I passed The Guy Next Door in the driveway this morning and he said three words: "I'm moving out." My main feeling about this is relief, with a healthy dose of the Universe loves me! But I also feel guilty and sad and I have the continuing sensation of waking up and realizing it was all a (sometimes bad) (mostly bad?) dream. I don't miss him like I used to, but I miss how much room he took up in my heart.
The first night we hung out, when he talked about creating a garden "for us both to enjoy," I saw an entire adorable future for us: Together but living in our respective apartments, meeting on his patio for tea. Having just the cutest story about how we got together. And finally, finally, being able to give up the quest for love! Because I found it right outside my door!
I've always had a vivid romantic imagination, but this was different. I'm scared about how much it felt like I "knew" he was the right one for me. I guess if I'd been right I could call it intuition, but as things are, I'm tempted to call it delusion. But I don't think I got there on my own.
(The day of the last date, he said a parallel to the "for us both to enjoy" thing, he said he wanted to knock out a wall in his place so we could have breakfast on my terrace in the mornings. I like leaving the terrace nature-y for the birds, but what a nice idea!)
I remember laying in bed that first night feeling ELATED, feeling sure that he would stay here and be weird with me forever.
In the end, I felt like we were a cult of two, caught on a roller coaster of shared madness. (Codependent Crazy, my sponsor would call it.) After our break-off I looked up his (stated) diagnosis, Bipolar 2, and it described exactly what I'd been through with him--unpredictable moods, various degrees of lying, cycles of happiness and misery. It helped me to understand a little, to give myself compassion about it, but it doesn't explain why I made the choices I did.
I could sit here and list his lies and red flags as evidence I got gaslit, tricked. But the important thing is--I chose him! And then re-chose him! So I'm asking myself, what made the fantasy so powerful?
Maybe it's as simple as a desire to fall in love and still keep my apartment? Maybe it's my porous nervous system and mirror neurons taking my brain to the mercurial place where his brain lives? Or maybe my dang soul just thought I could learn a lot from getting tangled up in him! I sure did!
Maybe I was lonely and needed a friend just as badly as he did!
I like my fantasy brain and plus, it's an autistic trait so I refuse to shame myself for it! But I'm afraid to sweep myself up into something so one-sided and shifting ever again. I know I can create beauty and romance out of pretty much anything, but I don't want to do it on my own, independently of reality. That's what art is for, not relationships.
It's snowing again and I'm using all of my self-care/hunkering down skills, lighting candles and feeling all the feelings, being where I really am.
I think part of my TGNS journey was about wanting to escape my own life, wanting to evade whatever growth and pain and love I'm finding on my own.
Or, I just loved him. He was my friend and I miss him, and I miss the idea of him I made up in my head. Both. I'm never gonna sort out the real from the imagined, the lies from the information, the throwing-away-art from the making of art in the first place.
These days I'm supposed to be all twelve-steppy and put things in the care of my higher power, so that's what I'm doing. My HP and his will have to figure this out. In this case, I think, the Higher Power might just be time.