A Star, a Thimble, and that Hidden Kiss

Maybe it was just me.  Maybe, in all honesty, it was my decidedness what made it happen in the first place.  Maybe I was looking for something, and I found it because I wanted it, not because it was meant for me.  Maybe he was there and was the only suitable physical explanation to all the answers I sought.  Maybe, just maybe, it was all coincidence and not destiny what put us in the same place when we were both looking for the same thing.

Maybe he was right not to say “I love you” first.  Maybe, I should’ve stopped myself that night in the car.  Maybe it would’ve been best to see where it all led me, without giving him that psychological shove that the “L” word usually pressures.  Maybe he knew it was something good, but wasn’t completely sure that he wanted all the implications.  Maybe he got to love me, or maybe I was just the fantasy he created in his mind that I was.  Maybe, just maybe, his love wasn’t really love for me but for what he wanted me to be.

Maybe I should’ve stuck to the original plan.  Maybe, when he called to ask why I thought it wouldn’t work, I should’ve told him to just forget about me.  Maybe I was never right for him, and I knew it.  Maybe I tried too hard to be.  Maybe I made myself the fantasy, because he had told me what it was, so that I could keep him.  Maybe I mistook a spark and chemistry, and bundled it up together to make something that looked and felt like love.  Maybe, just maybe, I wanted the fantasy, too.

Maybe it should’ve ended the minute we said goodbye the first time.  Maybe I should’ve never talked to him again after that, since I was fine.  Maybe it was my ego all over again.  Maybe it was his.  Maybe we already knew one another and it was easier to fall back in.  Maybe it had nothing to do with how much we wanted it, but with how effortlessly we could get it all back.  Maybe, just maybe, it shoudl’ve been just once, and nevermore, and we would still have a chance.

Maybe I should’ve been the one I knew I was, and stepped away from a friendship.  Maybe he should’ve never asked me to try.  Maybe the sex was inevitable, and the heartbreaks that came therein.  Maybe he already didn’t love me at all.  Maybe, neither did I.  Maybe, just maybe, it was all about the comfort, and never again about the heart.

Maybe what he said is true.  Maybe we can stop loving.  Maybe we can choose whom to love. Maybe he’s full of it, and he’s never really known love.  Maybe it’s just reason that we can control, and not the love that we carry.  Maybe someday I will find that I don’t love him.  Maybe, the time will have carried his words and self away from me.  Maybe, just maybe. 

Or maybe love never ends, if it’s true.  And if his wasn’t, I am left to love him all on my own. 

Maybe.

Or maybe it was all the other way around.

Hm.  Maybe.

I’ve been sidetracked.  I can’t say that it’s something I wanted to happen.  It wasn’t.  But I can’t say it’s something I didn’t let happen, either.  So, maybe, in the greater scheme of things, it was something I did want.  I wasn’t truly ready, I didn’t truly want the fulfillment, and it was just another one of those wishful thinking episodes where I say I’m trying but as soon as I have the tiniest excuse to stop… I just stop. Dear Lord, why?

Because it’s easier.

Once I was on my path, I felt so much more alive and light. But the path wasn’t easy.  I crawled over broken glass, bled my knees and hands out to get to where I was, and I knew that there was so much more to work for… I got scared.  Not that now that I’ve sidetracked I feel any better.  No.  Now, all I feel is a heavy pressure inside my skin, torturing every part of my body.  My soul and mind are crushed beneath all the trash that’s weighing me down. 

Wait.  No.  That’s a terrible understatement.  The truth would be to say: I’m putting this weight on me. I feel as though I haven’t learned a thing, and I know why it is.  You can’t let the devil in when you’re only half way.  Actually, you can’t let the devil in.  Ever.  Because what he tempts us with is that which we most love.  My friend Kizzy said it: The devil lies with the truth.  I finally understand those words.  In less than a month, I have almost destroyed everything that I’ve worked for. 

