She Lives!

OK, I’ll apologize again for the uber-dramatic last post. It’s very not my style to be so emo, and I spent close to a week living the emo life: I ate the emo foods, listened to the emo songs, dreamed the terrible emo dreams. (except that’s all a lie: full disclosure I didn’t sleep or hardly at all eat for the time, and, to quote a friend of mine from HER bad, bad time, “all music was broken.” But you know what I was going for.)

The other thing I did, after the initial wave of “emo” washed through my big, dumb brain, was a lot of thinking. I would go for these epically long bike rides (often in the rain – big shout out to the weather for totally backing my state of mind all of those days. Holla!) and I kept putting two and two together and getting spatula. What I knew for sure was I hurt. I loved him. He loved me. And I really, really hurt. Nothing else was anywhere near as clear.

So I did the thing that every strong, independent, bossy, control-freak of a woman would do in that situation: I went crawling after him. (OK, I’m gonna give my womyn and grrrrl readers a minute to FREAK THE F*CK OUT. Please send your incensed email reactions to the email address that’s somewhere on this dang blog.) I told him the truth of my feelings: being apart had given me an entirely new definition of “pain” and I now knew I could live with some compromises that he’d asked for that had seemed, before, out of the question. I just couldn’t make sense of the fact that we were apart given that the single biggest message from our last conversation had been how much we loved each other.

The other thing I did during that time apart was I went back to the beginning. I read every email conversation we’d had, starting with the ones right in the very beginning. I read the transcripts for all of our online chats that I could. I read all of our skype chats in the last 3 months. And that’s where I saw it.

I watched myself dissolve, right before my eyes.

As I think I’ve said before, one of the things that T.E. has always said he appreciated about me was my strength and stability. I’m someone who prides herself on handling her life stuff and having been able to take care of matters all by myself. Then life kind of went “KABLOOEY” a couple of months ago. And right about then my slide began. Strong went to sketchy to wobbly to “I’m sad! Fix everything! Waaah!!!” I leaned on T.E. more and more because I couldn’t show the cracks in my armor to anybody else. And to his credit he tried, but realistically I did not make it easy for him, and there was a big limit to what he could even do! He tried to get me to talk to people in town, but I can even remember thinking that no, that was what he was there for and I would just lean even more on him.

HARD.

And frankly I think I just overwhelmed the entire thing. I pushed him out the door, straight into other opportunities that were new and fresh and exciting and easy – all things I definitely wasn’t for him anymore.

Well, long story short (everybody together: too late!!!) we talked, we negotiated, we snuggled (there’s a way to do it on skype, trust me) and finally we got back together. This was actually a couple of weeks ago and I would have posted sooner, but for the first many days it all felt very fragile. Several times per day I’d decide this would never work. Then I’d change my mind and be desperate for us to talk. Then I’d be sure he was regretting the decision and about to drop the hammer. It all felt totally impossible.

But we stayed with it. And we talked. And talked. And TALKED. Man oh man, did we talk. Like talking was going out of business we talked. More than that, we did the thing that I think makes us really impressive: we talked honestly. And each long, heartfelt conversation built us back better and better. I’m proud to say that right now I feel closer and stronger and more right with this man than the day he had to fly away from me. We’re making plans for his trip home to me this summer. And the music is fixed again.

I promise, good people who were actually willing to wait for this additional drop of shoe, that I won’t let the emo stuff get all over this blog again unless there’s an actual death. Or maybe I break a nail. You know – the big stuff. Pinky swears!