Sometimes the things I read for class actually inspire deep thought.

I read this pretty highly disturbing novel this week called Time's Arrow for a class I'm taking on Crime, Fiction, and Film. The narrator is an unidentified and undetected presence living inside a Nazi death doctor who is re-living his life from death to birth in a world that's running backwards...so trippy, and so disturbing, as you must do violence to someone to heal them. Anyway, the narrator finds it incredibly interesting how humans forget everything, but he remembers, and it occurred to me that even though he means how humans "forget" everything in this scenario because it technically hasn't happened yet, we are quite adept at forgetting things in the real world too. I wrote in my response:

We remember what we want to remember. We have a tendency to downplay or even repress memories of unpleasant or traumatic incidents in our pasts, and it is not uncommon for two people who were once lovers to regard each other with mere cordiality in the future, as politely as if they are strangers. We would be unable to function in society if we remembered every trespass against us, if we held every possible grudge, and/or if the weight of our own actions was constantly bearing down upon us--we are, indeed, talented at forgetting.

And it was one thing to write that for class...it was another to see  it taking place within the context of my own life. I don't even think about my interactions with my ex anymore, though they have been both the thing I most anticipate and the thing I most dread about days in the past. He has a tendency to sit at the desk closest to me in the room at my eating club I do all of my work in, and this doesn't phase me. When one of us groans at our work or laughs at something, we share it with one another with no problems. When we run into each other around campus, he smiles and acknowledges me, and my smile back is genuine. He asked me for help with STATA (a statistical software sociologists--and evidently, economists--use to analyze data) the other day and I didn't hesitate to bend my head over his laptop and try to figure out what was going wrong, or to point him in the direction of further help. When my mom and I were leaving Quad today to go home for Thanksgiving, I specifically called out to him to wish him a happy holiday, and that too felt genuine.

I will admit, however, that later on in the evening on the night I tried to help him with STATA, I wondered whether I'm being too soft on him. Should I be colder? Should my politeness feel fake? Should my kindness come from a place of social responsibility, rather than of genuine feeling? Did I let him off the hook of hurting me too easily? Are my current actions negating our prior mistakes? Do my current feelings cancel out the pain and hurt of before? Am I somehow doing myself a disservice here, or not teaching him the lesson I should? 


And then I realized that I just don't have the energy for all of that, let alone the desire to walk around with sandbags of anger and hurt tied to my legs. Harboring all of that negativity wouldn't serve any purpose. It's not that I've forgotten what we were or why it ended or how he made me feel; when I want to, I can recall all of that in great detail. But on a daily basis, it just serves me better to ignore it, pretend it didn't happen...act like I've forgotten about it. Making us both live in those unpleasant moments forever is so...7th grade. It's just...easier this way. No one has to walk on eggshells. There is no shooting or receiving of dirty looks. We don't each have to be eternally sorry. I remember passively, and I live my life for me.   

How I realized I was actually over it:

"I have let you go, and everything I went through was beautiful." --Jill Scott, "When I Wake Up"

Very-drunk-dancing-with-random-Asian-kid me did something sober-reflective me was quite proud of last Thursday. Asian kid had maneuvered us against one of the columns that conveniently frames Quad's dance floor, and I guess I had my eyes closed or I was looking down at my gyrating hips or something, because all I remember is looking up at seeing that a girl I know was grinding all up on my ex...

...and the world didn't end. I didn't stop dancing with Asian kid--didn't even lose track of the beat. I certainly didn't freak out about it. In fact, I can't remember thinking about it any more substantively than just like, noticing because it was in my direct line of vision. I subsequently noted for the third or so time that night how ridiculous his outfit was, and then I...kept it moving.

And I didn't want to say anything for a few days, because I was fairly convinced that some sort of feelin some kinda way would creep up on me, but it's been almost a week and I've only thought about it as it relates to writing this post. I was bracing myself for flashbacks to when that was the two of us, to our first kiss that happened on that same dance floor...and let me tell y'all, I got nothin.

I watched some other chick grind all up on the first guy to ever tell me he loved me and I really and truly didn't give a fuck, and it wasn't just because I was busy gettin busy with someone else, because I still couldn't possibly care less. It was as uneventful to me as watching any two other friends of mine dance, because we stepped pretty seamlessly into that friends role when we got back to campus, and while I'm certainly missing ze cuddles and ze cocoa as the weather gets colder...I don't miss him. 

I suppose this is what it feels like to realize that you're over someone, rather than just to declare it and hope it comes true.

"Playing friends well"

That's what K said after he observed our interaction, that my ex and I are "playing friends well." It was a couple hours ago, but I keep turning that little phrase over and over in my head. I guess he just meant we're playing nice, being quite cordial--friendly is probably a better word, actually--to one another. When everything first went down, we said we were going to do this. I wanted to do this. 

But then suddenly I didn't anymore. Suddenly the thought of him made me uncomfortable and I wished I didn't have to see him and if I knew anything, I knew that I didn't want to try to be friends. When K and I were on our way to party Saturday night, I knew I was going to see him, and this made me anxious enough to want to make sure liquid courage could get me through the night. 


But it wasn't terrible. "It's nice to see you" wasn't exactly the truth, but it was neither particularly awkward or painful in the least, and was a more socially acceptable statement than "I'm pleasantly surprised by how anticlimactic it is to see you." 


When he came to the Black Student Union event I was at this afternoon, I was surprised that he was there for entirely separate reasons, but generally planned to ignore his presence. Then he came up to say hey to K and I, and we had a very brief (probably only about a minute long) but altogether pleasant conversation. This is when K made his point, and I came to the startling realization that I didn't really feel like I was playing. There was no internal monologue being rude/snarky while I was being nice. I wasn't looking for an excuse to get out of there or wishing I could be anywhere else. My lack of negativity even internally surprises me. 


