Walls

I think that maybe this is more of a problem than I thought it was.  I mean, I am more affected.  Maybe what I need is a couple of days to curl up by myself in baggy clothes with lots of tea and mindless movies and just cry.  I don’t have a couple of days to do that, I haven’t yet and I won’t in the time to come.  I’m working afternoons and I have been sleeping mornings to try to get rid of this cold, yet another cold, but my bicycle is back as of today and tomorrow I will have to start training again.  The LifeCycle is close enough to be no longer disturbing.  Training is not a question, whether I have trained enough or not is not a matter of stress, at this point it is what it is and I will be fine.  I’m always fine.

I am not fine right now.  I am jumpy and on the defensive, with a dull ache inside me and no small measure of anger.  I am getting on with life and driving kids around and watching Law and Order with my mother and preparing for the LifeCycle and even hanging out with Sam.  I think that’s what drove it home to me that I am not all-together all right, that being together is not the same thing as being OK.  I don’t want to see Sam.  Given the choice between sitting home with a book or seeing Sam, I’m choosing sitting home.  There’s something wrong with that.  I went to his flat last night and met his roommate and her friend…and we sat on their sofas and watched the series finale of Will and Grace, a show I have never watched…and I said I would like to sing duets with him and he said it would be good, said it with that old soul-connection, and I pulled back from it and looked away and thanked him for having me.  I always lose him.  Every time, I always have to lose him, we can never keep each other.  And our friendship is too perfect for me to lose it, I can’t lose anyone else right now.  So I seem to be choosing to never have it at all.

Sometimes I want to call Tyler and burst into tears and say, you, you messed me up.  I have come through professional and personal attacks, and attacks from inside me, mental illness and physical illness, I came through OCD without medication or exposure therapy, I did it all myself because I am strong enough to do whatever I have to do.  This is who I am, this is what I have done, and you, Tyler, you messed me up?  You stole my trust.  My ready trust is something that defines me, my willingness to give second chances, third, to forgive and forgive and forgive.  I am a person who will keep going back and going back to Sam, because he is my soul-mate and I have never had any relationship like it, even though it hurts like hell that I cannot have him for any length of time or having him in other ways.  I have always believed in loving and losing, and in the inherent worth of being tamed.  You risk tears when you allow yourself to be tamed.  And it is worth it for the colour of the wheat.  I have always believed this.  And right now I don’t.  I am disinclined to open myself and reveal my soul.  And that’s what it is, that’s the right word, "dislinclined."  I won’t even go far enough to say that I don’t want to.  Even that is too much.

It feels like depression, but I’m not scared.  My depression is chemical, and this is so situational that I know not to worry.  It will pass with time, depression always does and this isn’t even real depression anyway.  I’m far more functional than that.

I am, in fact, very functional.  I am getting things done, in good time and with all necessary energy.  I have another cold, but what of it, I was sick for more than half of last semester and it isn’t worth worrying about, it’s barely worth noticing.

I don’t really know why this has thrown me so much.  I guess this is the point when it becomes real that he dumped me…however I may have said otherwise at the time, until this, until Claire, we were just on hold, and I can handle that.  But this is a real ending, and there is something in it that feels like a betrayal…a betrayal of our potential.  Because I don’t want to be with him anymore, and I can’t see it ever working out anymore, and that is the end of that.  Except it isn’t, because I still love him, and ultimately if he called me tomorrow and asked me to take him back I probably would.  Probably.  Oh, I don’t even know.  But I might, and that is enough to give the lie to my saying it is the end of potential.  But I would know it was a bad idea.  And more importantly, it is now clear that he will not call tomorrow and say this.  Up until now, it was possible.  And it isn’t anymore.  Because he doesn’t actually love me and he probably never did, or he wouldn’t be seeing someone else so soon.

I shouldn’t say that, really.  Quirk recommended to me that I ought not to date anyone else until I’m properly over him.  My initial reaction to this is, of course not, of course that would not be fair at all.  But my second reaction is, what anyone else did you have in mind?  Introduce me to this mythical someone else and I’ll get over Tyler.  But there is no someone else, not anyone in the whole world to match him and he turned out to be a jerk and a lier and untrustworthy.  And if the unmatchable turns out to be not merely imperfect but unacceptible, what then?  What then?

I don’t even miss him.  I have no real wish to talk to him.  I called him yesterday because I hadn’t in a while and I can’t really expect him to do all the work…it is not fair for me to demand of him a huge effort to keep in touch and then put in no effort myself whatsoever.  But I didn’t want to talk to him.  I wanted him to call back while I was at Sam’s house, so I could open that conversation with Sam and feel the warmth of him and of our love to break this ice, because I feel like a block of ice right now and I don’t really like it much.  But I think the first thing that will happen, if I actually respond to this, will be an outpouring of illogical, unfair rage, and I still love him too much to want to rage at him unfairly, undeservingly.  He does not deserve such anger, he always did what he thought was right.  The fact that he was wrong doesn’t change the fact that he was trying very, very hard, and probably still is.  In as much as he thinks of me at all, except as a complication.  I bet he thinks of me just the way he thought of Claire at the beginning of our relationship — an "awkward life issue" that "explodes" every so often, a person who only exists in as much as she creates uncomfortable conversations in which he has to look out for himself while still trying to take care of me.

He hurt her, he hurt me.  Cody.  Mustn’t forget Cody, no, no — Cody was mine long, long before I had ever heard Tyler’s name.  He is harsh with M.A., he offends HRSFA.  I am not the one here who is ice.  He is ice and he smashes all the soft, human people around him.  (And of course this Tyler is no more real than the perfect Tyler.  I made them both up, or perhaps you combine them to get the actual person in there…because there is a p

erson in there, a person I love, and I didn’t mind it so much when he was ice to Claire because he had chosen me, now did I?)

Oh my dear one, what you have done to me…

–Stephanie