There is so much to be grateful for yet my insides are screaming:
“But where do my books go?”
And:
“Where do my lovers go?!”
Followed by a desperate silence to realize there are no books, and there are no lovers. There is only the idea of them.

Residues from the man who left years ago and by the manuscript about our affair.
The only book, I could get myself to work on, as the years disintegrated all who I thought I was (a writer of erotic diaries) and took the only relationship that I was truly emotionally invested in.

When he left it was like the cold came, that gently away took my pain and told me not to worry.
And I didn’t.
But when the spring came, or rather when it should have come, the heart no longer beat.

I feel like a different person, and yet I still write. I still feel like the writer Lauren Harteveld even when the emotional soil it used to root on is no longer there.
Because more than anything, now, I can work.

With his leaving, it was like all emotional bonds were cut, as if it was adamant I’d go without.
Not just romantic bonds but all of them.
I still feel love and affection but I am no longer attached to those emotions. They’re whispers now, not primal screams.

And in the absence of emotions, slowly but steadily, my productivity picked up and it has now reached absolutely insane levels.
One every writer would dream of, but my heart is no longer in it.
And I like it that way.

By now I work 40 hour weeks and none of it is for what used to be my core work of writing diaries or erotica.
You could identify different areas where I am active, but they’re all the same to me because I’m detached to all of them.

I’m not depressed at all, and in many ways I’m feeling better than I ever have in my whole life!
Yet it feels like The Job Of Being Me, instead of being me.

Either way, with that job and my regular social life, I could free up one day a week to live as the person I truly am.

One day, to be with a new lover.
Or one day, for writing about those lovers in my diary.
Or a day to publish that book (1994-1996) and after that 1996-2000. About the man who left.

But it’s or, or, or.
And nothing will happen, until I find a way to defrost this heart. 

.
~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Harteveld 2025*
Are 2200 characters, or less.
The name is inspired by the book Fretz 2025 by Johan Fretz and asterisk by the 2025 movie Thunderbolts*