This might not be as bad as previously projected. Stay tuned.

Never in my life have I dreaded going back to school

and I'll be damned if I start now.

^The attitude I'm trying to invoke. 

How I actually feel:

• As soon as I get back to campus, every day will be one day closer to the end of what has been the best time of my life. I realize this has been true since Sept. 11, 2008, when I moved in for the first time, but it all seems so imminent right now. [My life as I know and love it is in danger.]
• Holy shit I have to write a thesis. And okay, so I've sort of been working on it all summer, and may or may not have 8 pages of my literature review written, and am a hell of a lot more prepared than a lot of my peers. And yeah, alright, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life (basically), so I should be excited. It's not that I'm not excited...it's just, it's still scary as fuck. 
• I have no idea what the fuck I'm going to do immediately after graduation, and I probably need to have been working on that already. I hope it's not too late to get something good. 
• I may or may not still be not particularly looking forward to seeing you know who. I'm not hurting anymore, but I doubt the first few interactions will be pleasurable in any way for me. And I don't like uncomfortable situations...but there's no avoiding this, so it's keep my chin up time, I suppose.  I've just never really had to interact with someone who hurt me on a regular basis before [family and ex-family notwithstanding].

Yeah, so this year is...different, but still. I'll be damned if I start now. 

In light of yesterday's cathartic post...

Reblogged from Too Good to be True

Why It Hurt(s)

This post was inspired by Kat George's over at Thought Catalog. I was originally just going to reblog hers, but then there were things I wanted to cross out and brackets I wanted to add and then it seemed like writing my own was just a better idea. 


---------
Because he said he loved me the night before, like he'd said nearly every night for about two months, and the next morning he said he'd never meant it. Because love should never be a lie. 
Because he was the first man of my "type" to ever have seemed to have wanted me in a substantive manner. Because his desire and "love" for me amplified that which I had for myself--knowing he wanted me around, wanted me to hold a special place in his life reserved for no one else, was such an ego boost. I certainly hadn't held myself in overwhelming disregard before he came into my life, but belonging to him [or giving myself to him, if the ownership implied in "belonging" doesn't sit well with you] made me feel better about myself. Because knowing he never wanted me like he made it seem like he wanted me unleashed every insecurity I'd previously successfully locked away and suddenly they were all feasting on me at once.  
Because I ignored the things I was uncomfortable with/unsure about and had convinced myself that we had found perfection. Because he totally blindsided me that morning; I didn't see it coming at all. Because I had been thoroughly and completely fooled. Duped. Bamboozled. Toyed with. Conned. Because the realest thing I had ever known was never real at all. Because I thought I fell for him, but it turns out I had fallen for an act, and that was personally humiliating. I was so disgusted with myself for having been blind to the truth. I was angry at myself because I thought I should have known better, I should have seen the signs. Because once I wasn't in it anymore, I could see that I had lost myself inside of this, and all along I'd been thinking I was winning. Because hindsight is a bitch with 20-20 vision. Because I'd had endings before, yes, and I'd been lied to before, but never this thoroughly.
Because I thought I was doing pretty well for my first time around the meaningful relationship thing. Because we had serious-relationship-conversations and met each other's parents and celebrated month-aversaries and how could all of that be part of something that wasn't real?
Because I'd gone and let my imagination run away with me. Once we both seemed sure about this, I lifted the restraining order between my head and my heart and let them start talking again, and when they do that I get to making silly plans. Plans like international mail and sexy lingerie and rearranging my clothes to have an extra drawer for him and leaving an extra toothbrush in his room and Thanksgiving with my family and visiting his over our extended Christmas vacation. Because it had felt so much like an idyllic movie romance and I wanted to do everything in my power to keep it that way. Because I was suddenly alone to wallow not only in losing what we had, but also in losing everything I'd imagined we were going to have.
Because if he'd spent so much time and energy projecting emotions he didn't feel for so long, he could have at least had the decency to pretend to be upset as he was telling me all the ways I was wrong and he'd done wrong. Because he just got to walk away apparently unscathed, while I felt like I'd gotten run over by a tractor trailer. Because he'd gone from being the person who could make me feel invincible to the person who left me wide-open and vulnerable in the blink of an eye. Because I will never know what was and what was not a lie. Because he played love and I fell in, even though it was hard and I was scared, thinking it was an exercise in reciprocity, a leap of faith. 
Because I thought we were good for each other; I wanted us to be good for each other. Because he was the first time I had put my love life into my own hands and gone after something I wanted in six years, and look where it got me. Because even if I'm smart enough to not think I can't trust men because of what he did,  I have learned that I perhaps should be less trusting of my damn self. Because this doubt is a stain I can't get out no matter how many times I put myself through the wash.


-------
Sorry if you're sick of hearing about this. That was even more cathartic than I'd imagined it would be.    
  