Ketut told Elizabeth that it’s all right to lose your balance for love.  Hah.  Old man, you’ve no idea what you’re saying.  If you let go of your balance for love, you will lose all balance and fall off the trapeze.  Want to know what the real truth is?  Love is the balance.  Love is what holds it all together.  But we just don’t understand this, because we just don’t know love… and, in a way, we simply don’t want to. 

Love requires sacrifice.  Sacrifice is what makes balance happen.  And with sacrifice come certain choices. 

There is no choice other than to choose, and choosing has only one method: to choose.  Black or white; there is no grey.  Middle grounds aren’t real, because it is law that two things cannot exist within the same space -one trumps another, always.  So, either you want to buy the pair of Gucci shoes, or you save your money for that car you want to eventually buy.  Either you chose to eat fast foods every day, or you choose to keep your body healthy.  Can’t have the cake and eat it, too.  You can bake two cakes, if you want.  Sure…  But you keep one, you eat the other.  Or you keep both, or you eat both.  But you can’t have them both and eat them both, too.  Is this making any sense?

In an odd, twist-a-rooni way, I know it does.

Here’s the point: Nobody wants to love, because the kind of sacrifice that love requires is the kind that hurts our deepest sins.  To love, you must sacrifice your ego.  You must sacrifice your vanity.  You must sacrifice your instant gratifications.  You must let go of your excesses.  But you love the excesses, you say!  And you deserve them, because you work hard, and you have one life to enjoy, and if this is the way it must be, then dammit, why not?! 

That’s exactly why.

If you deserve something for working hard and because you have to enjoy your life, you deserve something good.  You don’t deserve excess, you deserve just right for you.  Excess is never good.  Never, ever, never good.   So, why would you want the excess, if it only brings you to trouble and, eventually, will make you unhappy?

So, here’s the truth about why we run away from love: Vanity, greed. Me, me, me.

If we find a way to get more and more of what we want, we cease to be humble.  With all the intention in the world, too, but we’ll be trying to give ourselves excuses by building lies about it, so that we can “forfeit” guilt or hide the trouble that will later come.  And the lies we like to believe the most are those that we tell ourselves; easiest ones to believe, too, since we’ve created them to the point where we think that they are convincing. That is when suddenly no one else in the world exists, no one else in the world needs, no one else in the world should have… except for you.  Once you get here,  be sure that you’re smothering love with a white fluffy pillow, waiting –hoping, even –for its inevitable demise.  

Alas, the great predicament: we want love, but we don’t want its implications, therefore we don’t want love.  

I’ve let my soul get jammed in the trouble that I started for myself.  I should know better than to let go like this.  I know better.  But I ignored it.  I ignored it because I chose not to be patient.  I ignored it because I wanted my “now” time.  I ignored it because I chose not to trust that everything has a way to work itself out -that God has a plan for my life.  And that it is a great plan.  Instead of letting life run its own course, I tried to take life by the balls and instead it jerked off mine.  And, being a woman and having none, let me tell you: it hurts like a bitch.

So, I have to admit to myself that I have not loved.  There is no other way to love but to love.  No grey areas.  Love is patient.  I have not been, so I have not loved.  Knowing this makes it easier to do the next thing I know I must do.  And yet, it does not. 

I have to let go.   

We’re only defeated when we let defeat take over us. When we fail a task, it doesn’t make us anything less than just human. What’s in a moment is “only what you take with you”.

What I mean to say is… That year I was taking off? Starting over again. 

Day 1.

This is an awesome song from my favorite hispanic songwriter/guitarrist, Silvio Rodriguez.  The lyrics are in Spanish, so I’ll try to translate for you to the best of my abilities. I wanted to share it because it’s one of those songs that you’ll just love, even if you’re not a musical person.

Quien Fuera (Who could be), by Silvio Rodriguez

I am looking for a word,

in the threshold of your mystery.

Who could be Ali Ba-ba?

