figure it out
7:07 p.m. | Dec. 15, 2008

i finally figured it out the other day.

i couldn't understand why it was so easy last time. "easy", is, of course, a vast understatement... but i was actually able to carry through with my promise to myself to freeze my heart against you. i thought it would be just as easy this time. why wouldn't it? i've done it a thousand times before, why not now?

driving through a warmth that tells me its spring, not winter, with a man holding my hand, the world flashed by in hurried moments of clarity. i feel like i'm living someone else's life, and not my own. i rested my hand on his leg and squeezed it, while i let my pain rest in my eyes, looking out the window where he can't see.

and that's the other thing. this pain, this heartache i carry is my secret. nobody knows the depth of it except for... us.

there's something to all those damn movies, poems, and books. they knew it too. just like us. movie love is possible.

anyway. the other day, i looked out the window, while driving through spring in winter, my fingers pressing against his thigh, and it hit me, full force exactly why i can't let you go, when before i could.

i didn't know then what i know now. i thought you didn't love me. i thought i was clinically insane for feeling the way that i did. when you're faced with something that questions your sanity like that, the only alternative is to push it away, and do it fast and cleanly. so i did. OK, well, minus the fast and cleanly part. in the end, you were nothing to me. by the time you showed up this time, i hardly ever thought of you, not even background thoughts. you have moved on, you were married, i had been right. i was insane, you didn't love me.

but now. you've turned it all upside down again, telling me i wasn't insane, telling me that you did love me. and now i can't let go of it.

even if i can't be with you, it seems like a betrayal to what we have to be with anyone else. a betrayal to you, a betrayal to me, and a betrayal to the one i'm with. because he loves me. oh, how he loves me. i see it in him every day. i see it when we wake up and when we go to sleep and almost every moment in between.

yet, here i am, again. in this same spot. wondering what's wrong with me, and yet, knowing exactly what it is. and i have no way to find a resolution. i think about breaking things off with my boyfriend because it seems the "right" thing to do, but in the end, where does that get me, or him?

i feel he deserves someone to love him the way that i love you. i feel that i waste his time because i don't. i'm afraid that sometime in the future, the us of this will force me to leave him, which i would, to be with you. except that's an uncertainty. and that's where this and the movies are different. a person in my situation would throw it all away without hesitation and go to you and we would live happily ever after. or vice versa. but i'm a coward and cannot sacrifice what i have at this moment to be a true and wonderful thing, for the dream that you and i would live together because of the uncertainty.

i'm back at square one again. but i know more about myself than i did before. and i know that you love me. and that's about all i know.

i fell asleep today with tears rolling down my cheeks and woke in the middle of the afternoon wondering where you were. and the only answer i ever have to that is not here.