I came to the realization last night

while having one of the wee-hours-of-the-morning laying in bed chats with E that I've missed greatly since we were roommates sophomore year, that I have changed my mind. [M, another former roommate, will tell you this is not uncommon in the least.] Even more accurate a statement, I suppose, is that I have recovered the good sense my damned-fool-blinded-by-love-and-hurt self had obviously lost. I am thinking clearly again now, though, and I don't want to be friends. What's more serious, I don't even want to want to be friends. Maybe he doesn't either, and those things we both said were just the things you say...we mentioned this at length in multiple communications, but I have no understanding of when he is being sincere. 
And I'm not even mad at that. All I know is that I felt like my world was falling apart because there wasn't a single section of my life that he hadn't affected. I couldn't wrap my head around losing him completely. He said he couldn't either, but actions speak louder than words [Yeah actually I can't stand by that oft-true cliche in the context of this situation...] inaction speaks louder than... I have already lost him. And yeah, I was a hot-ass-mess about that for a while, I'm not even gonna front, but...I'm not even trippin off that anymore, because something more important happened between then and now: he lost me. He has lost whatever hold he used to have over me, whatever it was that said I needed him in my life. He has lost my affection. He has lost my desire. He has lost my remorse. To an extent, he has even lost my interest.
I never stopped following his blog, so I know how his summer is going and all that jazz, but I noticed a while ago that I don't get excited when he posts something now. I read it, sure, but I've stopped wondering how he's doing. Today I kind of even skimmed it, more excited to move onto the other unread items in my blogroll. I've spent a lot of time in the past month and a half wracking my brain, trying to find a way to imagine being at the club together without it being so awkward I just want to leave. I was basically unsuccessful, but I've realized that at least some of the awkwardness is coming from trying to find a way to be friendly. I don't want to be all antagonistic or some shit, but I don't want to make small talk with him over lunch either. There are lots of people I have no meaningful interactions with in my club...I just wanna add him to that pile. Feigning a desire to interact that I just don't HAVE is the awkward part. Reservedness and polite interest I think I can handle. And anyway, they say fake it til you make it, right? Game plan accomplished.

"Loving someone that doesn’t love you is the most impossibly pointless endeavor anyone can ever find themselves sucked into and usually, when you finally pull yourself away you realize that you learned nothing, gained nothing, and lost – for a time – everything." --SingleBlackMale

This dude is just not getting it...

So last night I was just minding my own business catching up on the 120ish blogs I follow when all of a sudden Facebook beeps at me and the tab flashes "J messaged you!" *audible groan* Evidently his now-live-in girlfriend discovered some old letter I'd wrote him before we were even dating that he kept all this time (damn near four years), and it got him thinking about me. And as ALWAYS, he wants to know when I'll be home next "so we can chill". Now chilling evidently means teaming up with the girl to play pool against him. I tried to seem marginally non-committal without being rude, but I just don't understand why this boy man boy thinks that we have a meeting up three years after we broke up to play pool with his new booskie kind of relationship. WE ARE NOT FRIENDS. We may have been friends before we dated, but I was a different person then. As the closest thing I've ever had to a regretted relationship with another person, there is no longer even the slightest bit of room for him in my life in any capacity...he just doesn't seem to be able to grasp that. I've only seen him twice since we broke up, the first time being my first break home, when I almost hooked up with him again, and then again the next summer, when I ran into him at the mall and he gave me a ride home, but nothing happened because he was already with his current girlfriend. He has asked me to hang out multiple other times, but I always find some way of blowing it off. It's not even a time heals all wounds scenario; nothing about him or potentially seeing him hurts at all--it's more like remembering him and us makes me feel awkward. I judge myself for having been with him [though my body doesn't, haha]. And I don't remember how I ever really related to him, and I'm not sure I want to. And maybe, just maybe, I don't know how to be friends with someone who knows what I taste like, even if I never want them down there again...

So how do I make it clear that I don't want to hang out when I come home this time, next time, or for the rest of ever? Or should I just bite the bullet and hang out with the two of them to show that I am a flexible person who can be friends with lots of different types of people, and so that I have experience having an amicable relationship with an ex? 
(...I suppose I should take it as a compliment that none of my three exes seem comfortable with the idea of not being able to have me marginally in their lives in some way, from C who came crawling and begging back [Negro please], this situation with J, and the things KO has said which may or may not come to fruition.)

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day 27: Letter to Someone Who Taught You Something New

Dear KO,
The breadth of this topic means I could have written to lots of people, but it just feels most accurate to write to you because of how much you've taught me since February. I recently read somewhere on the interwebz the line, "I don't want to come out of a relationship feeling like I haven't changed much," and regardless of the misalignment between the levels of seriousness with which each of us regarded this, I've certainly changed a lot. Maybe I'll expand this to include things I learned about myself via being with you, which may not be the exact same thing as you teaching me, but oh well.
I learned that if grown-ass-woman-Maya wanted someone badly enough, I could take action steps to get from Point A to Point B with said person; I hadn't been brave enough to do that since I was little just-barely-a-teenager-Maya. You taught me what it feels like to be swept off my feet. You reintroduced me to anticipation and infatuation, 12-year-old schoolgirl style: will I see him today? Is he gonna text me? What will he say? I learned to prioritize something that was bigger than just me, even if my friends thought I was crazy. I learned to dismiss my friends' opinions/advice, which I hope I have unlearned just as quickly. 
I learned a new level of happiness, a level that evidently constantly showed on my face and got commented on all the time. You helped me see that striving for independence doesn't mean I can't ask for help in moments of need. You taught me that my ex (before you) may have been right on two counts: 1) that I just might have been a nympho waiting to happen, and 2) that the best thing two people can do in bed is to wake up together. You taught me the bliss that comes from waking up happy with the arm of a man I adore slung around my ribcage in casual protection, and that there are better reasons than schoolwork to only get three hours of sleep. There were more tangible things: you taught me how to two-step, that Campus Club sells $2 milkshakes, and that the ears are a very erogenous zone (among various other lessons in physics and anatomy that we learned together). I learned new levels of physical comfort, both with myself and with another person. I learned how to stretch the tiniest events as far as they could go, a whole new version of time management.
You taught me that I was wrong about myself in so many ways: I'd always abhorred cutesy, gagged at over-the-top romance. I always told myself I never wanted anything like that, but from the moment you gave it to me, I reveled in it. You taught me that, against everything I'd ever believed, in my heart of hearts all I want is a routine of togetherness, regularly shared meals and molding myself to fit into someone else's shape night after night. I know now that you never meant to, but you taught me how to dive into love: to weigh the options upon the shore and make the conscious decision to Get. In. The. Water! [Notebook reference]. Even if the two-way street was only a very well-put-together mirage, you taught me how it feels to be in love. With you, I learned to abandon all but my most important reservation: reservedness about my reservations; I'm working on it in your absence. I wish I had learned how to tell you when I was worried; instead, I learned to put my worries on the back burner and live half in the moment and half in a larger picture my silly little heart had concocted. I learned to be carefree in a glorious but potentially dangerous way. I learned trust and security at deeper levels than ever before, in the I wanted to put all of me in a box with a bow on it and give it to you and say This is yours now, take care of it, and I remembered again what it was to want to share myself with someone completely. 
I have since learned the true value of honesty, the sting of hypocrisy, and what exactly constitutes a lie. I have learned to be more open in my questioning. I have learned that a person's intentions have no true bearing on the effects of their actions on others, and am in the process of learning which component (the intentions or the effects) hold more weight in the course of this life we live, which I should value more. I have relearned the weight of shattered expectations, along with how to hurt, how to feel like I've been fooled, how to be furious, how to doubt, how to blame, and how to over-analyze (though I'm sure I never forgot that last one).
Most recently, I am learning to enjoy the memories of the past for what they were when they were, and to not try to tear them apart by applying later feelings. I am learning to stomp out dread with determination. I am learning to reprioritize myself. I am learning to forgive. 
It seems only appropriate to end with my our girl India:

"I'm only human
Let's shake free this gravity of resentment
And fly high, and fly high
You're only human
Let's shake free this gravity of judgment
And fly high on the wings of forgiveness

I've searched for romance
Flowers and affection
What I found is a lesson
Of what love really is
Found the game of love is
Not about how much you can take
In fact authentic love is about
How much you can give

...

And I wanna let you know how much you changed my life
I wanna let you know you taught me how to fly
And I wrote this song to tell you this
I'm better cuz you taught me how to give"

--India.Arie, "Wings of Forgiveness" 

Maya

I hope this is the end of posts about this. This one gets REAL.

I find the intensity with which I can feel various emotions for short periods of time to be incredibly interesting. I guess I just give in very easily to wallowing or celebrating, depending upon the nature of the emotion. I let myself get carried away by feeling. 

I guess what intrigues me about this right now is the question: how much of the feelings those moments of intensity are based around is legitimate? If I can put so much energy into feeling angry, or feeling sad, or hell even feeling love or happiness, that when the moment of intensity passes I just feel...sort of used up and like I need to recharge, then what becomes of the emotion once it has consumed all of my energy? It makes me wonder how much of a flame was there in the first place, and how much is just some part of my brain leaking gas to feed it. Even if the emotion is negative, a large part of me very much enjoys letting myself be overcome by it: it's like lighting something on fire and watching the fire burn itself out. Except the something is me. 

But I don't think it's healthy. Realizing it makes me not trust myself more than anyone else. If I keep shooting myself in the foot by feeling things so intensely it scares people, I am going to always be lonely. This habit gets me into all kinds of bad situations. 

I'm going to put even more of my business out here than usual and walk you through a recent example: a little under two weeks ago, I got really scared that my then-boyfriend [who I am still in the long-process of trying to let go, though I still can't say I want to fully. I wish we could just change the nature of things and leave them as they were. But this isn't about that.] didn't think I cared about him like I should. He called attention to a mistake I had made in a previous relationship that I talked about here and without letting him explain himself at all or what he thought we should talk about about that post, I freaked out and I sent him an email of things that were (I still believe) entirely accurate about how I felt about our relationship and how I felt about him and I hoped that was enough. But that fear about what he might be thinking just kept gnawing away at me until I couldn't stand it any more [living alone and taking 4 trains every day and working in an environment where you have very little human interaction means you have WAY TOO MUCH TIME TO THINK] and I started writing a letter full of frilly romantic things, which I now believe to have mostly been exaggerations of how I actually felt. Throughout our whole relationship, he had been the frilly romantic one and I had been the one who kept how she was feeling to herself until it had to be let out in little bursts--this was a big burst and though I believed it then, I can't look back at it now and feel like it was real and/or legitimate. Love was the emotion I got carried away with then, and I think I could tell that I was unsure about everything I wrote (I don't even remember most of it) because I almost didn't put it in the mail the next day. But then I remembered our "open and honest" policy and how in the previous letter I'd written to him, I stressed that I wanted us to be able to tell each other anything. So I drew little hearts on the envelope and left it in my mailbox for the postman to pick up. And what clues me in that it was an emotion wave is that by a few days later, I was worried about us growing apart while he was gone and I had this terrifying thought of what if we get to the point where saying I love you is a habit as opposed to a truth, and that came with a sister-worry of whether we were already there. He pointed to other things that made him realize it was time to end this, not just that letter, but I can't help but feel like these stupid emotion waves ruined this for me. 

Except the more accurate culprit is my apparent inability to voice my feelings about a situation with a person to that actual person. If we had just really talked and really listened none of this would have happened, I think. I'm beginning to believe that neither of us was completely open or honest or fair to the other for a very long time. And I think that's the reason I can latch onto for why I have to let this go. I've been struggling for days to solve this puzzle: 

lust < x < love

What is x and how am I supposed to feel about it? But wondering how one of us is supposed to feel or what the other expects/wants us to feel is what got us into so much trouble in the first place. 

So let's instead ask the radical question, how DO I actually feel about it? And the brutally honest answer is that as good as it has made me feel, and as much as I have an incredibly strong desire to just make it more casual and not stop, it is [very] possible that any improbably feasible course of action that involves lowering expectations and just enjoying each other for a while such as I have been privately entertaining over the course of the past few days wouldn't leave me feeling good in the long run. Where is the line between enjoying each other's company and using each other? I don't want to find out. I would rather this be over than find out. That's the first time I've been able to say this being over is not an entirely cruel happenstance. 