Who could be the mythical Simbad? 

Who could be a powerful sorcerer?

Who could be an enchanter?

I’m looking for a diver’s suit,

at the foot of the sea of all delirium.

Who could be Jacques Custeau?

Who could be Nemo, the Captain?

Who could be the bathyscaphe of your abysm?

Who could be your explorer?

Heart,

Darkened heart.

Heart,

Heart with walls

Heart that hides,

Heart that is where.

Heart, heart in flight,

Hurt from all of love’s doubts.

I’m looking for a melody

To have so that I can call you.

Who could be a nightingale?

Who could be Lennon and McCarthy,
Sindo Garay, Violeta, Chico Buarque?
Who could be your “trovador”?

Hands make art… and can BE art!  Love it!

I have a knack for naming every year.  As each year commences, something always seems to describe it.  Like the “Blue Year”, when everything in my life was blue, including my mood, my car, and even the door to the house I lived in. The year I met Houdini (my ex), was the “Year of the Star”, because I somehow felt destiny was going to hit me hard –and so it did –and later on it was further confirmed by our dreams of Neverland (that’s a whole other chronicle).  Last year had no naming, as so many unlikeable things happened that I completely forgot to baptize it.  Although anonymous, it was the step towards the current year: The Year of Realization.

Here’s what I had realized: I knew myself less than I knew others.  It was a terrible concept to comprehend, but it was my one and only truth.  Thus, I made a conscious check to learn more about what I was made of.  No easy task, I assure you.  Standing in front of the mirror naked has never been to the best of my liking, and this time I was more naked than flesh. 

The first face was the ugliest, and I was scared to even continue to stare back at me.  But I did.  I let myself witness all that I was, part by unpleasant part.  I gazed at my deceiving lips as they moved telling lie after lie; to others, to myself.   I witnessed the repressed fears in my eyes, and all those not so repressed complexes.  I watched in horror as the blood of harbored anger stained my hands.  I saw my neck stand rigid with the force of vanity. 

I made a note of everything I saw, closed my eyes and… 

When I opened my eyes again, I saw someone very different standing before me.  I was no longer disgustingly fat.  I was no longer ugly.  I was no longer short.  I was no longer hopeless.  I was no longer stupid.  Before me stood a woman with a glow about her, who smiled a true smile and had eyes full of stars that shone from recognizable happiness and fulfillment.   She called my name.  I was her name. 

That was when I understood that each of the things I had made myself to be were not what composed me.  No…  I, Karilin, had somehow managed to put away bits and pieces of the real me inside a small box underneath my skin and behind my soul, keeping them safe from further harm.  They’d been screaming individually for years, and now they’re performing live, in unison, to be put back together again.

This is truly how the Year of Realization began.  I vowed to understand who I was, to find all the parts of myself amidst the mess I had made throughout the years, and put the pieces of the puzzle exactly where they belonged. 

I began by understanding what I liked.  To a person who did not have a favorite anything, it was not easy.  Favorite music, favorite color, favorite style of clothing, favorite movie…  I had none.  I liked many, but not that particular one to call my own.  I found it mortifying to try and judge one thing against the others when they all had their very unique characteristics that made them great.   Strangely enough, it was through the discussion of a poem with a distant acquaintance that I came to a better method than just making a list of things I preferred.  And so, I crossed out the list and started a new one titled: “Things I dislike”.

I’m not going to give you a rundown on my list.  There are many things I dislike, most of which I wasn’t even aware of.  The truly peculiar thing, however, was that many of those things that I dislike have come packaged with many of the things I’ve liked!  It was insight that I had not predicted, and all I could hear inside my head was: “How did I let myself become so distant of me?”  I had let situations, people, and the every-day social paradigm to manipulate my mind, my thoughts, my innermost feelings, and even my catalog of perception.   In short, I was a malleable chunk of silly putty just waiting to be molded into… whatever.  And I accepted whatever. 

