Last night before bed, I started reading Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. It’s a memory play I’ve always wanted to read, especially after I really enjoyed Streetcar Named Desire. I was only ten pages into it but already felt like Laura, one of the four characters in the play, reminded me of Ed. Laura is the main character’s older sister, and she experiences some illness at a young age that results in her being disabled for the rest of her life. Because of this, she also is extremely fragile mentally. The way she responds to things is like the more feminine version of my brother.

I went to sleep and dreamt that I was home again, and to my surprise Ed was there. I kept thinking in my mind, he is still alive? And suddenly we start having a conversation during which he tells me that he has just ten more days to live before he will take his life. He continues about his business in the house, reading his Bible, cutting and eating fruit, going to the bathroom to floss. I sit there and don’t do anything. I just think. I think of all the ways that I can prevent him from taking his life in the next ten days. Maybe we can do some activity together that I know he will love, and in his moment when he is about to jump, he remembers how much fun we had just a few days before and decides he wants to do that again! Or maybe I can have him listen to Shania Twain and ask him, is this really the last time you want to hear that amazing voice? Or maybe on the tenth day, I could just prevent him from escaping my presence, tackle him, and then just sit on top of him and not get up. Well, it may have worked. Who knows.

I woke up and felt distraught and unmotivated, so I skipped the gym. Again. In reality, he really did succeed in leaving me. I wonder what it would have been like if ten days before July 22, I really did know for sure that he would leave me forever.

We’re all bad listeners. Even if we say we are good listeners, we’re all really just crap at it. Even quiet people who claim to be great listeners still want to be heard; their struggle to speak is just more silent. We’re human beings; that’s the way we are programmed.

One of the worst feelings, though, when having a conversation, is when you are cut off, and not just cut off once, but repeatedly – over and over and over again. This happened a number of times during a three-way conversation today among me and two other men today. Initially, I thought, these jerks. They’re doing this because I’m the only woman in the conversation! I can do this, too! So I started cutting them off. But as I stood there and observed, I realized that they were doing the same exact thing to each other. It led to a number of misunderstandings, which I was able to clear up at the very end of this conversation that really should have lasted about 1/4 of how long it did last.

Everyone really just needs to shut up and listen. It’s not going to kill you to wait a few extra seconds and listen to what the other person has to say. I feel exhausted.

Tonight, we went to see a play called Dinner with Friends, which is about two couples who are best friends and do everything together – outings, vacations, endless home-cooked dinners at home. They even get pregnant and raise their kids together. Then one day, one of those marriages breaks up, and they have to face the harsh reality that life is evolving and will never be the same again – for them as friends, as well as their own respective relationships with their spouses (and ex-spouses).

Karen tells Beth that for the first 20 years of her life, she did everything she could do to get away from her family (assumption here is that they are obviously dysfunctional), and the last 20 years of her life, she did everything she could to create her own family – of friends, a loving husband, and kids they bore and raised. Apparently, she says, she was trying to escape how “fucked up” her family was, but in the end, the friends she chose are just as fucked up.

That actually sounds kind of familiar.

I was sitting having iced tea with a friend today, and we were half joking about how people in general are disappointing when it comes to “trying hard enough” to keep in touch. “There’s no reciprocation,” my friend said. He said to me that in general, if a friend is over 20 miles away from you, the chance that s/he will make a genuine effort to continually keep in touch is pretty tiny. I said I had friends less than that distance who were difficult to make plans with. And then I have found with people who I have considered close, sometimes I just get exhausted of always feeling like I am putting more effort into keeping the contact going, so since Ed left us last year, I’ve consciously made an effort to stop doing certain things that either provide no benefit for me or give me no joy.

1. I’ve stopped sending news articles I find interesting (and believe certain friends will find interesting) to a select number of people. If they are never responding (and I find, through using bit.ly links, that they are never even opening my links), they probably shouldn’t be getting the few extra minutes I spend thinking about them and actually sending the links to them to read.

2. I’ve stopped trying to maintain contact with people who don’t reach out to me proactively. Why do I want to stay in contact with people who don’t think of me on their own?

3. This one is sad. I’ve stopped calling certain people. I’ve realized after thinking about some phone conversations that I’m not really being listened to. I’m too charitable when it comes to listening sometimes, and I don’t want to listen to things that bore me anymore. When you are not being listened to, why should you listen to that person?

Every day, I’d like to think I am growing and changing a little. You often hear stories about couples and friends outgrowing each other even when they may spend every single day together. It’s one of the hardest things to slowly start letting go of friends that you have had for maybe decades because they are almost like habits for you, and maybe bad ones at that. You are so used to having them around that after a while, you can’t really remember what pleasure they are really bringing you today, not 10 years ago.

And there comes a time in life when you really need to let go of your bad habits, as painful as it is.

Last week, I finally booked a trip for my parents to go to the Grand Canyon. This is a trip my mom has been wanting to do for a long time. She actually wanted to do it last year but was ultra dramatic about Ed’s condition, so she decided against it last March. The four of us were all supposed to go together. Now this April, the three of us will go without Ed, and Chris will be joining us.

It felt really good to plan and arrange all of this for my family, but the entire time going through flights, hotels, and tours, I felt a little pain knowing Ed would not be joining us. Last night, I dreamt that my parents and I were at the hotel in Phoenix during our upcoming trip, and for whatever reason, my mom randomly decided to bring a collection of photos of Ed as a child. I slowly went through them and paused on his elementary school yearly portraits. He’s so, so innocent, I thought. And then I began to cry. My mom continued doing what she was doing, oblivious to my tears.

Those photos depicted him when he was much younger, but at heart, he was always a child – so innocent and trusting and naive. I really miss my brother.