So now it's time to perhaps buy a new vibrator since mine doesn't vibrate anymore, and figure out how to not get overwhelmed by the desire to have his (someone's? his? someone-I-trust-and-am-physically-comfortable-with-which-describes-him-more-accurately-than-anyone-else's? Door Number Three sounds like the winner.) hands and mouth all over me, so that I don't have to go back on my statement that I want to be friends come the fall. I will find a way to stand not being able to wrap myself around him and a way not to miss the warmth and protection of his arm around me while we sleep, because more unbearable than either of these is the idea of yet another mistruth between us.

And while I'm doing all these seemingly-impossible things [preferably without doing any of the aforementioned things with someone who doesn't deserve me, because the best way to get over a guy is definitely not to get under a new one...], I will also learn to keep myself in check. I will learn to take a step back from whatever situation I find myself in and say 'Maya, how much of this is real?' Because I just don't have the time/extra energy/desire to keep putting myself through these waves, no matter what they're related to. And more importantly, the other people in my life who are affected by these waves DON'T DESERVE THEM.             

Confessions:

Small font because I'm whispering this:the hardest part about not hating him is that I have no reason not to still like him.

There. I said it. I know I'm not supposed to. I know this isn't a positive step forward in the healing process. I [think I] know it's a waste of my time. I know all my hardcore feminist friends are shaking their fists and lamenting my lack of pride right now. But silly hearts, they don't listen to heads very well. And my silly heart keeps wondering exactly how wrong it is to continue to be lovers if you aren't in love. K says married people do it all the time. Idk which option is sadder.

But then I remember that everyone deserves relationships that are equal partnerships, in which each partner is getting as much as s/he is giving and visa versa. Everyone deserves equal rankings in the priorities hierarchy. So even though right now I almost feel like if we had just a) listened to each other and b) been straightforward with each other from the beginning, we might have been on the same page the whole time, you can't go from trying to reach grown-person concepts like love and devotion to just trying to have fun and enjoy each other's company. #Lifedoesn'tworklikethat #That'sjustnothealthy

But [insert womp-womps here] #Knowingthatdoesn'tchangehowIfeel  

More songs because music makes the world go round:

 #WhatI'mtryingtobeabletomeanwhenIsayit

(I just mean the goodbye part. He's kind of intense.)

#ExceptmaybeIshouldbesayingthis

#AndwhatIactuallymeanisthis

Even smaller font because I don't even like admitting this to myself: It was easy to say that even if I knew then what I know now, I would do this again. That's still true. It's a lot harder to say that knowing what I know about everything that happened here, I'd still rather not let this go. But, silly little heart, you a) have to stop being selfish, and b) can't always get what you want. 

Continuing the confessions that are really hard to make: I'd never been treated so well in my whole life. That will be the hardest thing to let go of, I think. 

I May Not Have Been Loved...

...but I have been

romanced.

The distance between the two is great,

but not terrible. 

It's not a bad thing to have been.

In fact, I rather enjoyed it.

So no regrets, no what-might-have-been's,
no boxing my heart up never to try again. 
Who can be mad at romance? 

INSANE WHIRLWIND OF EMOTIONS cannot begin to accurately describe the past two days.

Extreme sadness. Hurt. Fury that almost scared me. Fear separately. Deep confusion, or maybe simply a profound lack of understanding.



All of those feelings are done now. Well I'm still sad that it's over, because I wanted to snuggle into this and stay there for a long while, but I feel nothing like the overwhelming _________ I was feeling. I feel surprisingly good right now. I feel like nothing was as bad as I'd thought/imagined/suspected/worried/feared. I am not a bad judge of character, and I would like to come out and publicly say to all of you who know me in real life and know the other person involved in this situation--he is not the villain here. This situation doesn't have a villain. It has two good people who made some bad choices and that's it. #theoppositeofpubliclyflaming


I'm not gonna list out all the terrible things that have been running through my head. They don't need mentioning, as they're all either flat out wrong, unwarranted, invalid, or have been deconstructed to the point of my being content. It may have felt at first like the world was ending, but up is still up, down is still down, and I don't think anything permanently damaging happened here. 



I have, however, learned a lot. And the things I have learned can be listed:

1.  It is entirely impossible to undervalue honesty, especially when you know the truth is going to hurt. 
2. Wanting to mean something is entirely different from meaning it. Changing your definition of something so that you can mean it isn't being honest either. 
3. Relationships are based on a lot of assumptions. It's probably a good idea to talk about things rather than assuming you're on the same page about X issue.
4. It actually shocks me that these words are about to come out of my mouth, but maybe it really is the thought that counts. Intentions mean something, even when they lead down unpredictable and hurtful paths. Sometimes people deserve the benefit of the doubt even in the most unfortunate situations.
5. Anger is actually an essential part of the healing process. 
6. My friends are awesome. But I already knew that.
7. Pain does not automatically negate all the previous joy a situation gave. Hurt does not erase prior happiness. I'm not saying "don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened," because I think that crying is a healthy part of LIFE in general, and it's important to be unabashedly sad when something makes you sad...but when it's all said and done, everything good that happened still happened. And that's what you should focus on. 
8. Your world should always be bigger than one person. I think I forgot that mine was for a little while until the support came rushing in from every direction while I was freaking out and I remembered that I have a whole network of people who love and care about me. 
9. Love is a nuanced, nuanced thing. It has so many layers and components and meanings and strivings. It varies from person to person and situation to situation. There are lots of things that love is. There are also lots of things that love isn't. And I'm still learning the differences, I think. Maybe we all are. 
10. Don't underestimate the benefits that can come from actually talking to someone who hurt you, instead of just festering in your own emotions. Every story has two sides. 
11. Analysis of every tiny detail of a situation is pointless and futile. Analysis of what major mistakes were made and what should have been done differently in those specific instances is an opportunity for growth that should not be overlooked. 
12. It is evidently possible for me to open up to my father under times of complete and total duress. It is also evidently impossible for my mother to let me open up to her during such times. This is unsurprising. Maybe I should be less freely open with my mother and talk to my dad more. 
13. I have no regrets. None. I might even want to change everything I've ever believed about exes and want to try to be friends. And on that note, I will pick a song:

And I'd choose you again...