Tsk, tsk. 

I have to thank God for the process I came to, and I know that it was He who placed this acquaintance on my path on that day.   What is more, through this process I came to realize something greater, something that I would have never thought of otherwise:  When we’re trying to get somewhere in life, we often think of the things we want first, and forget to focus on the ones we don’t want.  Sometimes, this leads us into a path where we find ourselves getting what we wanted, along with that which we didn’t know we didn’t want.  And then we don’t know how to let go of one without letting go of the other.

That is precisely where I found myself when I took another big step in my path to self-recognition.  I had kind of done this before, but not quite the way I will be doing it this year.  See, when I met Houdini, he told me that he was a Christian with very strong commitments to God, one of which was to abstain from sex until marriage.  Although I did not share in his conviction, I came to grant myself the opportunity to love this man just as he was, and support his ideals, which were not in any way bad.  Although our attempts at honoring his commitment were well-intentioned, I failed every two to three weeks.  This year, however, I play by my rules, and I will ensure that it is done regardless the external forces that might try to command my hyperactive vagina. 

Here’s an important side note:  Before you think that this is about church, or about religion, stop.  This is not about anyone or anything, except me.  I must know me, love me, and understand me, before I can communicate love effortlessly to everything and everyone around me. 

So, here’s the plan: To remain a full year without dating, without falling for a man, and without…

Yeah, without sex.   

The purpose: As difficult as it is for me to accept the reality of what I’m about to explain, I have already come face to face with it, and I will hand it to you as part of my own wisdom for you to keepsake.

“I’m not a player, I just crush a lot” is part of a well-known hip-hop lyric from the late Biggie, and it is what I have come to understand as my unspecified yet latent motto.  I was never a player.  But I crushed way too much.  I let my hormones take over and turn lust into love in the rapidly, ephemeral time it takes a hummingbird to catch its breath.  I’ve “fallen in love” so many times, that it’s the only reason why love has ever hurt; I’ve let what I made into love hurt me.  The minute I understood this about me, all I could think of was: ”However am I going to fix this?”

I’m fully aware of what a sexually-charged creature I am, and I’m thankful for it.  Very, very thankful.  But too much is just too much.  There exists a line, a boundary to sexuality.  I need to step back and away from it, so I can learn just to love, and then maybe slowly make my way to the margin where love and lust both meet.  The place where making love happens.  In 29 –almost 30 –years of my life, I’ve only been there once.  Just once. 

Life’s lessons come by losing, accepting, and then learning.  It’s the only way to understanding.  I lost, I’ve accepted, and now I’m in the educative process.  And what I’ve learned is that I had to take the time to understand when I lust, so that I could divide it from love.  I think that I’m getting the hang of it, too, but…

It’s just SO HARD!  No pun intended.

This is why I’ve designed myself this task.  I think…  I hope it will work.  And when I do allow myself the opportunity again, it will be true and wholesome, not half-assed and full of interrogatives that I bring forth myself.  All I can say now is:  Wish me luck!  

During the conception of my last chronicle, I unraveled thoughts pertaining things lost and how we don’t find them when we’re looking.  The past week and some of its episodes have given me a whole new outlook on that.  Which is why today, while sitting on my father’s desk chair and staring at the phone, I set myself to wonder about how quickly and involuntarily we lose things sometimes.  It’s kind of annoying, actually. 

One minute, you’re holding your car keys in your hand, the next you’re fumbling everywhere for them.  You search in your purse, your jean pockets, your drawers, the bathroom.  Even inside the fridge.  But they’re nowhere to be found.  You’re certain you had them, but somehow you unknowingly, absentmindedly misplaced them.  Then you spend the next hour cursing, breathing heavily, and partly blaming yourself for being so stupid. 

It can happen with everything, relationships included.

