iam42

we were not really that close, were we?

I love you enough (and me enough) to let you design your life as you see fit. I trust you enough to know what's best for you. I love you enough to wish you abundant joy and success even if unconnected to me.

I still miss you - everyday. it hurts that I don't get to know you anymore. you hadmy favorite mind - it makes me sad that I never get to hear it at work. so many things happen with me and I never get to share them with you. it hurts a lot. for a long time I'd believed and secretly hoped that you were waiting to be strong enough to come and find me, to befriend me. now I think that i'm a part of your inconsequential past. the very thought of that kills me because I can't imagine ever feeling that way about you. I would've done anything for you. and you wouldn't do amything for me - not even give me my money. that makes me feel so cheap - that you would barter away my being ok and things being respectful between us and the possobility of a future friendship to not pay me money you offered and then claimed repeatedly to send. you're a tender man. I know that. I remember waiting and watching you work through 20 minutes of rambling to get out your request for a bike ride. but I also know that you are strategic anf subtle. and if you wanted me at all - thought I was someone who should be in your life - you would pick up the phone. and you haven't in nearly a year. you have not once called (ok - maybe once) to say "hi you. how are you?" and let me tell you. but I think of you everyday - some level of shock at how love and harm work together - even with the lovely you.

dear you, I am writing you here because I never got to say goodbye to you in a way that honors who you are in the world and who you were to me: my kindest man. I still think about you everyday, still miss you every single day. I guess I want to tell you that I heard you, that you're not wrong for wanting to marshall all of your energies, even romantic, to be where you are. there is nothing wrong with not being able to love accross an ocean, with needing a lover who stands in your kitchen at dinner time or has a side of a shared bed or who coaxes you out of a mood by rubbing your shoulder,who showers with you and makes love with you several times a week, who hears first how your talk or class went. I wanted to be those things for you but I couldn't living my own strenuous life accross the ocean. I have thought of it/you as weak. but I admire you and your loyalty to your own needs and your right to have those needs met - even though the cost was my deeply broken heart. for my part I want to share that the timing and method of your departure was disastrous for me. my son got very very sick and has been in and out of long hospital stays since. and I needed a hug and a drink and to sit accross the table from you who had been my lover and my deep love. I just didn't have the strength to hear what you had to tell me. to this day I have never worn the clothes that I had purchased and packed for that trip accross the ocean to see you. to this day I have not been able to nestle under another man's chin or shoulder. this is not your issue; it's mine. in some ways it is just the legacy of how good you were and how much it still hurts that you are gone. there are not many do overs in life. and you determined and orchestrated our end in the best way you could. still, I wish that there had been more patience, more faith, more grace, more care, more room for me to say goodbye (with tears and kisses all over that pretty face) to one of my absolute favorite men - and minds - ever. please be very happy. a thousand kisses. yours.

I am afraid that I will miss you for the rest of my life.

you have f*cked me up. seriously. almost as bad as the ex who beat me up and put me in the hospital when i was pregnant, kicked me out of the house with our 6-week-old, and then kept me in court for the next six and a half years trying to get custody of him... as with him, i remain shocked and awed by you.

I still think of you every morning. you were so incredibly dear to me. it made me so sad and so exhausted trying to take care of you and of me; you were precious to both of us. it made me so sad and so exhausted trying to negotiate being a good partner to a not-so-good one. I didn't ask for much but what I asked for I really needed. and you wouldn't give even that. that's what stays with me, the pathetic imbalance of it all - that I would have hopped on a plane if you ever said you needed me right then and you had every excuse in the book for not giving me a call. I feel sometimes like you pushed me out of your life with the same subtle persistence that you got me in - careful not to let me know how I was being maneuvered into place. just enough, just so. I took almost a 6-month hiatus from caring well for myself. I stopped shopping, working out, doing laundry, showering daily even. I moved through my days like a shell-shocked and mind-twisted zombie. I mustered just enough surface to interact with work colleagues, to charm potential new suitors. maybe this is all much simpler than I've admitted, a simple case of unrequited love. i have a memory from our last night together of reaching for your face in a slight panic and asking if I'd hurt you. I have a memory from our last day of your disappearing into the bathroom repeatedly to cry while I packed. you didn't help me assemble my things. I did it alone, quietly. and before i left I kept smiling into your face and kissing your red nose. we kissed so much, such deep kisses. you told me you loved me and I said I'd see you soon. we ended a few months later a few days before my next scheduled visit. it took me two weeks to unpack the items I'd already started to place in my suitcase and I hid for weeks from anyone who might ask how our visit had gone, how you were. such shame that I could be so discarded by one who'd meant so very much to me. I think I'm coming to forgive us both. what i know, what ive always known is that we all do our best with what we have and what we know. i still love you very very much, and i carry you in a warm pocket beneath my heart near the center of my belly.