I wore a green shirt today. Subconsciously channeling:

The two artists I have the most music by are India.Arie and Eminem

As such, the two feelings I'm torn between are:

"And if he ever left me, I wouldn't even be sad, 'cause there's a blessing in every lesson and I'm glad that I knew him at all." --India.Arie, "The Truth"

and 

"when someone seems too good to be true, they usually are. But see, when you're in it it's too hard to see..." --Eminem, "Spend Some Time"

Not sure I'll ever make a decision between the two feelings. Not sure it's even possible. I am not sure how I'm not supremely angry or if I'll stay that way. I'm not sure what to believe about the past four months, except that for the sake of my sanity it can't be nothing. Not sure how long it will take to shake this sick-to-my-stomach feeling or to rebuild the ability to trust. Not sure you ever really know a person. Not sure how to make myself stop caring about him. Even less sure than I ever was before (not including the past three months) about what love ostensibly is. Not sure I'll ever really understand what happened here. 

I am sure I'll waste lots of time and energy trying to. I am sure that I feel humiliated, like I have been made a fool of. I am sure I'll throw myself into my independent work like nobody's business in a thinly veiled attempt to hide the fact that my life doesn't make sense to me anymore. I am sure that I was happy (albeit a different kind of happy) before this and I can be happy again after it. I am sure that there's a lot to be learned from this situation.  I am sure that I will never again undervalue the importance of complete and brutal honesty, especially when the truth hurts. I'm also pretty sure that I am (un?)fortunately too good a person to repeatedly flame him on this blog, because like I don't deserve this, I can't make myself believe he's a terrible enough person to deserve that, so I will try to avoid it (after this).

A DirectTV blimp just passed overhead saying "Change your life." My first reaction? I don't want to. But sometimes you don't have a choice. 

I will leave you with an excerpt from my favorite play, Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls who've Considered Suicide/ when the Rainbow is enuf:

"My love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face. [...]

My love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face.

My love is too magic to have thrown back on my face.

My love is too Saturday night to have thrown back on my face.

My love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face.

 My love is too music to have thrown back on my face.

And you remember that the next time some man tries to walk away with all of your stuff. 

I know that's right. Or says I'm sorry a million times.

...

 It's ok. I asked myself how I could let that happen and I realized that I was missing something. Something so important. Something promised.

I suppose what I'm left with now is me time. More than time to analyze what happened here, I suppose I should go find what I'm missing to make sure it never happens again. Not that I'm blaming myself--mistakes were made on both sides--but something needs to change.

How did I get here?

Ex-lovers and friends

So I have a friend who, when discussing her recent exes, always brings up that she wants to be friends with them after the dust has settled, not like my situation with J (just-the-letter J, not J******) where he keeps trying to hang out with me and I want nothing to do with him. I finally felt the need to clarify that I don't want nothing to do with him because we dated, I want nothing to do with him because...looking back on that chapter of my life, I have no idea why I EVER wanted anything to do with him. I like to call him all-the-rebellion-that-was-supposed-to-infest-my-teenage-years-balled-up-into-7-weeks. 

What I didn't remind her of, though, is that he's not the only ex I have, not the only situation for her life to be compared with. *sigh* We were laughing yesterday at a Yahoo article that said one of the worst New Year's Resolutions to make was to quit Facebook, because everybody uses Facebook. That's...not exactly true. More and more recently, I've found myself desperately wanting to Facebook-stalk one person I can't: my first ex, the one none of my friends like to talk about because they think I was being ridiculous about the whole situation. I'm not going to go through the whole thing again: he's been talked about before. I don't tell people this, but every time I'm home I hope I'll randomly bump into him at the mall or Wal-mart or somewhere. When I'm bored and randomly clicking around on facebook waiting for something interesting to happen in someone's life, I sometimes type his name into the search box just to see if he reactivated his profile, because I want to know what's going on in his life more than I care to admit. 

Don't ask me why. I don't know. I don't want to get back together with him, not in the slightest. I meant what I said in that tear-filled phone call from freshman year, and I will not retract those statements. But I hate that not wanting him romantically means I can't have him at all. I hate that I miss the way I feel when I'm with him, because I'm almost positive that what I'm missing is the naivete and sense of endless possibilities that encompassed the entire time we were close, but even more so I hate that we can't be friends. He has faded nearly entirely into person-I-once-knew status, and dammit, I want to know him. But sometimes that decision isn't ours to make.

Four-Letter Words

Some folk don't like them. (Sorry, had to make that whole sentence four-letter words, lol.) Fuck. Damn. Shit. Hell. I use these words a lot. Some would say too much. But there's one four-letter word I pepper my speech with possibly more than all the others combined, and that's L O V E. 

