2004-11-21T15:16:00.000-08:00

February-June 2004: November 2004 .
I had a lot of trouble putting this in, mainly due to the deeply personal nature of the subject matter,
(And the way it makes me sound like a bit of a girl and thus betrays my calm cool masculine exterior) but in the end I thought, "What the hey."
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that it deals with my break-up from Julia and the related aftermath. I wrote it primarily as a journal to myself initially, just to get things straight in my own head, then, it became a blog entry, which I never could quite post in good faith. Later on, (as in, this month) I re-read, fixed up, edited and added some stuff and took some artistic licence to, just so it wasn't ALL truth and to make it less like a rant and more like a story. I think I achieved a unique mix of rant and story. I call it a stant!

I read through and cringe at how at certain points I sound; bitter, twisted, needy, sappy, clingy, desperate, emotional, sappy, angry and sappy. But mostly sappy. The consistent changing in tone is probably because I wrote at it in about 12 different sittings as I was in a variety of different moods. But hey, I am comfortable enough in my self-image to let y'all read it. I know it just says what you would feel in the same situation.

I am fairly certain that there isn't anything in there that can be perceived as derogatory, as you might expect from a break up. I'm not out to make enemies here.

I might even show it to J before I let the rest of you read it, just to cover all my bases.
Anyway, just to be SUPER sure, understand that this is an account of what I was feeling at certain moments in time, and not a reflection of what I feel now. Julia and I get on fine. I'm happy that she is happy, and I am sure that goes both ways. Though what we had was special. It's in the past and that's where it stays.
I have also changed some details, so it is not all true. I'm not going to tell you what I changed, and since its primarily interior monologue and hence, intangible, you won't be able to tell. So there!
Do we understand?

Good.

If this is the first thing you are reading on this site. Please, I am not as bad and hopelessly romantic and loserish the whole thing makes me sound.

I'm going to stop over explaining things now, before you go in with preconceptions.

2004-11-21T14:55:00.000-08:00

Defining moments

There are people in the community, learned people who suggest that your personality is defined and set in stone by age five. So, the first five years of life determine who you are going to be and how you are going to act for the rest of your days. Life experiences will bend that slightly, but the essential outlook will remain the same.
I think that school of thought is kind of narrow minded, but then, maybe I just don't like the idea that my personality hasn't changed since I wore pyjamas with little dinosaurs on them.
I think it is more realistic to suggest that there are key, defining moments in life that alter your perspective and teach you the essential lessons. Wether that be a grandparent dying at an early age to teach you about death, or your parents divorcing and leaving you to deal.
I think that it is these cornerstone moments that define how you relate to everyone else you meet after that key moment.

I have led a fairly charmed life. I'm not rich. I have had to work for anything I wanted and have learnt the value of the dollar. My parents are together and all the grandparents I have known are still alive.
I can only site one specific moment where I knew for sure that my character was defined by the events of that small period of time.

Lessons of love are the hardest to learn. At age eighteen, life taught me the hardest lesson I had to deal with.

Once high school had ended, and exams were over, my then girlfriend and I talked about marriage, and how at that point in time, we could have dedicated our lives to one another. Not necessarily because we were that truly and deeply in love with each other, (although at the time we thought were,) but also because, in escaping from the institution of private education, we desperately sought the security of something warm and familiar. I remember a time in particular when we lay together, and I gazed across at her face and into her eyes in the moonlight and realised that I was could easily spend the rest of my waking hours with her. We were a little drunk, a little stoned, and a little hyper and once I made this assertion we spent the time talking about it. Talking about dates and ceremonies, and how good children would be, because they would be half of her, and half of me. It felt good. And at that time it felt like the surest thing in the world, it was going to happen. It was good. it was strong. We were both so sure. How could it not?

Of course, we were little more than kids ourselves at the time.

Unsurprisingly, the inevitable happened. She used the age old "we have to talk" line, which; as intended, immediately sends, shivers down the spine of any male, until they settle into the pit of your stomach, which then proceeds to do hula hoops around your ass while your imagination up and runs wild.

You hear those words; you know there is trouble.

