Questions and No Answers

Several weeks ago I spoke to Aziza on a Friday night. When neither of us is gallivanting across our perspective cities we find Friday evenings a good time to catch each other and also catch up. Since that last conversation I have been wrestling with a question that I am finding hard to answer. I think mostly because I don’t want to answer it and because I find it a rather disturbing and somewhat dark part of my living truth.

Publicly I am easily framed as a young man with a kind heart, caring and always in good spirits. With that image outsiders extract that I am also a man who feels deeply and has cups of empathy, sympathy and soft feelings that overflow. Further, that I may be rather soft, warm and emotional. But I am not many of those things. Often, but not always, it is like I am emotionless, in particular those emotions that involve hurt, pain or sadness.

I have heard of deaths and other troubling news and never flinched. In most instances I am nonchalant and go about my business as if nothing has happened.

I easily detach myself from others without second thought. A frightening number of people that I know, friends and family included, if I never spoke to again I don’t think I would miss. How horribly true. A buddy that I had known for years has been calling me for two years and I won’t answer her call. I just decided one day that I didn’t want to talk to her. The same is the case with another once friend. I decided last year on Christmas Eve that I would never speak to him again. But at least then I had more of a reason. I felt he lived in lies and I only could surround myself with those who live in truth. He’s reached out. I have not at all been phased.

The last time I cried was in 1999. There must be something wrong with that. At one point I believed it is because I had used all of my tears up as a child and I had no more left. However it can’t be that simple. Open and shut. It disturbs me because I think there must be something wrong with me. What happened to me along the way, what series of events caused me to move to a place where I could feel no more? Where did this numbness come from?

Aziza pointed to an answer that I still can’t accept. She thinks it may stem from relationship, or lack there of with my father. But I don’t see that as the case. In no way do I even care about him. To some that too is disturbing. No love. No hate. No joy. No anger. I am sans emotion. She believes that if I were to develop a feeling of some sort about him that I would then be able to have feelings about other things too. That it all starts right there. I don’t think so. I believe it is something much greater. I believe it must be a combination of all my life experiences. But how could even those lead me to this? Were my tender youthful feelings lashed so much that my flesh turned to leather and beating heart to still stone? Is the true reason that the universe has not allowed me to love someone and them love me is because part of love is hurt and I’ve yet to again acquire the ability to do so.

I have questions and somewhere I must also have answers.