Aada said she wondered if I ever turned my judgment on myself. I am having a low day, one in which I feel bad about everything I’ve ever written about her. I can’t take in that she said “sometimes it’s been a brilliant and beautiful journey,” because of course my heart, like hers, focuses on the negative, that sometimes it’s been “excruciating and debilitating.” I can only hope that these are operatic swells of emotion on the page, because them being God’s honest truth is debilitating for me.
I’m just a writer. What do I know?
I know that I feel small, that I’m working up to feeling valuable. I didn’t mean to punish anyone, but I did. Aada said that she felt like she had to step onto the hot stones and correct the record, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. I sat through all of my flaws and failures, taking them in one at a time and cataloging them for future flagellation.
And that is the heart of the matter. Aada and I don’t love ourselves enough to love each other in writing. We’ve never had the safety and security of a hug. We each look for the negative and think the positive is suspect. We each take home the other’s punishment and not the delight we’ve always felt when things are going well. We can’t make the delight last, and I think that my feelings for her are entirely to blame. They make our relationship too volatile, because I know something for sure. I am in love with her writer personality, and when I meet her in person, she will no longer be the same. She will be flesh and blood and all the things that make us human. Who knows if either of us like that person? Is that why we’ve been so afraid to try?
I definitely think that’s part of it, but would also calm everything down. Seeing her ensconced in her own happy relationships will take away the make-believe in my head. I just know that due to my own stupidity, it’s going to take even longer for that to happen and may not happen at all (the way I feel when I’m really hanging my head in shame). Am I embarrassed by the things I published? No, but I would take them down if Aada asked. As I’ve said before, I don’t have a choice in whether she reads or not, so the choice to be embarrassed has been taken from me. If she sees it, she sees it.
I will not be happy if all of my writings about her manipulations are taken as worse than my own, because we had an equal hand in wrecking our relationship. I am not thinking of her, but the way Manassas and Reston and Sacramento and Houston all exploded at once last Friday. Apparently, more people are interested in this story than I thought, because I thought that 12 years after I met Aada was enough time for no one to care about my silly blog anymore.
When I was finished writing that piece, I melted down and burned out, sleeping for several hours just to get peace. The horror of what I’d done had already set in, long before Aada arrived on my doorstep. My saving grace is that she said that the story could stand if that’s what I needed, but that saving grace put me into the ground with regret.
It’s a regret I’m learning to live around, that’s for sure.
But if Aada wants to see me humiliate myself more than she’s already been humiliated, she can read every blog entry I’ve written in the past. All of them contain embarrassing lines that are “not ready for prime time.” Do you think it was easy admitting I’d fallen for a pretty lady in the sky?
Fuck no.
To be fair, she is VERY PRETTY.
She is the movie star that would look like she was dating Pete Davidson.
Okay.
The thing about “checking for assaults” has to stop. Cold.
The thing I wish I could say? Woman, are you blind? I LOVE YOU, YOU IDIOT.
This brilliant and beautiful journey needs to continue without its excruciating and debilitating aspects. She does not have the safety and security of knowing we could meet up for lunch and everything would be okay. That my writer personality is not 3D, that I would never even hug someone without consent, etc.
I do have manners, and regret every single time I decided not to use them. Aada has also apologized for everything, all of it. That’s a solid basis to rebuild if we choose to later in life, and I’m glad we didn’t walk away from each other in enmity.
I wonder where I’ll be the next time Aada decides to drop in, should she so choose. I am not convinced that she actually has the willpower to let go of me, but we will see if she prefers the brilliant and the beautiful as time goes by.
But it’s in thinking about where I’ll be that makes me so desperate for self-reflection, going into my ivory tower to work out where I need to go next. I think that there’s a few self-help books out there for me, ones I need to read if I want to maintain peace in all of my relationships.
No one can make me feel worse than I already do, and no one can make Aada feel worse than she does.
We’re licking our wounds, but the question that needs to be answered is whether we can be trusted with each other’s hearts. Can I grow from this, because I can only control that much? Can I discover what makes me come across as manipulative so no one feels that way? Can I take account of all the ripple effects my blog has caused? Am I strong enough to make amends where I can, letting people go if they no longer want to work on our relationship?
I am obviously not strong enough to feel like this relationship is over yet. As I told Aada, I can’t take in the enormity of forever all at once. I know we will not talk today, and I will say that to myself until forever arrives if that’s what needs to happen. I also need to get away from feeling like I am waiting for something to happen, that there’s an “us” when there hasn’t been for months.
What I know for sure is that I am a part of her wild and crazy brain. We will never get to the point where we don’t know each other again, because all it takes is a “hello” and my heart flips. I know my love for her is real when my heart flips and the e-mail is so raw it takes a chunk off my ass.
“Slow down, John Wayne.”
I miss the emails that are profanity laced and so funny I sag in my desk chair laughing. I do not miss all the pot shots we’ve taken at each other trying to prove political points.
I do not miss anything to do with fighting.
I would give anything to make time travel real, because I know exactly what changes I would make in my life to make this period happier. Things would have shaken out the same in terms of the divorce, but it would be a totally different landscape in terms of our friendship.
I would have fed the dogs, watered the plants, picked up the yard, whatever.
Anything to show her I love her in an asexual, aromantic way that is deeper than I’ve ever felt with anyone else. That looking for someone else is painful, because there’s no one like her.
There’s too much mystery, and not enough time. No matter how much time we have left, there will always be a bit of mystery. But that’s what keeps it interesting, what encourages me to put away any and all butterflies because I will not be accepted if I have them and shouldn’t.
I’m starting to realize that being Lord John Grey was indeed lonely for him, but there was no one like Jamie Fraser, either.
Now we’re cooking with gas.
Stories That Are All True 