Angry.  I am a testy, irritible prick.  I've smashed three mugs in two weeks.  I tell people where to go with a cool and deliberate venom.  I glare more than I glance; my jaw hurts from clenching.  Rage rises in me more willingly than mist from whitecaps on a stormy sea, and I whip it and coax it to a peaceless climax, as if self-contempt were orgasm.  Fuck off!  Fuck you!  Fuck me! with a nail-studded bat.  I wonder what firing a shotgun up my ass would be like.  It would probably kill me slowly, in total agony, and it might not muffle the gunshot enough to keep the rescuing assholes away.  Worst of all, I'd probably survive. 

Being pissed-off and miserable pushes people away, people I may need one day—as if prudence were a reason to be nice.  If nice is not reason enough in itself, then fuck it.  And pushing people away, there's a lot of advantages to that.  There's none of the anxiety of wanting closeness, none of the confusion of feeling both desire and guilt together, as if they were joined at the hip, as if they never ocurred apart from one another.  Do they? 

And pushing people away preserves a comfy place for self-centeredness, which brings up another question; if one should not be centered on one's self, then where?  Should your happiness be my purpose?  I have done that before.  Been there.  Maybe the goal is to find another and, together, make each one's purpose the other's happiness.  Neat trick.  Like Siamese twins. 

Oh, I know it happens.  Like I said, been there.  And I don't disparage it; it's a nice place to be, but it is not where I am going.  Maybe that's a choice, but I don't think so.  The place where I am going—my persuit of wholeness, if you will—does not involve another.  It does not involve another any more than it involves all the world, every facet of creation, and creator too, whatever that may be. 

My persuit of wholeness does not exclude you, not entirely.  It just does not include you to the exclusion of anything else. 

Maybe that's why I push people away; maybe that's why I feel so anxious about being close.  Being close feels like excluding everything else, only it's everything else that I want.