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I have tried an experiment today. Wake up, put a smile on your face even if it is forced, and see how the day goes. It seems to be working. Suddenly I feel a rush of the happy chemicals to my head. Maybe it’s because it’s Friday. Maybe my mind is slowly changing still.
Hope you’ve had a good day. Hope you have a good weekend.

I haven’t had the best week so far. I found out a friend had to be put in the hospital this past weekend and he has a tumor in his stomach that is causing internal bleeding. An uncle of mine died yesterday. Two other friends are dealing with their own personal/family dramas and seem to be taking it out on me and everyone else. Sometimes it seems like the sky is falling. If you pray, please keep me in them. I know the thing I wrote yesterday seems like I have all of my shit together, but I need help and hope at times too, and I am finding it hard to identify a source for those things now.
I hope things are more stable for you.

Talking with Steve, my therapist, yesterday, I mentioned the museum metaphor that I wrote about yesterday. We talked a bit about it, and about the dream I had last week, and he basically blew my mind open about it all.
With regards to the dream, he asked me how the “me” character in the dream felt. I told him I felt hurt, scared, a little angry at times etc. Then he asked me to put myself in the shoes of the “you” character in the dream. Then he asked for me to tell him what that character felt. That was a lot harder. I closed my eyes and thought and ultimately started talking. I said, “I feel pity for this man in front of me, I am so tired of this, I am so tired of having to deal with this, I wish he didn’t hurt like this, but I cannot do anything more to stop it, I love him, but I cannot love him like he wants me to, and possibly how I really would like to.” At the end of that Steve said, “So that’s what the Grier character in the dream felt?” I said, “Yes.” Then he explained to me that the character was not really you, that the thoughts that the character had were really my thoughts, a way in which my subconscious thinks of myself, projected onto a female character that looked a lot like you in the dream. It has nothing to do with the way you necessarily feel about me, but more about how I feel about myself. Everything started to click then.
I realized that though I still love you dearly, much of what I love is the memory of what you were (and maybe still are, I don’t know) combined with a somewhat idealized image of you in my head. I know so little of who you are now that it would be impossible to be in love with you in the way that I think I am. I still think you are an incredible person, one of the best I have ever met, and I believe that stands outside of that idealized image, but recent e-mails have proven to me just how much different you are than the memory or image in my head. None of this is a bad thing, you are struggling with lots of things and, I know, trying to make positive change in your life. At least that is my hope.
Realizing that makes me realize that I need to keep the memory as just that, but try to do away with the idealized image. I think I secretly knew this anyway. When Liz asked the other night what it would take for me and you to get back together again. I at first said, “Grier would have to fall back in love with me.” Then I went on to say, “I think we would have to take things slowly and get to know each other as the people we are now, forgiving some of the past stuff, and having faith that our attempts at self-improvement are steadfast (probably didn’t really use these words;)), and that we would have to talk clearly of our expectations of each other, identifying deal-breakers and desires.” I didn’t really ponder what I had said too much. During the session with Steve though, I realized and talked to him about my belief that that may be the most mature feeling I have had about “me and you” in a long time. There was a storybook beginning to our story, but there really will be no storybook ending. Either we will lose contact altogether, we will try to become friends, or somewhere down the line, we might try to pick up the pieces and try again. I don’t think either one of us knows what will happen. I know I don’t despite the fact that I try relentlessly to see the future. I need to be more patient with so may things. Let things unfold. Despite the fact that a few of the emails we have exchanged over the past few weeks have hurt me at times, at least we are getting to know each other as who we are now a little more. Any friendship or new relationship between us will require that. I guess it gives me a little hope, because of the three potential endings I mention above, the least desired by me is for us to lose contact altogether.
I need to get the image of you, good and bad, that is in my head out, and only think of you as who you are now with the information I have now. I need to stop having the image as an artifact in that museum, like a picture hung on the wall. No one is a picture, not even a moving one. You can only be who you are, and the same for me, and hopefully we are both making progress toward being better people with happier lives. I hope there will be space in each of our lives for the other.
About the museum thing, Steve said, “Sometimes you have to look around the museum and get your fix of artifacts and placards before you are ready to leave it, maybe you are still looking around?” I said, “I think I am about ready to leave it.”
Sorry that I rambled so much. If you made it through all of this, thank you. What I know of you right now, who you are now, is something and someone I have deep love and admiration for too, even after I throw the image away.
Take care.

