I keep trying to write around what’s bugging me this week,
but it isn’t working. For the most part, it’s been a good couple of weeks. I
had such a great birthday and my first few weeks of student teaching have been
stressful and busy but very gratifying.
But when it comes to this project, I am lost. Mister Hazel
Eyes's disappearance hit me harder than it should’ve, and I’m feeling kind of
slutty/rejected because Mr. Popular hasn’t been in touch either. Neither should
be such a big deal, but I just can’t get over the never-seeing-someone-again
aspect of dating. Things just go by too fast. Since last year, six guys who
really meant something to me have come (well, most of them came, anyway) and
gone—I am grateful for the experiences and fun that they all brought me, but it
all went by so fast that it’s hard not to feel like I’m extra-rejectable, like
I’m a failure, like I’m in for a lot more loss.
It seems that whenever I am heartbroken over a toplike
person, I get the insane urge to process it with Bill. I guess the heartbreak
neural pathways just have his name on them. When I let myself think about it, I
feel so unresolved about him, a deep dark, creepy, suitable-for-David-Lynch
sadness that he persists in not being around. So I did something foolish that
usually works: I wrote him a love letter. I find that sometimes if I write out
all of my lovey dovey feelings, thank someone for his contribution, and
apologize for my half of things, people can start to feel less haunty. In this
case, more haunty. He said, thanks, he’s glad I’m not mad, but that I ruined a perfectly good exit.
I’ve always wanted to show this blog off to him (to show
EVERYTHING off to him, really) so I friended him on the fb. It was fine at
first, a little inspiring push—it made me feel brazen and hot just to think
that he might see some of my smutty details. But after a few days, it felt just
like it did last December, like I wanted so badly to be near him but didn’t
know how, like I would do absolutely anything to get his attention. And that’s
without much clicking—just the tiny bit of not-really-a-connection from
facebook was enough for him to start sucking the life out of me, to open up
that awful, starving well of want. I took him off, of course, I said goodbye
again, exit-spoiler that I am.
Sometimes I really do worry that I’m broken, that the ten
years that I spent trying not to be bi have left me too desperate and urgent to
be able to make a real connection with a man. I am deeply ashamed of the
attachment that I still feel to Bill after all this time—I feel like I’m
breaking some rule of adultness that I just don’t let go of things in any kind
of normal way. I should be bouncing back faster from Mister Hazel Eyes as well,
but it’s hard to get past the hurt of someone not even wanting to say goodbye.
I am a good student in everything but this, and I absolutely HATE to have a
failing grade on the record, but I suppose there’s no magical sex-TARDIS that
would allow me to go back and somehow make it work out—it just didn’t.
I really hope that I’m not broken. I hope that neither my
half-closet years nor my mistakes this year have cause irreparable damage. I
don’t know what the darkness is that I keep wanting to go back to, but I know
that it’s closer to addiction than it is to love, and I know that it is the
opposite of joy.
I’d rather follow joy. There’s a lot of good stuff on the
horizon, and I thought it might be helpful to articulate this sticky tar pit
stuff before it seeps back down into my subconscious. I need some courage,
friends, I need to follow the part of myself that knows what it’s doing, my
inner Bettie Page, not the glassy-eyed December-girl who’s still worrying how
to please someone who has been gone for a very long time.
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