I went to get coffee in my sweats, hair in full-on bedhead mode. I think I frightened little children…. Or no one noticed me. It’s Baltimore. People are weird. Get over it.
I got a cup of flavored coffee, hazelnut, and just put in some plain creamer. I love, LOVE Royal Farms because they brew by the cup and there’s no urns of coffee that have been sitting there since June (seemingly). They get the award for best gas station coffee by a mile, and to add some good calories, I got some orange juice as well.
The one other thing I was going to do was fill my car up with gasoline, but the Royal Farms I was directed to was only a convenience store.
I didn’t go to Dunkin because I’ve had the same thing in a row for several days. Their macchiatos are so good, but I’m a little tired of them. I had to switch up my game. But coffee and orange juice at a gas station were the same price as one macchiato at Dunkin, granted it’s a large.
And for some reason, vegan macchiatos taste better to me. I get oat milk even though I am not a vegan. I just like vegan food. I’m one of those omnivores that will eat anything you put in front of me, and I have found vegan favorites over the years.
I can even make vegan macaroni and cheese that might make you cry. It’s all about learning the right substitutions.
But no food means as much to me as coffee does, which is why I’m generally not hungry until very late in the morning. The coffee and cream is enough until brunch.
Brunch is usually something fast, and if I go out it’s just an Egg McMuffin. If I stay in, it’s eggs, toast, and bacon. It seems like a lot of food, but I would rather eat a lot early and have a simple dinner… If I remember to eat dinner, that is.
It’s the ’tism.
Or the ADHD.
Who knows?
What I’m saying is that I’m rarely hungry so I pack in calories where I can. The coffee is certainly helping me to put on a little weight, but I needed it. I look more like an adult now.
Well, that’s debatable. I do an impression of an adult on some days, and that’s my best offer.
I’m still thinking about driving through the hills of Virginia, and how Tiina said that houses were relatively cheap out there. I’m not sure that I would want to live that far from DC, but I would like to settle down somewhere.
It matters to me to have friends close by, but I’m not sure if they’re going to stay or not. Tiina and her family moving would leave me pretty isolated, so going to visit is good enough for now. I think I have problems making friends in the city, but it would be harder if I never saw anyone.
Well, my life wouldn’t change a whole lot since most of the day I’m writing or playing on the Internet in some capacity. One of my friends works for USG and they post landscapes when they’re having a bad day because posting a dumpster fire is frowned upon in this establishment.
So, I check in on my friends with lavender fields.
I worry that I’d get in trouble with Aada for moving back to Virginia, because it’s ridiculous and that’s how I roll. I could live next door to her and I’d never see her. And of course she would say it doesn’t matter and it’s fine while she was seething inside. That’s how she rolls, but that’s not punishment. That’s just saying she’s a people pleaser and I’m not.
I have the unfortunate task of writing down what most people miss, because I don’t mean to catch what other people miss in a way that is negative. It’s all portraits of my day and sometimes I get angry, sometimes I am full of joy. No two entries represent the same emotions because the pendulum swings wide with all my mental health issues.
I am certain that my mental health issues are going to be a large part of whether Aada comes back to me or not, because I think she does feel sympathy and empathy for my plight, but she cannot see it because she thinks I am rejecting her. I was not happy with the way our relationship ended, but none of that was about blame. Saying I’m unhappy about something doesn’t mean it’s your fault. It means the situation sucks.
Aada, in my heart and mind, thinks that people are out to get her most of the time. It’s a paranoia she cannot shake, and I could not participate because it required me to be locked down and silent most of the time. One of my friends caught her in a lie, and our relationship tumbled apart.
She says that the damage to her is incalculable, but I think we’re even.
She told me she wondered why she was responsible for my mental health. She’s not. She just slowly isolated me from every single one of my friends including my wife. Who does that leave?
None of this is about blame. That’s what happened.
I take issue with freezing me out because I have caused unforeseen “damage.” It is not my issue to be responsible for someone else’s reading comprehension.
That is also a universal problem that has very little to do with her because all my friends have tangled with me over my writing at one time or another except Bryn, because she could care less what I say about her. She likes having the mirror held up, but most people don’t.
The hardest part of this entire story is deciding what’s mine and what’s hers to keep. Where does Aada end and I begin? I could not explain our fast bond without explaining everything else.
I could not forgive her for a lie without working through it.
I could not put down the problem unless I understood it, and I still don’t.
She said that she’d never read again and was back three days later. I don’t know what it is about us, but we flatten each other with prose and both take the negative home with us. I know that Aada believes I am a wonderful writer, but I’m constantly stuck on “incalculable damage,” and “excruciating and debilitating.” Never mind that she also said our journey had been brilliant and beautiful. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria goes both ways.
I wish we could go back to the days where we talked easily, because I’m ready for the drama to calm down. It might even be better for me to move on and break our connection, but I don’t think so. The best indication of future behavior is the past, and Aada has never been out of touch for more than a few months at a time.
In short, I’m sure I’ve done enough that she’ll think twice about coming back, but I need her to think three times. I need her to acknowledge that these pages won’t mean anything until it’s been 10 years. She has to read them without thinking about what happened as happening to her.
She need to go back and pick up the positive, because the negative doesn’t stand out so much when you’re not hot under the collar.
It can’t be never, because never is not three days.
And that’s why it’s so hard not to turn this issue over and over in my head. I want her back, but in a different capacity. I don’t think that we can get healthy by taking potshots at each other over the internet. I know that my anger has melted and I just want to move on from this problem and take up some joy.
I’m sure that there will be other problems down the road, but they’ll be easier with two brains on them.
And maybe I’m just psychotic to believe that this relationship could be real after so many years of being virtual. What I know is that regardless of what she does, there’s not a way that my love for her stops. I get over things, and quickly, because I write about them.
She said, “I don’t know how anyone could read about themselves without skin crawling revulsion,” and my heart broke because it really shows me how low her self esteem has gone because she was reading my writing after she told me to get out of her life.
None of that writing was meant for her, because I needed the space to get angry and grieve. I have gone through every stage, even bargaining, because I would rather work on books with her than write blog entries every day. In order to get something different, I will have to be different as well.
“If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.”
I have gone back to feeling safe with her after forgiving some really hard stuff. You never want to see your friend doing anything that will actively hurt you, and she did. I could say the same about myself, because I am not innocent in hurting her- this time around or any other.
We could have had it all- safe passage all the way to the river with each other and our partners, but we’ve both retreated instead, choosing to leave enlightening each other out of the mix.
I am sure she died inside when she heard why I wrote what I wrote and when. But now that she knows, I’m hoping that she has more empathy for me and less anger at herself. I don’t want her to be angry at herself, I want her to work with me to provide me some options.
Like, skipping the part where she said she didn’t want the 479 blog entries that left nails in her palms.
Too much.
Because if she went back, she would find all the lines that say “I love you.”
I didn’t mean to punish anyone. I was hurt, with that caved in feeling in my chest. I must have missed a few things in there and I feel incredibly apologetic.
Aada understanding remorse doesn’t mean she’ll do anything about it. It matters that she feels her own, not mine. Because wanting to change things has to come from her, because I’m already on board.
I can’t help it that I said I was willing to do the work, no matter how hard it gets, and that person chooses to walk away. I cannot tell her that if our relationship had been happier, so would the blog. That writing is a comprehensive response to life and not all about her.
I have been responding to her only because she was The Friend. I didn’t have anyone else for a long time, mostly because I didn’t want it.
Will she see that part of it?
Only time will tell. Maybe Christmas.
Stories That Are All True 