be happy

I’m getting to see a Yankees game live on ESPN tonight. Usually these games start at 2 or 3 AM and I just don’t get to watch, but being in the States for a bit has given me the opportunity to see the games live. Cano just scored the Yanks’ third homer.

However, it also makes me miss D. He’s the one who actually explained baseball to me and made me a Yankees fan. I want to share these moments with him. I want to call and wake him up and have him explain things I don’t understand. And I can’t any more.

So I now have this wonderful new appreciation for an amazing American sport and must find some one new to share that with.

I’ve been thru so much in the last year that I couldn’t imagine there was much else that could lay me out flat. God punishes you for what you can’t imagine (Duma Key, S. King). Today I found out I was wrong.

It’s odd that one response to a loss of friendship would be a vicious character attach, an attempt to make the other person feel shitty enough to come crawling back to the friendship.

The hardest part was those things T said used to be true. That’s the Achilles heel, the fear and doubt that I haven’t changed the way I hoped and that I’m still that nasty, unhappy person I’ve been trying to escape. I know it isn’t true but that’s the problem with the Achilles heel… it exists and it’s existence can kill you.

The pursuit of happiness: too much time to think?

You don’t get to deal with one thing at a time. You deal with everything on your plate at the same time to the best of your ability. Some people can deal with huge helpings, piled high on their plates, without a second thought. Some people can’t deal at all if all the food on their plates aren’t neatly segregated. But most of us are in between and have to figure out how to deal with a regular plateful. Because food touches. Because life touches. And it’s messy too sometimes.

On Monday D and I fought over his tagging photos on my facebook page. We had a friend, C, join and he was extremely excited about it. So he went thru and tagged as many as he could easily find. 8 were from my albums after I had asked him to leave me alone for awhile. It upset me and so we fought.

However, because C has joined facebook, I’ve been going back thru the photos too. Here’s what I’ve noticed: D is always intimate with his friends, cuddles up to them, hugs on them.

I didn’t doubt things between D and me for any other reason than he stopped touching me. I didn’t doubt D’s reasons for wanting to be my friend for any other reason than he kept me at arms length.

So, now that I’ve been looking at those photos, I wonder if D has wanted me in his life at all the last 4 months, and given some of the thoughtless things he’s done in the last month, I wonder if he even considers me a friend.

Now that I’ve asked for a cooling off period, I’ve been thinking about it. And I don’t like the answers that keep coming to me.

But it keeps coming back to this, it always has: I miss him. I like how my life is with him in it. I like the laughter, the music, the discussions. I like the sense of adventure and the willingness to just do it. I like the playfulness and fun.

But I want more from him than he from me. We can’t find a common ground. So, all I can think of is that I miss him, flaws and all. That’s it.

Relationship ending is a particularly devastating to those involved. Why? Because we usually only have two choices with how to deal: hate yourself or hate the other. Hating yourself because you fell, you trusted, you were fooled, you didn’t see. Or hating the other, because it’s easier to believe he/she is the fool for not seeing your finer quality, for not seeing you for the wonderful person you are.

I think this is why relationship rarely survive the break up process, because of things we have to tell ourselves to get thru the devastation to our ego. Because we make the other the bad guy, the liar, the idiot. We do everything possible to explain the inconsistency, the change, so that it isn’t so devastating.

I have a temper from hell. I never actually learned how to deal with it, just how to let out just little bits. It’s extremely damaging just to do that. Broken calculators. Damaged bathroom doors. Dented in car doors. Broken water bottles. I hold it tightly checked. It scares me.

But I have to deal. Because I can’t damage my world without repercussions. Because unleashing the fury doesn’t fix anything and actually tends to create more problems. Because my mind is analytical enough to see those problems before hand and it’s those practical issues that can usually keep the temper at bay.

Sometimes, it’s just more satisfying to let the monster out…

Every d@^^n day, for the last 3 days, some man has told me I’m gorgeous and shouldn’t be alone. Why? Why is there a problem with me being single? Why should I have a man? Is it threatening? Is it so outside of our cultural norms? F**K! I haven’t even been divorced for a year! Is this the way they comfort me over the ending of another relationship? The loss of another man? Man = Happiness? I haven’t noticed that so far…

Being without you is like holding my breath underwater. The longer it goes on, the more it hurts. And now I must find my way to the surface without you there…