dangerous thinking

I’m in a melancholy sort of mood today. It’s been lingering for a few days, building. I’m in a good place in my life. I can pay my bills; things are tight sometimes but I can pay my bills on my own. I am getting ready to start full-time and that means health benefits again after over a year without health insurance. My family and I are…well, we don’t fight as often as we were and that’s good in itself. I don’t have many more friends than I used to but I feel like I’m at a better place overall in my life. It’s nice to feel…content with my life as a whole. It’s almost like the pieces are falling into place finally, slowly, here and there. Still some that don’t fit just yet but it’s okay.

As for the melancholy.

I’m lonely.

Someone quoted something earlier that made the loneliness just pop up to the surface of my thoughts.

"You can’t STOP loving someone; either you still do or you never did."

It’s very true.

I never really loved Jay, I just thought I did. Silly puppy-love so many of us find in high school. Our first love that isn’t really love at all. What a fallacy. Our first love is so rarely genuine love. But it certainly feels as if the world is ending when we have to let it go.

I loved Joey. As much as he was a jerk and a mistake and I am FAR better off without him (probably would have been better off having never met him really), I miss him still. I miss who I was with him, how I felt with him. Every now and then I even still miss him.

I loved Quinn. I still miss him. I still lie in bed sometimes aching to feel his arms around me. I still think of his smile and his laugh and it makes my heart skip a beat. I find myself thinking during a conversation "Oh I need to remember that joke to tell Quinn." He was only really in my life a little over a year but in that time I fell truly in love with him. It’s why keeping him out of my life has been so hard the last few months. But I also know that it would be so easy for me to fall back into my old patterns. It would be so simple to just let myself love him in spite of all the heartbreak and the bullsht. I can’t do that anymore. So as much as he wants to be friends, as much as he tries to be friends, I know I will never really be his friend again, not until I have learned to let go of this love and let it settle into something less moving, less intense, less dangerous. Let it settle into the banked embers of old love and stop being the smoldering embers of unrequited love.

I wish it would hurry up.