People say I'm a really affectionate drunk, and that I love everyone and everything once I've had a few. This is both true and untrue...most of the time, I just stop giving a fuck about what is socially normative in terms of affection and love when I've been drinking, and treat everyone how I'd like to treat them all the time. Because the people I grew up with, they taught me that a friend is someone you hug without asking, and whose back is comfier than any pillow, and who it's okay to contact 949379834 times a day, and for whom concern and worry are the most natural things in the world. A friend is only a strange half-step away from a lover, and that step might not even be down. And I love those definitions of friend; I'm not really ever going to be willing to give them up. I just attempt to tone (ha!) them down a little in daily life because other people are more reserved, or something, I guess. [And yet E talking about her wannabe boo who is so overly overtly physically affectionate like I want to be and how open and in touch with her emotions it makes her feel makes me consider dropping the normal act and--call me cliche, but--reaching out and touching someone whenever I get the inclination to.] 

What I'm getting at here is that I'm a pretty loving person, and I'm usually pretty open about that, even when I'm sober. I love mozzarella sticks, I love the way B's hair feels when I run my hands through it, and "M, I love you, but [insert some criticism or refusal here]". I love my single, I love studying in the large library, I love my JP topic, <3s in my facebook wall posts and when I'm saying goodbye to anyone on AIM or Skype. It's, like, the opposite of a big deal when I drop an "I love you" in casual conversation; people seem to interpret this as meaning "I appreciate/enjoy your company", which is fine by me.


But a friend of mine is going through some drama with his boyfriend that is causing me to, at the very least, wonder about this emotions-wide-open-heart-on-my-sleeve philosophy of life. His boyfriend said he loves him for the first time a few months ago, and he has been unable to say it back. Truth be told, I was really surprised when he told me this,  because he's one of the friends with whom I can't part ways without exchanging i-love-yous. But once he explained it to me, it made perfect sense. It's like, right now, to the best of his understanding, he loves his boyfriend the way he loves me, the way I drop I-love-yous in casual conversation, in the I love being around you/I love the way you make me feel/I love the person you are and the person I am when I'm with you kind of way, but totally not on that I wanna ride off into the sunset on a horse with you and live happily-ever-after tip. He's having trouble recognizing the differences between the various ways of loving other people, and whether there is a middle ground worth recognizing between the point A and point B I just described.


I've never talked about this to anyone before, but here's a secret. I accidentally told J I loved him on like, the second or third night of our relationship. It was really late and we were on the phone and it just seemed natural, because I am that kind of person. And on one level, I did love him then. Because on some level, I draw no line between "I love X-cool-thing about you" and "I love you". I never have. But what's going on with my friend and his boyf right now has made me realize that someday, this distinction will become important. I will have to know when it is okay to say I love you to someone I'm romantically involved with, and what that means compared to with someone I'm simply emotionally involved with. I will have to understand what the difference is. Why does it matter that I love my hypothetical boyfriend any more/in any other way than I love my actual best friends? I'm not sure that even makes sense to me. I don't see love in the real world as sunsets and horses and the whole cast breaking into song and dance; love is compromise and love is work and love is building something to come after honeymoon-happy. Love doesn't automatically entail ever-afters, but I don't think that means you can't love if you're not planning on buying the horse, if that's not too much of a mixed metaphor.


And this may possibly be the root of my recurring boy issues. I throw the word and the idea of love around so much that my brain doesn't really distinguish friend-love from romantic love or familial love (for instance, I say I love my girls like my sisters, but I treat them SO MUCH BETTER than I treat either of my sisters, and would be hard pressed to say I didn't care about them more. Goddamn, I'm rude. Anyway.), and thus flip-flops around between the two when it comes to boys I absolutely adore. So maybe if I figure this out, my boys can just be my boys and that's it. 


I just like to love people. I love almost instantly (along with trust), and will love and trust fiercely unless/until something is done to ruin that love and trust. Call me a hippie, but I just want to be able to love everyone, and for it to not ever be weird. I wish everyone gave hugs freely and leaned on people's shoulders when they felt like it. The world would be a better place.

Fragile Families

I know this isn't true, and is thus entirely irrational, but sometimes when I'm listening to lectures, I feel like the speaker is talking about ME. For instance, we had a guest lecturer in my Sociology class on Tuesday, speaking about research she and a team of grad students had just done on Fragile Families--children born out of wedlock and the tenuous ties that bind their parents. She kept talking about these people, these children, these parents, like they were so far removed from our current situation, and the whole time I just wanted to scream YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT ME!
She said a lot of things I don't agree with about children supposedly like me, but if being a SOC major has taught me anything so far, it's that I'm not like anyone who falls into any of the same categories as me. Comparison is futile. So I fumed silently, then finally treated myself to a Starbucks coffee mug to make myself feel better.
But early this morning, as I was laying in bed trying to go back to sleep, I realized she was right about how the introduction of new partners into the family and the dissolution of those relationships is stressful for the child involved. I had been refuting this because the dissolution of my mother's marriage was perhaps one of the most joyous occasions of my life. But laying in my bed, I began to feel this forbidden ache: I was again missing the one person I'm really not allowed to miss.
Greg. My mom's ex-boyfriend. I recognize that he was not right for her, and that the best decision for her personally was to terminate this relationship. I understand that, and on some level I am proud of her for being able to make the decision to walk away...in the past, I have known her to fear solitude over second-best relationships. 
And yet. Greg is one of those people that makes me question whether there is someone somewhere with some great big plan in which everything happens for a reason, because even if the 6 years or so he and my mom spent together weren't right for either of them, in some respect they were perfect for me. ...Wow, I didn't mean for that to sound so damned selfish. It's like, I mean no disrespect to my actual father, and all the disrespect possible to my ex-stepfather, when I say this, but in many ways, Greg is the closest thing to a traditional father I have ever known. (Not that he's very traditional about anything.) I guess, the relationship he and I had...he made me want to be enough of a little girl that we could go to Daddy/Daughter dances and enough of an adult to sip wine and have intellectual conversations at the same time. I would never admit this to him, but I cared SO MUCH what he thought about everything. He kept it real. He listened to my poetry and didn't judge me for it, just listened. He was trying to win my mom's heart, but he managed to get a pretty good chunk of mine too, and goddammit, I don't give a fuck if it's somehow disloyal to my mom, sometimes I miss him so much it HURTS. If ever I believed in family, it was when he was the head of mine. He lies somewhere near the root of my belief in unconditional love, too. It feels so wrong to say this, but it's how I feel so here it goes: Losing him was like losing my dad all over again.
I want to be able to have dinner with him. I want him to know about my JP topic, and I'd be more comfortable talking to him if I started dating than either of my actual parents. It's not fair that my mom wanting him out of her life meant taking him out of mine too. It's just not fair.

