Boy, did I like the
italics when I wrote this one. I just got on a roll and I couldn't stop.
I am being haunted by echos of conversations with my last boyfriend before the person I am "seeing" now, conversations from the period of time during which that relationship withered and died. For some reason, that particular era remains a perfect set of lucid memories, whilst many of the rest of my memories from years past have been become muddled or nonexistent. I remember exactly what it was, so many months ago, that hurt me more than any other aspect of that previous relationship's demise. One day, he just stopped saying I love you. The day before, he'd said it; the next day, it was missing; and it never resurfaced, in any form. We'd still talk, we'd still exchange emails (as we too were geographically separated at the time), but his letters were no longer signed Love, and he never uttered those three simple words that had previously been a staple of our regular interaction.
I thought, How can he, one day, stop loving me, just like that? Yesterday he did, but today he doesn't? How does that work? It was a crushing feeling, especially since he kept up our regular correspondence, at least for a time -- just minus that one crucial sentiment. It seemed so orchestrated, so cruel, and so pointed.
Last night, I had a dream... I dreamt that I was around this person, that we were talking... and that we were friends... yet he said something to me in the dream that made me wake up crying and sweating. He said, "You realize that everything we shared for those eight months was a lie? I never loved you, I took it because you let me have it. You were so vulnerable, you were a little girl trying to love."
I stared into his eyes that dream, so hurtful. I never thought that those beautiful blue eyes that I once dreamed of diving into like an ocean over and over again could stab me so sharply, and I woke.
I do, of course, still love him. We shared too much together. Our lives were too intertwined for too long for me to be able to separate all such emotions from thoughts of him. At some point, though I came to the realization that I just don't have the kind of confidence in our relationship to probably ever make it a reality again. We've been through too much. I've become too disenchanted. I am too autonomous, and not willing to risk becoming otherwise, if it means putting myself into a potentially painful and impossible situation as that which I've been in with him before.
I do love him, but I couldn't bring myself to say it. I'm afraid that by saying it, not-with-standing its truth value, I would be instilling an inappropriate source of optimism or hope in him, about the future of a relationship with me.
I do not like being hurt, and I like being hurtful even less. I soften every time that I try to explain my disenchantment with everything to him, and it brings tears. I hear his cry, and I immediately want to take it all back -- not because anything I've said isn't true, isn't what I really believe is what I want and need for myself, but because I know how it feels.
I don't know what to do or say anymore. I care about you, the person I am with very deeply. And I don't think I could go back to this other person if the world depended on it. It hurt too much.
I try to lie to myself and say that he didn't care, and that it's easy to forget about him because there was nothing there for me but, I can't lie. I only can't forget him because he was my first real and serious love.
before | after
Goodbye... and EFF YOU! - January 14, 2004
This... sucks. - November 30, 2003
High on Life... and hyper as hell. - November 28, 2003
Happy Thanksgiving, not so happy. - November 27, 2003... Thanksgiving Day
100 exciting things about me... hehe,.. not. - November 25, 2003