Lets face it, they have been used for generations, and the connotation of the expression crosses cultural boundaries, and immediately chills the heart of the person who hears them. Its not "we should talk", its not "we ought to talk", both of those have wiggle room, a teeny tiny ray of hope that could imply that maybe they just want to talk movies, or music, or how their pet kitten Mr Teeny died when they were 11 and that was a critical and defining moment of their lives. We need to talk implies a painful urgency that suggests whatever they are going to say has been well thought out, for a long time, and it cant be good.

We talked. No major problems.
I still loved her, She still loved me, but I wasn't capable of giving her what she needed out of life at that stage.
She needed space. She needed freedom.
I knew it was game over when she told me that she felt safe with me.

Safe is boring.

Nobody wants safe.
People want danger, they want excitement, and they want to be entertained.

Safe implies a family by twenty-five, a dog named "Waggle" and a white picket fence in the suburbs

Nobody wants safe.
Especially not fresh out of high school with the whole world at your feet.

I think deep down I knew. The cynic in me knew it would happen this way.
I had myself shut off emotionally for a long time as a means of protection. I prolonged everything. Trying to delay what I knew was probably fate. If I was less of a romantic, I probably would have had the "It's not going to last, enjoy it while it does" mentality. However, that foolish little man in my brain with the dozen red roses, book of French love poems and his head in the clouds managed to convince me otherwise.

Is it considered insane to personify your emotions?
Is it mental to be arguing with your own internal monologue?
I think it is possible that people who write like I do are in many ways as insane as the old men who rant on street corners, or the thirty-something's that have worked the same office job day in day out since they got out of school, and eventually have to be taken away in a rubber truck.

The difference with writers is they use the paper as their voice, and whatever medium they publish in as their street corner.

Regardless of the mentality of it, the brawny hardcore and icy Schwarzenegger type in my head who was telling me to be realistic faced off against the poet romantic, and somehow the poet won.

I had convinced myself I was bullet proof. Impenetrable.
Somehow she managed to pry her way in.

That's the problem with matters of the heart.
The heart has fantastic foresight, gazing ages ahead into the future. Somewhere inside, every person has a "True love conquers all" mentality. That foresight is strong enough to convince you of anything. Any big problems get glossed over because that tiny voice you assign to your heart says "Who cares, With love you can move whole mountains". The strength of the human spirit owes its mere existence to the existence of love. The two are intertwined.
Given two options, a person will almost always go with their heart.

The mind however has a remarkable hindsight, looking back and showing you the clues you missed, as if taunting you for not listening.
It also has a giant ego, and doesn't like being listened to.
Your mind is a bastard. Trust me.

The thing is, your mind is right 99% of the time, but you only realise that after you ignore it.

Prometheus and Epimethus all over again. The core of the symbiotic relationship.

This anyway was a cataclysmic event.

So it seemed at the time, everything is a cataclysmic event when you are eighteen. Later they become humorous anecdotes or character defining stories that you will laugh about later.

In the moment they rip your guts out.

There was no yelling, no screaming, no horrible argument where both parties say things they will regret later, but at least that allows you to part for a reason, and gives you an excuse not to see them again.

There was nothing but tears. Cold silent salty tears. For what seemed like the longest while we held each other, sitting on the stairs. Tears rolled down my face as I took in the smell of her hair, the look in her bleary eyes, and the feel of her warmth pressed against me, one last time. When all had been said, I stood up, kissed her goodbye, turned my back on her and walked out of her house for the last time. And in that action, effectively walked out of her life.

The fact that I cried surprised me. Not that I'm a "men are tough ergo men cannot cry" type. I just don't cry.
Death is something I have accepted as a universal inevitability. I stood by my grandfather's deathbed and watched on as tears rolled down the faces of everyone in my family, yet I remained dry eyed.

Not that I'm trying to make myself sound super tough. I think it's just the fact that I have myself mentally prepared myself for almost anything.

Almost, She broadsided me on an otherwise normal morning.
I can count the number of people outside my immediate family who have seen me cry on one hand.

The number always comes to one.

That moment right there, is what I would come to recognise almost a year later as a critically defining moment of my character. The details of it are seared into the forefront of my mind.

But that's the purpose of experience. If you don't grow, Isn't it a waste?

I walked away in the end.
Well; Crawled away, as you would expect when you feel as though your heart has been ripped out via your colon.