But you know, I still firmly disagree with the guest lecturer about one thing, and my belief about this is unwavering. She said children of fragile families would be better off with no transitions, even if they were into better relationships. That's just plain untrue. Even knowing how much it would hurt to finally understand what a father-daughter relationship is supposed to be and then lose it, I'd do it all again for the sake of the memories. I'd do it all again for the pure joy I got from running into him at Walmart over the summer, or for the shared secret joy my sister and I got from texting him to wish him a Merry Christmas.


I really do want to meet him for dinner or (in a few months) drinks or something and catch up. Maybe that's stabbing my mom in the back, but hey, I never wanted to break up with him. Don't I get some choice in who stays in my life?

I had a geode once...

^Sort of like this.

The person I was with told me not to buy it. His argument was something to the effect of there would probably be better things I could spend my money on. My counterargument was that I'd always wanted one.

...Damn it's crazy how hindsight is such a BITCH. Those three sentences really sum up his and my entire relationship...and happened within a matter of hours before the relationship ended.

I don't know exactly what happened to that geode. I may have gotten rid of/hid it somewhere in  one of the bouts of depression and anger I wrestled with for months after this all went down. Which really SUCKS, because despite all the metaphorical deeper-meaning-ness of that statement, I really have always wanted a geode.

I bring this up now because my residential college is sponsoring a trip to the Dodge Poetry Festival. 

I'm sure most of you don't automatically see the connection here. The Dodge Poetry Festival is where I bought the geode. It's where I almost had my first kiss. It's the first place I ever publicly belonged to someone else since the days when my father wanted to put me on a leash (don't even get me started...). It is without a doubt one of the most naturally beautiful places I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. 

It's also the place where my heart was broken [hopefully] harder than it will ever be broken again. It's the place where I realized that having a past doesn't necessitate a future, and that even someone I have trusted for as long as I can remember may not necessarily deserve said trust. 

It's a place I want to go back to and also a place I fear ever returning to.

The trip is free.

I should go. I know I should. I'm just going to need some time to turn that should into a will.

I mean, can returning really be that hard? Can it be as hard as turning him down when he came slinking back into my life freshman year was? Will I see the haystack we rolled in, the tree I climbed, the bench we sat on, and feel the urge to contact him? Will I kick myself for still having his number? 

Or will I just go and have a good time at a festival I love? Can life be that easy, just this once?

Bonus points if you get the literary reference.

30 Day Letter Challenge--Day Seven: Your Ex

Dear *,

I've been trying to give you not-so-subtle hints about what I want our current/future relationship to be, but you haven't seemed to be getting them, so I'm just gonna be straight up with you for a minute:

I. don't. want. to. be. friends. There, I said it. I've been trying really hard to figure out how to let you know that I am always going to make up some excuse not to hang out with you when you call, or that better yet, I don't want you to call me. And that probably makes me a fucking bitch, and I'm sorry for that, but it's how I feel.
And don't get me wrong, it's not because I'm still hurting from our relationship or because I'm still in love with you (ha!) or because I'm jealous that you've had like 3 girlfriends since we broke up and until about 2 months ago you were still the only boy I'd ever kissed. It's not because of any of these things.
Sigh, I suppose I should stop pussy-footing around this. There is no nice way to say this. It's because...I really just don't like you. Not even as a person. I look back on our little fling-in-disguise now and can't understand wtf I was thinking, besides that you wanted me and I wanted to be wanted. And that's not to say that I didn't develop real feelings for you as time went on, because trust me, our break-up hurt way more than I was expecting it to, but now...that is gone, and as rude as this is, I'd really appreciate it if you were gone too. I still don't regret it, but I kind of feel like we were as close to a mistake as it is possible to be without regret, and I'm really surprised my mother and all of my friends did not just slap me repeatedly until I woke up and realized wtf I was doing.
You were the first person in a long time to make me feel beautiful or sexy or like someone wanted me around. I needed that then, probably more than I've ever needed a lot of things. And you giving me that made me overlook...absolutely everything else? Now that you don't fit into that role anymore, I really...don't know how you can fit into my life. 
There was once a hole in my life that I contorted you to fit into. That hole is now gone. There's really nothing more I can do with you. In my new-and-improved life, that hole never existed. That really means you can't be hanging around anymore either.
I'm sorry. We can't be friends. There's nothing I even like about you. Well, maybe one or two things, but hey this isn't Breakfast at Tiffany's and that's not gonna cut it. I'm happy for you and the newest girl; from talking with you, things seem to be different with her, and I hope things work out for you. (While I'm being totally honest, I'm also pretty happy that you've downgraded, while I'm in the process of making a serious upgrade.) As per our last conversation, you seem to be making a general happiness upgrade though, and I am really glad for you about that. And I wasn't kidding when I said I was proud of you for going to school, even if it is in drama or whatever; it's a step I never thought I'd see you make.
Thank you for being what I needed when I needed it, but I'ma need you to stop hovering around now...


Maya