i am upset that you have not sent me what you owe me. i am not a slight, silly girl -- as you know and knew even before you won me. your disrespectful discard not only crushed every ounce of good feeling i had for you; it embarrassed me to no end. please just send me my money, and let's be done with it. you played me pretty badly enough.

i still wake up every morning and think of you first. if i dwell for any length of time, i tear up. if i stay even longer in my head, i cry. this is still everyday, 6 months later. pathological grief to add to my ptsd diagnosis. great... i find myself deploying both intuition and intellect to try to understand. mostly, i want to understand why you didn't want to see me one last time. i can't figure out if it was just that you were so done that you couldn't be bothered or that a breakup would not have happened if you saw me. i believe your reasons in a way. i remember you. i remember how much you hated to cook for yourself and so would sometimes go hungry to avoid that. and since i don't cook, i would just flit about the kitchen, talking your ear off, keeping you charmed while your prepared our meal. i know what you meant when you said that you could not deal with being divided by two continents: you felt fragmented away from me and needed to get over me. i know how bad you were with communication, how you'd disappear into your own head. i know that i needed to touch you when you were upset with me. sometimes, i would make love to you first and then ask you what was wrong, how had i upset you. i know that a ldr was not tenable for either of us -- not under duress. two physically and psychically guarded people. we opened slowly in the warm presence of the other. i remember that. perhaps, that i why i said the words when you couldn't. in all of your complaints, i heard "i can't do this. please let me go." so i did, or said i would. i'm trying. but i carry the memory of you and the extreme hurt of the way you left like an irrecuperable wound in my chest, around my neck, in my hands. i hope one day, one day, you will say hello. and really mean it.

i said, "i miss your pretty face, your pretty everything!" you said, "i cannot love myself for not making you happy." was something lost in translation? there are no villains or victims here. i want to disown the stories i have made up to explain and survive my disappointment. the fact of the matter is that we all do the best we can with who we are, what we know, and what we have. i have a penchant for being lit up by shiny shady people. you are attracted to the delicate but durable. your arrival was an unanticipated good, not unlike others who seemed to have stepped straight out of daylight into my life. departures are never easy, but they are often an unanticipated good as well. always, my friend.

i read somewhere that not mattering to someone who is important to you is experienced as psychic annihilation. that seems awful. i am not your responsibility. i never was, and, because i lean toward shame with every exposure or indication of need, i couldn't bring myself to ask for much. but when things were simultaneously good (my career) and bad (my son's depression and hospitalization) what i so needed from you, what i would have given anything for, was a hug. a moment with my head on your pillow and your face inches from mine. to hear you say hello because now we were in bed and the door was closed, and i could just come out and tell you what was really going on with me. to have you touch my face and lose your hands in the mass mess of my hair. hi, you would say. and my mouth would go running. i could've heard anything from you and would have believed/accepted all your reasons for needing us to stop. and because i do love you and don't believe that possession has any place in that, i would have let you go. why not after all? ldr's suck! but you couldn't spare that one moment in time, grant that one hello that we had planned in a giddy but quiet way during the last days of my last time in your home. i forgive you, or i will. but we will not know each other again. who knew that a man whose voice i have never heard raised could be connected for me to so much hurt? so yes, not mattering to someone who is important to you is experienced as psychic annihilation.

i am afraid that i will always miss you -- and never understand. the distance between caring and not caring feels unbridgeable. how did you get there?

you broke away. we are broken up. i am broken open.

i will never forgive you. i hope that i don't miss you for the rest of my life.

that pedestal beneath your feet is crumbling. people mistakenly believe that someone who adores you always will. not true, my friend. the best thing about getting over you is knowing you will never be able to make me feel pain again...