Last year, right around this date, I lost the love of my life.  More than a month ago, I also lost his friendship.  As if it were not difficult enough to have broken up with him as a boyfriend and then as a friend on the same year, I’ve also lost something else.  Something less ethereal than love or companionship: my PC monitor. 

There should be some rule about things we lend or share with these people we call our love partners.  Something like “Return by the end of relationship”, or “Penis will be cut off if not returned to owner”. 

As of today, I have known to have lost many important things to my exes.  To Belly, I lost my hymen.  To Incest, I lost my life-long movie collection.  And, as it seems, to my last love, I’ve lost my monitor.  I can’t get my hymen back, and, judging on how very little I enjoyed my first sexual tryst, I doubt I would want it anyway.  Tried as I did, including one trip to Orlando after the break up, I couldn’t get my movie collection back.  And now…  Now I am left with one laptop slowly ebbing away, and one PC tower without a monitor.   

Fucking shit! (Insert heavy breathing here)

To keep you up to speed, I had lent him my PC last year so that he could do his school work.  I wasn’t using it, and it was just gathering dust atop my desk.  But, when he took it home and tried to use it, my PC would not work.  He took it to a programmer friend of his who had it for a total of five weeks and never fixed it.  After many harassing sessions, when we got it back I decided to take it to a more reliable source.  Here’s where I make my colossal mistake.  Since it was the tower what needed fixing, and I had promised to lend the PC to him, I let him keep the monitor and only took the tower with me.

There’s one thing I left out in The Day the Earth DID NOT Stand Still.  After I finally told him that I had been thinking to leave, he jumped right in. 

“No.  I’ll be the one to leave.  I’ll disappear.  For… a while.  I just hope when I call you pick up.”

Meanwhile, in an apartment in Carolina, my laptop decided that I’d been giving it too much use for the price paid, and as of today I cannot unplug it for more than a minute before I get the lower-left screen message that I have 0% battery remaining.  Lucky for me, the PC was fixed by last week.  But Luck’s never a lady with me, and I still had no monitor to use the tower with.  I knew I had to do the unthinkable, and that it was inevitable.  So, I asked myself one question:

“Are you ready?”

The minute I found myself picking up the phone and texting so matter-of-factly, I knew that I was.  There was no hesitancy, no in-between guilt of self-demotion.  The action which only weeks ago would’ve been nerve-wrecking had come so simply that I had to search deep to understand myself while I wrote the short message, because I was feeling nothing.  It was a simple business transaction in my conscious mind. 

Now, not receiving a reply…  Well.  Let’s just say it left a less than desired taste in my mouth.   

The text was Wednesday.  When he didn’t respond, I very wisely thought to give him a couple of days to process the information, as men usually need this.  I waited until today.  This time, I called.  He never answered.  I didn’t bother leaving him a message.  I didn’t, because I knew by then that the “while” he had depicted was actually a nice way to say that he was performing an act of disappearance.   

And this is how he was bumped in rank from mere ex-boyfriend to The Great Houdini.

Here is where you find me at the beginning of this chronicle, just staring down at the phone.  Just thinking I’ve lost much more than I had bargained for, and that I still want my monitor back.  Trying to figure out a tactic… some steadfast way to regain my piece of machinery.  And kind of trying to convince myself I’ll ever get it back.

There are times in life when things don’t go the way we’ve planned them.  Having been the type of girl who only plans vacations and pretty much left the rest of her life to come-what-mays, I can’t really complain about how my every day episodes turned out sometimes.  I believe not having had a role model to be there and teach me how to plan for my life is a reasonable explanation for why everything in it has been so disorganized.  Sure, I had my mother, and I had my father, and I’m grateful to God because they are still a part of my life, but neither of them were ever really there.  Not the way parents ought to be, in my perception.  Nothing I can do about it, nothing I could ever do.  I can be angry because they never noticed, and, if they did, nothing was ever done about it, but why even go there?  I can’t change my past, and it would only continue to poison any good intentions towards self-betterment.   

So, today, I have decided to detox. 

