Sometimes I get on here just to see if I’ve missed anything interesting. I had so many friends on here, and now we’re all strangers. I formed relationships I thought I’d still have, some of them I miss more than others. I almost fell for someone I met on here, and just when I forget about him he pops up out of nowhere and for a moment my heart begins to race. I think about how I had that giddy feeling during the first conversation we had, then I remember the heartache. The loss of a newly found best friend who wasn’t scared to make plans with me for the future but who was scared of real feelings and wouldn’t tell his friends about me. Now he’s a husband and a father, and for a moment, I think about what could have been if we just tried. I’ve finally figured out the missing pieces of me, the trembling insufficient painful bits of me, and it’s taken so long to get here and I’m proud of myself for finally finding what my mind had been hiding, but that doesn’t keep me from being anxious and nervous and mostly jealous. As a teenager, I had my life mapped; planned down to a T. I’d be a writer, or a chef — a photographer, maybe. I’d live in Chicago, married to the first boy I ever truly loved who so very long ago discovered that when our initials lined up together in a row they spelled out the word FATE. I’d be a mother by twenty-three, we’d have a nice house outside the city surrounded by trees, with two kids and two dogs. Our daughter would have my blue eyes and his dark hair, our son his spitting image down to the green eyes. We’d be happy. I think about that a lot, think about him. But then I’m caught by the what-if, the never-happening and I start to fall back into that space again. Where all my future plans collapsed, where I never felt that way again until this guy. It wasn’t love but it could have been if only we gave it a chance. Well, I was all in. And he’s all in with his family now, and that is wonderful, and I’m glad he finally found someone worth taking the leap. Part of me wants to block him again, to delete the message and never entertain it. But then I find myself responding less coldly every year when I new message pops in. I turn over what to say in my head, debating waiting a few days, then respond anyway. I guess people never really move on, do they? Everyone thinks about the people of their past, but I’m not used to people really thinking about me. Sometimes I wonder if I should just lay all the bad shit out on the table: I reacted to that this way because of x, y, and z. It’s not your burden to carry but here have it anyway. My therapist said what I carry is not a burden to anyone who asks for the knowledge, and it’s not a burden if they love me. But besides my family, who are hardwired to love me, who does? I get attached to people quickly, and am also quick to detach, which i know now is a symptom of my trauma and ptsd, but I don’t really owe that explanation to anyone, do I? I’m still trying to decide the answer to that question, myself. Still trying to figure out who deserves that knowledge. Of the three people I can think of, one is dead, one has no online presence (the aforementioned fairytale), and the other (not listed here) decided long ago not to answer my messages. I’m still trying to figure that out. I suppose I lost the purpose of this post here. What I meant to say when I started this was, damn, things change but they also just stay the same.
snowghoul
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