Holy hell. I don’t know where to begin.
In some kind of poetic justice I managed to lose one of the rings I was wearing today. Of the two, I lost the one my grandfather had made, but still have the one that is the half of the pair A. and I bought together.
Of course, after meeting with her this morning I’m not sure if I should just put that ring in storage with the altar, the henna, the toothbrush she has here and everything else from our life together.
She remembers the good times as being the exception to the bad times. I see the bad times as being the surface, transitory storm over the wonderful thing we shared together.
She says she still loves me, but that continuing on like we are dating would just be like putting bandaids on something that is fundimentally flawed. I feel like the flaws are imperfections that merely are, admittedly big, obstacles to be dealt with in order to get back to the happy parts.
She doesn’t want me to wait for her to get back to the point where she wants to be with me, which is a point where she feels she may never reach again. I feel like by just dating, we’d be able to forget all the stupid day to day stuff that was causing us to have problems, and stick to the fun parts while finding ourselves by ourselves.
I’m living in this fantasy world where I imagine that she’ll have called while I was out, or that by some miracle she will have decided to come visit and have driven down so that she’d be here when I got home from rehearsals. All the while, she’s going on with her life, dreading the approach of time together because she’s feeling guilty for hurting me, but also feels completely drained when we’re together.
I’m barely able to sleep a full night, but she’s sleeping soundly.
I know we had problems, and I know that I messed up big time. I really wanted it to be enough that I love her. I know I was distant and difficult. She said that it might have helped if I had changed six months earlier, but I didn’t. Why can’t my mistakes be forgiven?
She’s been here before, of course, in her previous relationship. She knows that it doesn’t necessarily work out, because it didn’t, even though she thought he would be the one she would be with forever. She also knows that getting back together after things get better doesn’t mean it will work, or even that it will stay good for long, because it didn’t for her.
I had the idea of forever in my head sometimes, but I’ve never been able to say to myself that I really thought I’d found the person I wished to share the rest of my life with before. I think I’ve hurt several people by not being able to come to an understanding of how I should feel about love or forever. I really thought that I have found both this time, and there’s still part of me that still thinks that even the sliver of a chance that I have left to me is enough.
She still wants to keep in touch, to see me in the play and to maybe do things like go snowshoe, etc … but that it’s got to be as friends.
She talked about e-mail and about making sure I had her new phone number, but providing me with the means to contact her is to opposite of the problem: she’s the one that is determining the boundaries, so I almost have to wait for her. It seems that any time I try to contact her or spend time with her, it’s clingy to have done it or it’s me trying to be romantic again. But any fun thing would be romantic, so is the only thing left to converse stoicly?
Is this, as her brother said, a “tide” of her that must be weathered, if any man can?
Is this pattern of her deciding that I must be farther away just before each time we meet something that will continue? Did she intend to push me this far away from the beginning and was just trying to soften the blow by making it a slow progression?
The biggest struggle for me is to not fall into depression, shutting down like I did before. I’m probably going to be a burden to all my friends for a while, and I feel horribly guilty for that. I don’t know if it’s good or bad that some of my friends are her brother and uncle, but it’s at least something that will complicate things.
Another struggle will be in finding a way to not become embroiled in a fantasy world, having conversations with an imaginary version of her or finding myself living for those imaginary miracles of her romantic return to me, like some sappy movie that would no doubt bring me to tears. I’ve already caught myself doing both of these things recently.
I suppose this relates to the thing about not shutting down, but I have to keep on going, work on healing myself, even though my heart feels like it has been ripped out of my chest by cold steel claws.
I already had a seriously difficult time staying focused at rehearsal tonight. I came close to something like a panic attack a couple of times.
As the night wore on, it got harder. It seems like each day gets harder than the previous one.