omnia_mutantur | "Don't ask me to hurry"

So far, for the most part, Abundance has been having his dates on Friday nights. He's probably right when he says they're the least disruptive day and I know that there's not a day of the week I'd be more comfortable with. He asks me sometimes if schedule-things are okay, and I never know how to answer that. For the moment, I'll fall back on okay being the same thing as not asking him not to do something, but I suspect it's not the same thing.

I want to not care, I think. I want to be able to ignore the panicky feelings until they go away. I want to not feel prickly when he leaves and even pricklier when he comes back. And maybe I'm trying to punish him with my feelings? it's hard to tell the difference between feeling my feelings and using them to manipulate other people.

I keep wondering what I'm worried about, and I know it's mostly him leaving and the idea of what will happen to my emotional state when he does. Maybe after that fear, it doesn't really matter what I think he'll be leaving me for, but I still suspect that's wrapped up in whatever the fear is. (Yeah, I know I keep talking about what does or doesn't or should or shouldn't matter). If it's that he's going to decide that what he wants out of life is to go have a primary, nesting relationship with someone who still all their factory parts, or with someone who isn't married to someone else, or with someone who is better at being chill about polyam, or even someone who just doesn't cry so much, it's mostly the same final effect, he won't be here with me, we won't be in a relationship anymore. Sure, if I get to know the reason when it happens, different reasons will gut me in different ways, and be differently hard to recover from, but anticipating which way it'll hurt doesn't do me any favors in the present.

I still fall prey to the fallacy of if I can just imagine the worst thing that can happen that the imagining of it will somehow muffle or mitigate the blow when it falls. Intellectually, I understand that this probably just extends the miserable time, or makes me miserable when I might not even need to be at all, but trying not to go down those paths feels so unbearably risky too, like I'm courting some unimaginable danger and that being ambushed by pain will end in disaster. And by disaster, I think I mean I'll lose all the bits of functionality that I've painstaking assembled from the shitshow of my brain and while I'm pretty sure every year I'm better than I've been, the bottom never feels that far away.