Just hate

Yesterday I had a call with a friend. What bothers me is the strong influence she has on me. It annoys me to hear from her without needing to call or message her. It bothers me the suffering I feel because of her presence. The emotions she manages to transmit to me. The constant feeling of hitting against something that doesn’t come out.

Now I am here. I am motionless because I feel her stillness. If I ever manage not to erase these lines, I know she will try to give me a technical judgment. I know she will tell me whether this line was written in good English. I know these lines will be checked or directly translated with Chat GPT or Perplexity. I don’t want her to get lost in the technique that I don’t know if I have. I don’t consider myself a writer. I don’t want to be one. I just want to go back to doing a job that belongs to me. Or rather, maybe I just want to lose myself again in some narrow and distant street like those where I used to get lost. Like those where I can no longer go. All my physical pains, the consequences of tumor, all my psychological limits have now tied me to this chair.

As I write, I feel an emotion. I write these lines after having deleted so many, and I finally feel something. I had to spend a couple of hours deleting and writing. Deleting and writing. Staring into the void. Staring at the wall. Staring at the closed door on which there are Post-it notes for a story about a friend who arrives in Milan for the first time and gets lost. One of the next stories I need to write. It would be easier to write about her. Maybe. I hate being here trying to make sense of this empty emotion. Doing it while trying not to think. I go as fast as I can and will try to delete as little as possible.

The emotion fades and the void returns. Now it comes back inside me and the words disappear again. I slow down. The anger depends on the contrast. I understand. It depends on the contrast between the desire to scream and the impossibility of doing so. Once again, contrast. Perhaps it is precisely the contrast that makes these lines possible.

The thing that makes me feel bad is observing from the outside something I cannot control. I can only observe and wait. Usually, one would give up. If it were a hidden treasure in a certain spot, it would be possible to say after digging for years and years that there is no more earth to remove. Something that evidence makes impossible.

If it’s a person, it’s different. It’s not a place marked on a map. A specific location. It’s a direction. A direction to go in. In the end, I may find nothing. In the meantime, I found many things, but nothing definitive. Nothing that says I have finally reached the end.

The thing I hate is not seeing any immediate reaction. Not feeling anything and once again waiting in front of the void. In fact, ending up feeling the void. Being empty. Breathing it in and being a part of it. My life isn’t based on what I do. It’s more or less always the same at a more or less constant rhythm in a more or less confined space. A room in a house. What changes in my life are the emotions I feel. The sensations I have regarding the people who pass through my life. Emotions and sensations that I cannot control. Or the pain in my gut that prevents me from eating. I can’t control that either. I can only drink almond milk and pretend that it’s enough.

The pain arrives when it decides to. This sense of apathy comes without belonging to me. I don’t want it, but it’s here in this room with me. I hate it. I hate that it has to be here with me. Maybe I love this hate. I love that I feel something toward it. I love the certainty with which I face it. Knowing that it will always be possible to rely on this strength whose origin I do not know.

In the two years I was a coach, I was taught to mask other people's emotions. I was told not to take on their emotions and to keep them at a distance. Perfectly correct. Only in my case, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not about technique. It’s not about the method. It’s about a deep connection with the person for whom I feel this way. The consequence at this moment is the anger I feel for that sense of emptiness and lack of action. Perhaps it’s a sense of helplessness. Perhaps it’s the annoyance of feeling years pass by and being unable to do anything but wait.

In the meantime, smile. In the meantime, say that everything is fine. I wake up in the morning. I do everything I have to do. I find myself finally immersed again in the void that I call good. 

This friend is perfect for describing what bothers me. What I don’t want. What I have to do. I hate this sense of duty. I hate that I can’t simply delete her number. I hate that she is out there somewhere. I hate that she waves and says, 'Hi! Hi!' with her little hand. I hate that she doesn’t try and try again to express what she has inside.

I slow down.

Yes, now I feel better. I have to thank these lines. Now I feel better. I no longer feel apathy. Now I feel hate. Or maybe anger. Hate seems excessive. I hate that I’m here reflecting on whether it’s right or wrong to say hate. Okay. Instead of hate, I will write 'I can’t stand it.' But anyone who reads the next lines should know that if I write 'I can’t stand it,' I would have preferred to write 'hate.' Hate is also shorter. But at least the God of hypocrisy won’t condemn me for eternity to answer that everything is fine to everyone who asks me. That would be a condemnation I couldn’t bear.

Okay. I’ve stopped feeling hate. Now I go back to staring at the wall. As I stare at the wall, apathy returns. And with apathy, the void. I can’t stand this friend. I can’t stand her. Now I’m writing her a message that says: 'What a drag. I feel what you were feeling in the past few days. You transmitted it to me. I’ve been feeling it since yesterday. What a drag. I’m writing about the annoyance I feel. Boredom. Boredom. Boredom. You’re boring. (Side note: I filtered out the insults).' Let’s see what she replies.

Yesterday she was positive. She wrote to me that yesterday she was positive. I can't stand her.

She writes to me that she reads what I write and gets lost. If I write in English, she gets lost. If I write in Italian, she gets lost. If I were to drop acorns on the ground in a maze, she would get lost. One fucking acorn after another, and she would get lost.

Now the thing I can’t stand is that she prefers to enter data into a management system rather than respond to me. I can’t stand her because now I have to wait for her to finish some pointless data entry in a pointless management system while I wait for a response to a question I don’t even remember. 

It’s not so much the question itself. It’s not so much the answer. It’s the thought of having to wait while she enters data into a management system. It’s offensive to me.

I slow down.

Now I’m in a good mood. All that not being able to stand her has put me in a good mood. If I could eat croissants, if I didn’t have lung problems, if I didn’t have headaches, if I didn’t have trouble driving, and if I didn’t have intestinal pain, I would go to a pastry shop to buy myself a croissant. Without cream or anything else. Just like that. 

A gesture to finally have freed myself from her negative influence. It wasn’t difficult. I just had to tell her that I can’t stand her, that she’s boring, and that was enough for me to get rid of her. Okay. But now I have to go back to staring at the chat waiting for her to reply. Damn management system. I hate the management system. No, I can’t stand it.

Fuck you, management system.

Every now and then, I might reread this text. I know that if she read it, she would tell me that she got lost. It’s almost worse than a management system. She could be a management system. I can already imagine her profile on LinkedIn:

'Hi, my passion is managing your data. I’m not interested in understanding its meaning. I don’t care how many there are. My only talent is managing them. I don’t even know what that means. But I want to manage them. I enter them. I’m there, and I enter them. All the time. You give me data, and I enter it. If you want, you can give me management systems of management systems, and I’ll enter them into one to enter them into another. I believe in teamwork. Especially if the team consists of management systems.'

I also can’t stand the fact that she’s right. I hate this terribly. 

In fact, I can’t stand it.