K said I need some fun in my life. I about cried. This was after we had talked about my in-the-air painting career, the funeral luncheons she had organized, how the characters in her novel could share their internal feelings through dialogue to enhance the anticipation and give us readers a clear idea of their motivations, and about how my novel is a knot of catharsis. (I think catharsis implies some level of acceptance; but maybe the knot implies its incompletion?)

I got tickets to a show for Saturday, and I am committing to go. Last night I saw a movie. Does that count? I purchased a blender/processor combo. Does that count for fun?

I know. I know. I know the kind of fun I need is social. Didn’t I used to be funny? Didn’t I used to be a cut up? I think I’ve had friends. I’m trying to find some now. I’m trying to build community where I am. There is no high like laughing with good friends. It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

So I’ll go to this show on Devil’s Night. And I know what’s going to happen–I’ll lock into the sound, I’ll let loose a bit. But it will still be singular. Alone in the crowd. And don’t get me wrong, it will be good, but it won’t be fun. Not in the way that is missing, not in a social way.

(Remember that birthday when I saw Craig Finn in Detroit?, and I took the girl whom I’d gone on a triple date with the month before, and once the music started I ignored her. I didn’t forget that she was there, but I chose, I said to myself, I’m not going to let the fact that I brought her to this show stop me from enjoying this show, and I didn’t, which meant, she didn’t much enjoy the date.)

And I saw the movie last night, You Can See Everything. Alone, in a crowd (Okay, not really, the theater I saw it was a tiny room of 15 large recliner chairs, and though it almost sold out, the couple next to me on the left didn’t show. I actually have met the woman who sat on my right, though we (or I) pretended we hadn’t, though we remarked to each other at the end–and the gals in the front row turned to me and asked what I thought afterward, too. See–and here’s my problem. There were two openings for connection and I let them hang like a high five. I keep telling myself that someday I will have to start introducing myself in social situations if I want to meet anyone–and I’ll have to let conversations exist, to, you know, have one.

I saw You Can See Everything, but I’d already spent all weekend and the beginning of this week thinking about codependency. I remembered how in Prague, there was this cocktail hour on the first evening of the program, and I attached myself to an older woman, who was a kind of pirate, and I followed her around and any time someone asked her what her tattoo meant in Arabic, I would tell them for her. There were a handful of people–indeed, mostly women–on that trip I codepended with–did they also depend on me to feel safe or comfortable among strangers, in a strange land? Later, M suggested I could move to her hometown in the hills of Colorado, work in the bar she had worked for, and live in the apartment she had lived in. I didn’t take her up on it.

I thought of D, a woman I worked with in Napa. It was unnerving to laugh so much with a person (though you know what? if I browse a little deeper I can see why this dynamic was so potent, how it was not a one-off). I’ve thought a lot about D in the last 10 years, trying to pick apart what that friendship was about, what I wanted from it. She began in the role I started in and had progressed from; and I was jealous that immediately after she arrived, people in the broader circle were inviting her to hang out. Let me put that a different way: People I wanted to be friends with invited her to be friends with them–I was jealous that I was still on the outside. So part of my dependency was that I wanted her to take me there. Nonetheless, and ironically, I felt she wanted my friendship, too, to validate and comfort and be dependable.

And let’s be honest with myself. Part of it, too–part of so many of my codependent relationships with women as a young man–was that I wanted her to gift me my sexuality.

Of course she couldn’t. Nobody can provide a thing that a person can’t find in themselves, for themselves.

And that’s what I’m trying to get at, here, there: there is some part of myself that is underdeveloped, unfound, unreleased, held back, and in my life I have attached, or tried to attach myself to others who lack. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

I don’t think that that’s where I began my marriage, though. “The story I tell myself,” as were taught in couples’ counseling, is that in the 18 months or so leading up to meeting my now-ex-wife, I was working hard to stitch my shadow back on, and let my gold shine.

I do think that my ex wanted me to be codependent.

Frankly: I had been codependent with her in an earlier version of my life. Our lives. I think, that often the strategies deployed were intended to draw me back in to full on codependency: I need you, you should need me, too. But here I thought we were both full, needing nothing.

And here’s the fucked up thing: the damage done is that my gold has diminished, depleted. I left, I got out, I said no, no, no. But the wounds, man.

When the women in front of me turned to ask me what I thought about the movie I said I needed to think about it. 24 hours later, my thought is: goddamn I’m grateful I saw the light. It could have been worse. A lot worse.

I stay home, I stay alone, because I can’t afford the risk of entering another codependent romance. I stay home and alone because I have to darn my shadow, and get used to my gold once more.

I need some fun in my life.