The drive home was a moving picture, my romantic history with this girl flickered before my eyes in black and white as if it were happening to someone else. Like sitting through Casablanca and hoping this time Ingrid Bergman won't get on the plane, but realistically knowing she always will.

I can say with upmost honesty that I loved that girl. She meant the world to me. I don't know if she knows that. I don't know that she ever will.

I know, and that's enough.

Everyone has to have a first love, and the problem is that that love becomes the benchmark for every other relationship you will ever have. Not necessarily in a "She is better"/"She is worse" way, just in a "She's different" way.

I had hoped that she would work out what she needed, and discover that thing was me.
She said that she still loved me.
She also said she felt she was making a big mistake, but it was a mistake that she had to make.

When I got home I opened the front door, and immediately felt ill. I made it to the bathroom just in time. I retched painfully, as my sorrow took its toll on my body. Until then, I had not thought it possible for emotions to manifest themselves physically like that.

Sitting with my head down a toilet bowl ruminating on that changed my mind fairly quickly.

And sit I did, for the better part of a half hour trying to puke up the cold dark ball of pain that rested at my core.

When that didn't work, I did what any self respecting male in my position would have done.

I got drunk.

The afternoon seemed to crawl. I remember crawling to the shower and turned the hot water on as high as it will go. And there in the shower cubicle, curled up in a ball on the floor and nursing a bottle of vodka, I cried. I cried as I remembered everything we had done. And didn't stop until the water went cold an hour later. I hauled my pathetic carcass to my room and barricaded myself in with music for company. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. All I could do was stare around my room at the things that reminded me of her. The photos, the gifts she gave, every tiny detail seemed to be highlighted in flashing neon, taunting me.

The worst part, I didn't hate her. In any other relationship, you can sense the decline, and begin steeling yourself for the end, you argue, fight, and generally wind up finding yourself jaded and bitter. This time, one night I went to bed with a fine relationship and a loving girlfriend, and the next day I awoke to turmoil and heartache.

Even so, I wasn't angry with her, I wasn't resentful. I loved her enough to make sure that she was happy in whatever she chose to do. If what she chose to do didn't involve me. So be it. I had no outlet for my emotional energy. I felt helpless. I knew that I still loved her, but I also knew there was nothing I could do. I felt like begging, sobbing, screaming, pleading. All I could do was wait in the hope that she would need me enough to come back. Love me enough to come back. I stared at the phone long into the night.

It didn't ring.

I realised the futility of holding out hope for so long. But in the same breath didn't want to give up so easily. We had been through so much together. Too much, I thought, to let this relationship go so easily. I was willing to fight.

The whole situation reminded me of a proverb,
"If you love something, set it free, if it returns to you, it is yours forever, but if it doesn't then it was never really yours."

A friend calls this the butterfly effect. If a butterfly lands on you, and you try to grasp it too tightly, the powder on its wings rubs off, and leaves it unable fly, its beauty is damaged, and it falls to the ground where it ultimately dies. If you leave it on you, it will stay. Stay for you to enjoy its beauty for as long as it sees fit, and then move on. It may return to you, it may not, but if it doesn't, there are plenty of other butterflies out there.

The real chaos theory of the butterfly effect is not quite the same. Chaos theory suggests that a tiny change, such as the flap of a butterfly's wings can cause typhoons on the other side of the world. In this way it suggests that seemingly insignificant and random events begin a chain reaction of events that later on cause significant events.

That wisdom comforted me. It didn't make it hurt less. But it did make me reconsider holding out hope for too long. Maybe I should move on, live my life, and see if somewhere down the track our paths cross once more.

Time passed. I was forced to see her socially, and although I put on a brave face and made polite small talk, I couldn't let her touch me. That, exists as the one thing I can't quite explain. It was as if her touch alone caused me physical pain. Not that it did really. It was probably psychosomatic, but I was convinced it would hurt.

I began being critical of all the wrongs I had perpetrated on her during the course of our relationship, blaming myself. If I weren't such an asshole, maybe things would have gone differently. Maybe she would realise that she needed me as much as I needed her. I dreamt. I dreamt that one day she would realise she had made a mistake, an error of judgement, anything that would facilitate her return.

Unsurprisingly, it never came. She constantly told me how she didn't want me to drop out of her life, but I saw less and less room for me to fill.

