To Be or Not To Be…

I was going to note back to one of my favorites, but I realised I had more that I wanted to work through and write out.  Her entry and our ensuing notes merely prompted all this to come more forefront than in the past.

Manny and I have a complicated past.  To be fair, I think our future isn’t going to be any less complicated except that we both are now aware of how complicated it will be.  I love him and I wish I could marry him and have his children and build a life with him.  For so long, he felt as though he was the second choice.  Things didn’t work out with Tim and I went back to him.  Things didn’t work out with Matt and I went back to him.  Things didn’t work out with Ricky or Danny and I would just always go back to him.  Granted he took me back, and that was his choice.  He could have said no at any point, but each time he opened his arms and his heart.  And each time I stabbed him with a knife and ran away to another guy.  Sometimes it was to a loser; sometimes it was to another guy who left me.  Sometimes the reasons they left were dumb and sometimes they were… well, unavoidable.  Death isn’t always something you can choose.  But Manny never left.  Through all the crap I threw at him, through all the crap he threw at me, he never left.  He never really threw in the towel and called it quits.  I’ve come to depend on him being the one guy who won’t leave me.

I don’t know exactly what the moment was when he stopped being the "second choice".  Maybe it was once I slept with Mike.  We had a bit of a Dawson’s Creek moment.  He was Dawson mad at Joey for sleeping with someone other than him.  For letting someone else be my first.  I think a part of him felt that he had earned that right, and he didn’t know what Mike had that he didn’t.  Why did this other guy get what he could never have?  And I’m not entirely sure either.  I do know that moment changed our relationship permanently.  Since then we’ve never gotten back together, at least not officially.  We have kissed and fooled around, which I put a stop to pretty quick.  I knew we were both too emotionally involved to ever have a casual relationship like that.  Still, the bickering and fighting and reliving of our past relationship has never really stopped.  It has definitely slowed considerably in the past few years, with only a few fights since "The Talk."  

Oh man, "The Talk".  It was a massive, no-holds-bar conversation that lasted long into the night.  I think it was nearly three hours outside the warehouse at the camp where I worked during the summer.  I just tried to backtrack and see if I had written an entry about it.  Perhaps I did, but I can’t find it at the moment.  But "The Talk" was the culmination of all our fights and arguments and attempts to get the other out of our lives.  The problem with trying to walk away from each other is that neither of us really wanted that.  Manny has seen me at some of my worst moments.  He’s dealt with me when I’m breaking apart at the seams.  He knows that as bad as things have gotten recently, it is nowhere near as bad as they once were.  He is one who can identify true happiness in me when it is not manic driven.  He is one who can identify true depression in me even when I’m trying to hide it.  He is one who has never left me.  No matter how far apart we travel, he’s still made sure that I know he’s there.  No matter what.

Back to "The Talk".  It resulted in us reaching a breaking point.  Either we had to decide that we wanted to be friends, and truly be friends or to just walk away from each other and stop hurting each other.  No one was forcing us to be friends anymore.  It was our choice.  And we both chose friendship.  That was a huge turning point for us.  I think we went over three years without fighting.  It became an anniversary date for us (which I sadly don’t remember anymore).  It was our anniversary of no fighting.  Those friends who experienced our fights rolled their eyes, but were secretly grateful that the war had finally ended.

We’ve had a few… spats since then.  The latest one happened earlier this year and nearly ripped us apart again.  Yet, I watched him change and grow in the span of a phone conversation.  Its incredibly to think of where we started and where we’ve gotten to, both individually and together.  Our relationship has gone through so very much, I can’t believe its still intact in any form.

Back to my original point (I can ramble on so!).  Its sometimes really hard to sort out in your own head what you want and what you don’t want.  I spent years yo-yo-ing between Manny and other men, keeping him on a leash just in case I wanted him back.  Eventually, he had to cut the cord and break away.  He refuses to entertain the idea that we could get back together.  He claims that he has moved on and beyond me.  Perhaps in a way, he has.  He is no longer waiting for me the way he once was.  Except there is still that indescribable link between us.  We get each other in a way that no one else does, and we are often drawn back to each other because of it.  I honestly don’t know if we’d survive if one of us started pursuing the other.  I mean, hardcore wooing and pursuing.  I think we’d both break, and fall headlong into nuclear disaster.
The secret thing deep inside me is that there is a very specific reason why I cannot allow myself to fall into that relationship again.  Amidst everything else, there is a very specific reason why we would not work out as we are right now.  There is always room for change, and perhaps that one singular reason will one day resolve itself.  A tiny part of me is constantly hoping for that change AND the renewed possibility of a relationship.  Its almost as if this one issue is the lynchpin that is keeping us apart.  Perhaps its easier for me to use that as an excuse rather than face the idea that we are never going to be together.  I tied his tether too tight and held on for too long, and in doing so, I’ve lost him in a way I cannot recover.

Either way, whether that lynchpin is ever removed or not, I will always wonder "what if".  What if I had refused to let that one issue get in our way.  What if I had stayed with him and stopped constantly trying to protect myself by running away from him – in essence leaving him before he could leave me.  What if, what if, what if.

There is no way to ever resolve all the what if’s that exist for Manny and I.  They are too numerous with too many possible outcomes.  I’ll admit I do get caught up in them at times and wish I could explore them, even just for a time.  Just to see if we could have a happier ending to our story.  But I have to remind myself of that lynchpin and of all the reasons why we are where we are today.  The most recent argument brought a number of things to light for me, some which I shared with Manny and some which I did not.  But one thing I still know to be true.  Even if we can’t be together, and even if the dream of a white picket fence with kids and pets is nothing more than a dream, I do not want to remove him from my life.  If I could, would I choose that dream?  Would I choose to be with him?  Yes, I truly think I would.  But short of that, I don’t want to remove him from my life either.

It may seem like settling, but its not.  We don’t always get to face the choices we want.  There’s not always the option to pick a different question or a different scenario.  So when the what if’s fade away and the dreams slip back into shadows, we are left with reality.  The choice that does face me is if I want this man in my life at all, in any form I can have him.  I get to make that decision.  There are times when I feel that it would be easier if I removed him from my life.  There are times when I do distance myself from him.  But at the end of it all, I still want him in my life.  Even if we can’t be everything we wished we could be.  Thats a choice we both made and one I’m glad we ended up on the same side.