So I decided to take the day off today. Maybe a good idea, maybe not, but I had some things I needed to do and the company owes me a couple of days for recent weekends I have worked. One of the tasks that I had to do was go to the YMCA and cancel my membership. Like so many things, I have been putting this off as well for too long. I thought it was just out of laziness that I had not gone over to cancel, but I realized today that there were other reasons as well.
I have not been going to the Y with any regularity lately. It has been well over a month since I even went at all. I am also trying to cut down on my expenses, i.e. no more newspaper, no more Netflix, cheaper car insurance, and an end to my Y membership. To be honest, all I ever used was the treadmill, and the city provides one of those, in the form of a sidewalk, free-of-charge. I had just been procrastinating on getting over to the Y to cancel it, or so I thought.
Like with so many things, as I am learning through my therapy, issues like prcrastination are usually related to deeper issues, anxieties, etc.
I waltzed into the Y today, told the guy that I wanted to cancel my membership, filled out the appropriate paperwork, and walked back out. It was in the parking, walking back to my car, that it all hit me. Everything started to flood back about that place: the first time I went as your guest to the place, going in the afternoons occasionally with you – you on the elliptical and me on the treadmill. I remember staring at you there when you didn’t know I was, and thinking how beautiful you were. How interesting it was to watch you in public when you were unaware that I was watching – a sense of pride because you had chosen me. Then there was sweaty us riding back home discussing dinner.
I remembered the day I got my membership and they took my picture for the ID. You made the girl take the photo twice and you had to fix my hair between the two takes. I remember when we decided to do the family deal together. I remember when you finally decided to end your membership and go to Curves. I remember that it hurt a little that day too, but not like it did today.
There’s this way in which I feel like I live constantly in the museum of our relationship. Like most museums, it is enjoyable at times, but ultimately it tells the story of things already past, already dead. I guess I gave away one of the museum artifacts today. It was a beat-up YMCA id card where my face was mostly scratched away, where the fix you did to my hair could hardly be made out. I understand now the things causing my procrastination on this. I imagine this may be good for me in the end, learning to give up on these things, but today I had to have a quiet moment in my car in the YMCA parking lot, and now I am having a tear-filled moment writing about it here.
You once told me that tears are the way the heart heals itself, maybe that’s what this is. I surely hope so.

Happy Valentine’s Day, G! I worry about how I will handle today, so I thought I would try to start it on a good note that may just carry throughout the day. Hope you have a great day, and that your heart is light and full.

I know I got a little upset on the phone last night, but please don’t think I am sad all the time. Life’s not so bad. Just wanted you to know.

I am no more the answer to your problems than Mexico is. I am just here, and it is south of the border. I can speak with strange accents and pretend adventure. At the end of the day, I still work for a newspaper. There is another, and so many more that do that. Mexico is an illusion. I am not sure it even exists. I am not sure that the next block does either, until I have to pass through it on the way to purchase sour cream for this baked potato.

Sing to me babe, with that sweet throat. Tell me that we can try again.

I felt your heart tonight. It beats still. You are human. I thought that you and I both might have become embroiled in a pattern of hatred, complexity and general non-humnaness. That is not the case. I hope the conversation did not hurt anything. You will be great, because you have always been wonderful, and it is not just me saying it. Float on, wunderkind.

So it seems like I am always out looking for second best. I know where best is, but she is forbidden, so now I have to settle for a second best search. They may not even be second best, at least I hope not. I hope there is a closer approximation of you. There will be nothing that will equal you, but maybe something that comes a lot closer than what I am meeting. Why do I want to go out to midtown on a Friday night to watch you dance with German guys? Which then reminds me of your Danish guys in NO. They must have been cute, so much cuter than me. For you to kiss Christian at the end of a drunken night. Doesn’t seem like you, but I have witnessed it happen now. Have seen how that scene goes down. I don’t know that Grier. I don’t know her at all. I hope that it made you feel good. I am sorry for what I did that made you feel justified. Were you ever true to me? Was there always, from the beginning, someone brewing in the background? A secret desire? Was I ever your desire, or just a filler? I think I know I was more. I think you did love me. I know I did and do you. You asked why we couldn’t be, and I am not sure exactly sure what that was supposed to mean, but we were. We did exist, me and you, for a time period, and I think you were happy for at least a portion of that. If I am lying to myself, please do not correct me. I am looking for number two now though. I blew number one. I should have known I couldn’t deserve you. I should have known that achieving this dream wasn’t possible.
Jenny told me today that she thinks she likes me because of the way that I love you. That she has always wanted someone to love her that way and that seeing how I love you made her fall for that side of me. I told her that I love YOU though and that is not transferrable to someone else. She said she had thought about emailing you to tell you about my heartache and unflinching passion for you. I told her she should not do that. I could not see how it would help me, you or her.
When I was in high school I spent one glorious summer in Charlotte at a state-sponsored summer program. It was one of the best times of my life, and returning to my high school was difficult. After that summer I pined for it and thought that I had been given an experience that I could never top. Only I applied to Governor’s School the next year, and in the spring, in the middle of a tennis match, my friend Shaq came out to the courts to tell me that we had both been accepted. I felt like I had a second chance. I was in a dream state for months. The GS experience was even better than the previous summer.
I sometimes daydream about a second chance with you. I dream about getting number one back. I dream about what I would be like to fall back in love with each other. I dream about calm, maturity, knowing that I did something right. That I finally got it right. That there is forgiveness, and that right and proper change and hope can be rewarded. That it might even be better the second time, after we’ve lived a little, figured a few things out, know that we miss and want each other more fully.
I cannot give up. Not yet.