“You’ve Let Him Go. You’re Free.”

This is a quote from the last note I got.  It made me cry harder . . .

Work is . . . in the balance, to say the least.  My hours have been being cut the past couple of weeks, the only thing making up for it being that Scott, the other district manager, was having me go to other stores and cover shifts.  Well, I went to the Ocean store today to see if I was scheduled for that day, and I figured if I was I would just stay down there.  (The store opens at four, the manager has to be there at three, and I went there around 2:30.)  Anyway, I wasn’t on the schedule, period.  Someone else had taken over my position as that store’s assistant.  I’d wondered as much when the guy was staying inside and learning how to make pizzas and such, but I just figured, ‘okay, he’ll be an assistant for another store, if he moves up that far.’  I never thought he’d be taking over at the same store . . .

Well, I figured, ‘okay, day off.’  It was only a Monday, there’s only one store I’ve ever heard of that’s busy on Mondays.  So I figured I would call later on and see what was up and was I working somwhere else on Wednesday.  I get a call tonight, while I was out, without my phone, and it was my mom saying Domino’s had called me and I should call them back.

I did when I got back and I got ahold of Scott.  He asks what happened today and said ‘well, I could have called him , or Matt, or Jane, etc.’ and that ‘it seems like I don’t really care about working.’  He goes on to say that I’m always coming in late, I’m never prepping, and I would rather read a book than do what needs to be done around the store.  He said that things should have been prepped in Long Branch, but instead, I sat there and read.

Now, that pissed me off.  I’d like to know where his hidden camera was, because A) he wasn’t at the store.  B) I didn’t even bring a book with me the last time I was at Long Branch!

And what the Hell with the ‘always late?’  The past week, I got to the Ocean store to open, one day at quarter to three, and the other, about 3:05.  The times when I had to open, I’ve been there no later than eleven-thirty.  (We open at noon.)

And the ‘not prepping?’  Excuse me, but I prepped everything for the makeline except pineapples and jalapenos because I didn’t know where any scissors were to open the damn bags!  And the only reason I didn’t prep chicken stuff was because it looked like we’d have enough for the day!  There was a little over half a case of each!

But, and this is why I’ve now come to the conclusion that Scott’s an ass, he’d already made up his mind about me and didn’t listen when I tried to say any of that.  So now . . . I don’t know.  I might go back to being a driver.  I’ll have to talk to Jane.  To be honest, though, I don’t know if I still want to work for this company.  But I’m pretty sure it’s too late to sign up for anything at Brookdale, and even if it wasn’t, I still need some way to make money.

I don’t know what I’m gonna do.

"You’ve let him go.  You’re free."  Then why does it make me feel like crying?  Why does it make me sad?  I watched those videos and thinking back on them now, I felt like warning myself.  "Don’t get so close to this guy!  His brother’s gonna try to break you two up and ultimately he manages it!  You come so close to emotionally losing yourself, it’s not worth it!"

He wasn’t worth what I had to go through to learn what I did.  Because if he was, he’d be the one beside me right now, instead of two cats.  If he’d been worth it, there would already be a ring on my finger.  If he’d been worth it . . . 

Now . . . all I know is how lonely I am.  I don’t seem to care much about anything.  I don’t care about writing, I don’t even really care about reading.  None of my drawings ever come out the way I want them to, so I stay away from drawing, I don’t have good solid markers to color in the fuzzy posters I found, and besides, most of them were bought with Mike or someone related to him in mind.

I want someone to hold.  I want someone to say "I love you" to, I want . . . I want Ryan to reciprocate my feelings!  I want him to love me the same way I love him.  I want to kiss him and be kissed by him, I want to hold him and have him hold me.  I want to know what it truly feels like to love someone and have them love you enough to pick you over others.

This is a segment of the last E-mail I wrote to Jill.  God only knows what her reaction’ll be to it.  It’s been a week, and she hasn’t responded.  But yeah, I’d say I cover how I feel about things with Mike pretty well here.

I admit, I’d like to go into more personal things with you, but since a lot of my emotional "fun" things have to do with Mike, I don’t know how comfortable you’d be hearing them.  I mean, long story short, that actually tells it in a rather scarily accurate way, is the song Over You, by Christ Daughtry.  If you get the chance, listen to it.

I mean, as things stand now, I’m over Mike and everything I went through because of him.  It was a long jhourney, but I finally came through it.  Hell, I even saw him at Staples a couple of days ago, and… nothing.

It just strikes me as sad, though.  We knew one another so well, we thought we’d be together for the rest of our lives, Hell, we’d planned on getting maried May 9th of last year.  We picked that day because it was the anniversary of the first time we met.

And now?  Now, we’re strangers who lost one another to life.  And that strikes me as so sad.  That once, we almost had a sixth sense about when something was bothering the other, where the other would go when they were upset, how to comfort the other, and now… Now, we might as well be on different planets for how attuned we are to each other.  (ie, not at all.)

You’ve taken up that spot in his heart.  And I admit, it was hard talking to you at first because of that.  I was *okay* when I thought and could tell myself that you were this petty, shallow, will-eventually-cheat-on-him-because-you’ll-see-he’s-manipulating-you-but-won’t-have-the-guts-to-break-it-off person.  But then we actually talked.

And then, though it was hard talking to you, it was harder not talking.  Because when there was a stretch between E-mails, my mind started saying, "Well, she’s just such and such…" but another part of me was saying, "No, she’s not and she’s proving that to you."

I was jealous of you.  In a way, I still am.  Because you truly get to be his girlfriend.  Maybe that’s what I was in the beginning, but… for most of our relationship, I took on the role of mother, therapist…  And I neve got to settle back in to just be ‘Mike’s girlfriend.’  I envy you that.

Yet, in an odd way, I also think, despite my opinion of him, that maybe you two were meant to be together anyway.  That he just had obstacles to overcome and maybe God knew you weren’t the right person to handle them.  Be

cause you had something like three chances to get together before you actually did, but it didn’t work out until recently, whenever you actually did get together.

I know it can’t be any other way between he and I, but even though I’m over it now, it still makes me sad that I lost him to life.  Because I lost so much more than just a boyfriend.  The night I got together with him was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life.  Because I lost the best friend I’ve ever had.

Heh…  I doubt that he’d still say the same now, but… He told me so often back then that that first summer that he and I hung out was the best summer of his life.  That I had given that to him…  Like I said, I doubt he still holds that as the best of his life, but, you know something?

It still counts as the best of mine…

Ah, damnit…  I thought I could get through this without crying.  Please don’t think I’m fishing for sympathy or anything.  Or trying to get you to take sides.  I’m not, on both counts.  I’m just… I don’t even know.  I guess venting to someone who hasn’t heard these things from me a million times?

You know those books, the ones about Drizzt I recommended?  I sped through the first three like nothing else.  But when I got to the fourth one, it’s as if it hit me that… I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to about the books when I was done with them.  It truly hit me then that Mike wasn’t going to talk to me, so what was the point in reading them, really?

Heh.  I think that’s what I miss most.  The conversations we used to have.  The way we could go from one subject to another, seamlessly leading in and out, bringing up points or counterpoints and then going onto something completely different, yet related, and neither of us would wonder how.

I’d talked to him on the phone last year in either late April or late May, you know.  I wish he hadn’t lied to me then.  He claimed if I ever needed to talk, despite how he felt, he was willing to listen.  I wish he hadn’t lied to me, because I know now that’s all that line was.

::Sighs::  I should stop babbling, shouldn’t I?

Okay, gonna go.  Cuz this may have been a little too under-the-surface.  But once I started, I don’t know.  I had to force myself to stop.

Bye. :/
Kate.