unfriend and unfollow those whose visas have been promptly revoked, whose pending deportation from our little countries, within our completely imagined worlds are only, simply, a swipe away.

It all seems so trivial, and fun and interesting at its best, and at its worst, it is invariably always painful for me.

And yet I still and always hope, that someone will simply look up, away from the screen, away from the facade, and stare directly into the real.