love and be loved

Holy hell, all my friends are engaged. I feel like I need to start countdowns…”How many days left do I have to find a date for this wedding?”

I have the most awesome friends ever.

that my current emotions are best described as a combination of:

“The Dance”, Garth Brooks
“You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”, Dusty Springfield and
“Think of Me”, Andrew Lloyd Weber

{you know you’re a musical nerd when you express your emotions in terms of songs. you know it’s really bad when some of those songs are from musicals. guilty as charged.}

I think that’s an ok place for me to be at right now. I’m fairly satisfied with that. I’m not bitter, or vindictive, or hateful, or spiteful or anything. Just kind of sad for what was but is no longer.

I’d had “love everyone” on my list pretty much since I signed up for 43T. Loving everyone, or at least seeing everyone as worthy and capable of love, is something I strive to do in my daily life. But I realize that I am mortal, and I am incapable of loving EVERYONE. For example, there are some people in my life that just annoy me too much for me to actually love them. I don’t hate anyone, but I can’t love everyone. Some people are a bit too evil for me to love. There were and are very few people who are truly capable of loving every member of humanity. Jesus, maybe Mother Theresa. Not me. So that goal left to make room for more tangible, more realistic ones.

I finally deleted the “stay in love” goal. It needed to go. A small bit of closure that may help my poor heart. I wrote this entry before I deleted it, but since 43T deletes entries when you delete the goal, I copied the entry into this goal. All of you who’ve been supporting me through this whole…thing, I don’t know what to call it…deserved a better explanation than I’ve been giving you.

I know I never updated after that weekend when I saw him. Sorry. For a while I just didn’t have the emotional strength to deal with it. There was also a time issue, I don’t have very much of it to spare.

Deep breath.

So I saw him when I went home the weekend before Halloween. I came home Friday morning and saw him that evening. Now, if you recall, I’d basically been hoping that all that needed to happen was for us to see each other, and be able to talk face to face, and we’d be able to figure things out, or at least try. So anyways, we met for a movie at a theater about halfway between our towns. He came over to me and hugged me, and we just held each other without speaking for several minutes. God, did that feel good. He held me and kissed my forehead. He held my hand walking into the theater, and we talked about my trip, about how his day had been. He had his arm around me during the whole movie, and I leaned against his chest and wanted to stay there forever. We walked around Walmart (because that’s what we do for fun in Western Pennsylvania), then we had coffee at EatnPark (a 24hour diner type place). We talked about a whole lot of stuff, but at the same time, about nothing at all. We didn’t talk about US, or anything relating to anything that happened with us. I didn’t bring it up because I’m a f*ing coward, and I didn’t want to do anything to make the night akward. It wasn’t akward, which was good, but I was afraid to do anything that might turn it akward, or ruin the unakwardness. So anyways, we talked about a whole lot of nothing. After coffee he drove me back to my car, and we sat in the car and just held each other in one of those akward across the car seat hugs without speaking (it was raining). I asked if he wanted the shirts of his he’d given me back, he said no, not to ever give back anything he gave me. We got out of the car and had another really long hug, ignoring the rain. Then he stepped back and said something like “It was really good to see you.”, before he got in his car, and I got in mine, and we parted.

“It was really good to see you.” For some reason, that simple phrase just killed me. I’m not sure exactly why. I think I felt, that’s it? “Really good”? That’s it? I cried half the way home before calling my best friend (who’s also a good friend of his, hence how we met) and crying some more to her.

The next day I talked to my best friend/our mutual friend again. She said she had something to tell me, and after getting my assurances that I wouldn’t be mad at her for what she had to say, she told me, “You know he’s already been rebounding, right?” I’d had a vague idea, but…well…no, that was a lie. It really wasn’t something I considered. How could he be, if I was still hurting so much? So that was basically the point when I finally told myself it was over, for good. No more denying it.

Since then, I’ve just been trying to move on. Trying not to think about him. Keeping busy, so I won’t have time just to sit and be depressed….easier said than done. I can’t help but think about him, every time I’m with couples I’m friends with who remind me of how we used to be, whenever I see things that remind me of him. I wonder what went wrong, and why I didn’t have any idea of what was about to happen, why I didn’t detect any signs of the jerk my boyfriend was about to turn into.

That’s another thing. He seems to be continually coming up with new ways to be a jerk. Either that, or I’m just now discovering them. My best friend/our mutual friend says that he’s changed, not for the better, and other mutual friends of ours have noticed it too. He made some really assholeish comment about one of our friends whose boyfriend just dumped her after cheating on her. People on the staff of the school paper, which he’s the photo editor for, are apparently starting to consider him creepy because he keeps bugging people to model for him and his photo projects. Oh, and my best friend finally told me that he started rebounding a lot sooner than she’d first implied. Apparently like a week after he broke up with me, he was already bragging about something he did on a one night stand. He’d always told me that after his last girlfriend dumped him, when he was rebounding and doing the one night stand thing for a while, it just depressed him and made him feel bad about himself. So now what’s he doing?...the same damned thing, apparently. I told my best friend that I feel like I don’t even know him any more, and she said she felt the same way. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to look at someone you’ve loved with all your heart and realize that you have no idea who they are?

So, that’s where things are at now. He apparently decided that he’d had enough of being a nice, sane, really decent guy, and wanted to see what it was like to be an asshole for a while, so he’s working on perfecting that, or something. I…I don’t know. I’m not sure how I feel about him right now. I don’t hate him. Hating him really wouldn’t hurt him any, and it would do me a hell of a lot more harm than good. I don’t know if I still love him. Mostly I’m just sad. Sad for us, sad for him, sad for myself. I think I’m ready to move away from him, but as far as moving on to something else…no. My poor heart’s still in pieces, I can’t deal with anything but trying to heal myself now, and I’m not even handling that very well. I can now officially say that every time I’ve attempted a romantic relationship, it’s ended with me getting hurt, hurt badly, hurt much worse than the guy involved. I’m not bitter towards love or towards other couples, I’m still happy for all my friends with relationships, but my views about my own chances for such things are a bit pessimistic right now. It doesn’t help that most of my good friends are in relationships with people that they’ll probably end up marrying. I thought I had that. Shows how much I know. I have a long way to go before I’m truly ok again.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been throwing myself into ballroom so much lately. Notice the sudden increase in the frequency of dance-related entries on my part? {Warning: Metaphor ahead.} In ballroom, when I’m dancing, someone’s holding me in their arms. The world drifts away, leaving only the song and my partner. I’m being held close, and I feel safe again. I’m protected and supported, if only for a few precious minutes. But then the song ends, and I’m on my own once again. Dale was different than anyone I’d found before, our song longer than any dance I’d imagined myself capable of dancing. My time with him was the happiest time of my life thus far. I still don’t know exactly what happened that brought the song to an end. Maybe I’ll never know. I was so caught up in the dance that I didn’t hear the song ending, didn’t see the change in his steps. The song ended, and I wasn’t ready for it.

Sigh. That’s the thing about songs. Even the best ones end.

Hey, even if nobody else does, the kitten loves me. Dusty Lilly P.I.T.A., aka Dusty Lil, aka Dusty, is currently asleep in the pocket of my bathrobe, lying on her back on my leg with her front paws in the air.

Awwwwwwwwww.

I am in love, and I am loved, but this is still on my list because I don’t think I’ll ever be finished with it. :-)