It's So Weird

I stepped away from my computer, inhaled a deep breath, took myself out of the office and to Starbucks, bought myself a strong cup of coffee, and, still shaking, tried hard to read my book and couldn’t read a word, stuck as I was on the same sentence, the same email, the same exchange, over and over and over again in my mind.  But I stayed there for my full lunch hour to shake and breathe because I want to be happy, to learn how to be happy.  To let go, and start over.  Or try to, at least.

That night I cried so much and so hard I scared myself, shaking with pain that I thought time would heal when really, it hadn’t done a thing; shaking with missing him, and with the fear that I would go on, missing him, unable to delete his emails, unable to meet anyone else, unable to be in a relationship with a real live man, instead of with the scrappy shoddy unreliable idealized memories of a relationship that took a year and half of starts and stops, and then more tentative starts, and even more painful stops.  Of overcoming tremendous, unthinkable obstacles so it has to work out, right?  In the end?  You know, triumphant togetherness and laughing knowingly at all we had been through, over shared peanut butter chocolate stack cake, while sipping cappuccinos, in slow-motion, to an adult contemporary soundtrack.  And all that brutal emotional work and fragile honesty and soul-searching and wound-baring and aching and longing and moments of ecstasy and glimpses of bliss, and shards of safety, security, serenity even, mostly in post-orgasmic moments when my mind could finally be quiet and I could just lay still and rest, and release my held breath and hope that it would always be like this, legs intertwined, him gently kissing my eyelids, only to ultimately end, with rules about having No Contact that had to be strictly observed and enforced, and that I would continue instead like this, crying alone in bed, in pain, shaking and crying myself to sleep from a five-minute fluorescent-lit interaction with, and one brief email from, him, unable to be happy, forever.