Months later, She told me she had found someone else. It was then that an irrational rage overtook me. Consumed me. So much so that I ran, lifted weights, punched a pillow, did things to lessen my anger until I could hardly lift my arms. When I was too tired and sore to move. As I was curled up in a tiny ball, realisation dawned on the load of bullshit she had fed me months previous. She didn't need alone time. She didn't want to be single for a while. She just didn't want me.
It was then that I realised that our entire relationship was a farce.
She never loved me. I was a tool. A tool she used to pass the time until she could jettison me like ballast. A pathetic crutch, to be there and support her until she could walk on her own. She loved me so much, that after years of friendship, and a steady relationship, she could replace me with another who she had known for weeks, not years.
I had entertained beliefs that maybe I had had an impact. Maybe I had touched her heart.
Maybe our passing had left a scar.
I was wrong. I had been nothing special. She hadn't even loved me enough to shed a tear as we said goodbye. I was just one more bump on the road, quickly forgotten as she looked to the horizon.
The love I had given was not reciprocated.
I felt numb.
Then I felt hate.

Hate. The real thing. It is widely publicised in song and story that Hate and Love are opposites.
Yet, it has always been said that hating is a form of loving. Both emotions are strong and involve a degree of passion. Both are very strong words.
I don't think I can in good faith say that hate and love are opposites.

Love and Indifference are opposites. Love and apathy.

Going from a state of feeling so much, to a state of feeling nothing at all. Caring so much, then eventually not caring at all.

I hated her.

More time passes, and I slowly went about erasing her from my memory.
Photos came down off the wall, Smiling at the happy times.
Love notes that I swore I would always keep.
The Valentine that she had scrawled on a corner of foolscap pad that I had never had the heart to dispose of. Gifts, presents, tokens that reminded me of times past, all of it, into a box, for safe keeping I told myself.
The perfect image of her that I had held in my head for so long started to fade. I had always used to remember the exact colour of her eyes, the two tiny beauty marks on her cheek that moved when she smiled, the chicken pox scar that she took great delight in pointing out. Eventually all of those became fuzzy, and soon disappeared.

Life kept right on moving. I got caught up with study, a blossoming social calendar, work and the other trappings of life, which seem to absorb all of our time. I saw her once in this time, out with her new beau. I decided discretion was the better part of valour, and faded into the crowd.

Some time later, I convinced myself it would be healthy if I forced myself to see her again, to see if we could regain some form of normal friendship. We caught up for a lunch one day that both our calendars were clear.
I find usually what happens is, either enough time has passed since the initial break-up that you idealise everything about them, or alternatively you find them painfully annoying and can barely stand their presence.
Strangely, this was neither. Anything that I found annoying were the same familiar, endearing little quirks that had drawn me to her in the first place, and I didn't idealise anything. It felt normal and yet wrong at the same time. I was the one who felt awkward, far from the easy and comfortable back and forth conversations that we used to have. I tried to fake it, but I doubt I did it convincingly.

Life rolled on as life tends to do.

A while after she left me a message. She said she was sorry that she took what we had for granted.
I think she was drinking.
I don't know wether she meant it or not, and I don't know wether to take it seriously to this day.
But the moment I heard those words, any latent feelings that I had evaporated.
There was no more hate. There was no more love.

There was just a happy state of indifference.

Later still I ran into her out somewhere. Conversation was normal, just like it used to be and I felt human again for the first time in months. What had seemed like a disaster months before had become little more than an interesting story.

I learnt to see it for what it was.
A learning curve

There is one thing that I have never had the heart to get rid of, a token that I keep as a reminder of what love teaches.

A photo,
Well, technically two photos, glued back to back, the first a favourite of us, drunken and dazed, blurry and out of focus, but smiling all the same. The second is one of us was taken while on a school excursion; it was about a month before we started dating. I keep it to remind me of how easily you can lose a friend if you aren't careful, and how quickly conditions change when things get complicated. The picture is dog eared from the number of times I have shut it away, slammed it in a book, or put it in the bin, only to rescue it minutes later. It now sits, jammed in the top of a Rubik's cube, in pride of place next to my computer where I do all my writing.

There are three distinct types of love.
The love you say but don't believe, the love you feel but don't react, and the love that changes you.

Wether it changes you for better or worse is up to you.

Don't Eat The Yellow Snow: Defining Moments