A dose...

While this quarantine stuff is entirely insane, I gotta say I'm enjoying these live streams of some of my favorite artists. Ben Folds just finished playing, yesterday while beginning to build the desk I had to buy online I watched Little Dragon perform a live show. This morning I had a zoom chat with my mom and step father, and my twin and sister and I've had a handful of virtual happy hours with different groups of friends and more filling in my calendar, what a timeline we're living in. Not sure if I should be surprised that even during a time like this I'm finding myself busy. Went over to Shiloh's last night to cook dinner together and then stayed over, it was my first time seeing people I know in real life in five days, such a wild thing to acknowledge and I'm sure if I hadn't experienced this feeling before during many of my solo adventure trips I think it'd be freaking me out much more.

I know that before I deactivated my social media accounts I was always anxious I would miss out on things, but even before the craziness of all this, I found I was paying more attention to different avenues of communication with the people that truly matter to me. Now that the test has been cancelled I suppose my catalyst is gone, but I honestly feel like getting back on them is not worth my time, especially now, and perhaps I may be writing here more often, this at least feels productive. All the people I truly care about, I have contact with, the only person I don't, I had to block him on there anyways because I didn't have the self control to not try and stalk the shit out of his feed to gleam what I could about whether or not he was happy. As more people reach out the sadder it is making me that I feel like I can't reach out to to him. When things with the man first began we used this phrase "a dose of honesty" and it has been bouncing around my head all day today. Being brutally honest with each other was one of my favorite parts of us and that last go around I was trying so hard to listen to his desire of not wanting a relationship that I did what I could to not rely on him emotionally and kept a lot of things that were going on for me at the time, from him, and the fact that he so quickly re-engaged with his wife, I'm positive he kept things from me too. Now I wonder if that was what lead to things no longer feeling as special as they once did, that the choice to close off just a little, made it all change. 

There are times when I am deep in the sadness of it all and get so tired of how long I've been hurting because of this and I reach a little jolt of anger, just a glimmer of wanting to inflict even a semblance of the pain I've experienced onto him. Little play outs in my mind's eye of him finally realizing what it is that we shared and me saying it's too late. Those moments are so brief and even while those thoughts cross my mind, it is impossible for me not to feel my heart's elation at the idea of his acknowledgement that whatever it is we were, was indeed something worth having. Perhaps that is the root of why it bothers me so much to have never gotten a goodbye, the acknowledgement that what we had mattered. As soon as my pain begins to subside I just do my best to try and understand his side of things and at the end of that exercise I always know that if it was me, and after my own childhood, if I had the chance to keep my family together and it was a happy and healthy family for my children, I would do it. I used to worry that he didn't care about his own happiness enough, that maybe he thought he didn't deserve it, but I think I've begun to realize that once you have children and have bonded with them the way it is intended, your happiness is so intrinsically tied into theirs, it is impossible to purely think about yourself. I will always believe just staying in a marriage for the sake of your kids is not the right thing to do if that means it's a marriage of anger and yelling and creating a home that feels more like a prison and having to walk on eggshells. However if there's still a true partnership and love for one another's well being that is palpable, even though passion may have left, perhaps it is quite an honorable thing to give your children the stability they deserve during their formative years. My parents were never even able to figure out how to talk to each other after the divorce let alone co-parenting to any degree. The fact that they communicate now continues to blow my mind.

Perhaps he knows as well as I do that we could never be just friends and that for the sake of a happy life for either one of us, this silence truly is for the highest good of all involved. I think for a while there were parts of me that feared truly getting involved with anyone new because things with the man never felt finished, and I always knew I would never be able to say no to him and I just never wanted to hurt anyone, but yet I have ended up hurting myself creating a life of solitude far before this current global one was imposed. I have not allowed myself to rely on anyone but me for a very long time and as things continue with Shiloh I know I am definitely afraid to let someone in, and to let someone truly be there for me in that space of a significant other that really is different from friends and family. Even if what's going on right now never grows legs, it does feel like it's an important process of me learning how to actually open up my heart again to actually receive the kind of love I've been begging the universe for. I think I was right the other day, I'm never going to stop loving the man and wishing him well, but I am more than capable of allowing my heart to love someone else too.