The first step to detoxing is the hardest.  You must stop taking in your addiction; stop giving your body what you one day decided was what you needed and have been supplying for days, months or years.  No thinking, no pruning around it, you just stop cold-turkey.  It would be easier if not for the very diverse and individually varied withdrawal symptoms.  Which symptoms an addict will experience depend on the type of substance, the frequency of use and regular dosage, and the duration.  Actual detox is the period of time it takes for the toxins to leave the body…  for that which you every day yielded toward to part ways with your body, mind and soul.  It is a short term solution to a long-length problem.  And it usually lasts 28 days. 

But this chronicle is not about my parents and the many addictions I grew into since they got divorced; lies, deceit, manipulation, vanity, jealousy, etc., etc., and then some.  Someday, eventually, it will be about that particular episode in my life, because I’ve known what I had to do to get myself “together” for a long time. It’s Only, before, I didn’t understand that I have more courage than I’ve been giving myself credit for.  I think I truly realized it the day I told myself I had to get away from my dear friend.  Never to see him again was a thought that… well, it hurt.  But the thought of wounding the memory of us was incalculably excruciating.  It took all my will power and an earthquake for me to finally do it.  And from the moment I let go of his warm and love-filled embrace, my detox process began.   

That’s what this is about. The fantastic yet painful process of detox from yet another love gone by.

I’ve always been more of a listener than a talker.  When my friends are in a bind, or need to vent, I’m the one they call.  They know I keep opinions to a minimum, and my mouth shut until they’ve let it all out.  This is why I have never felt that psychology helps me much.  I do self-therapy all the time, by myself.  That’s why for the first step of detox, I kept a journal.  I wrote in it day after torturous day, for two weeks.  Today, I made a conscious note to review my progress.  As I opened every document on my word processor, I found myself a witness aghast at my own evolution.

I’d become a changeling!

The first day I was the love-sick school girl who’d just lost her first love.  The next, I was the raging ex-girlfriend who blamed it all on the ex-boyfriend who didn’t seem to care.  The next, it was all MY fault.  The transformations varied as the many pages began to turn into fewer, and my soul grew quieter. And then one day, it happened.  I sat before my laptop, ready to begin my day’s worth of unfortunated love, and found myself drawing a complete blank.  I finally had no more words to say to him or to myself that would make me feel any better.  That’s where I hit the inevitable wall of detox.  Without words to write, without feelings to express, I had nothing but time before me. 

Although I never really expected that he would call, and was almost convinced that he had decided never to do so, the clock couldn’t go fast enough for the day that I would hear from him again to come.  I know how contradictory that sounds, but many of love’s feelings are this way.  Maybe we subconsciously feel that love interferes with the preservation of the species, somehow (you want to be in love, but you don’t want to get hurt).  So, when the month had passed, I didn’t even realize it, because it still seemed like every day would take an eternity to end, and infinity to renew.

And here I am, past thirty days, and he’s still gone nowhere. 

Yesterday, my will faltered.  I had to go to college to make some copies for a presentation, and every step of the way my face must have been pink from the excitement and the dread that at the same time filled me.  I thought I might run into him.  But, it’s a somehow unspoken rule of the universe that when we’re looking for things lost they appear when we least expect them to and not when we’re looking for them.  The closest I came to running into him was running into one of his friends.  And all the way home, and all the while I composed my presentation, I was decidedly saying to myself that I wanted to know from him, that I wanted to tell him everything that had happened starting the next day after we broke-up with our friendship.  So, I picked up the phone and… 

Nothing.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t even bring myself to dial his number, which I had erased from my phonebook (a very stupid thing to do when I’ve got it embedded in my mind).  I sat down, beating helplessly at my mind, and thought: “If you had found him at college…  What would you have said?  What would you have done?  What would it have mattered either way?  And then you would have ended up restarting the detox process and undoing everything that you’d done…” 

I let my phone fall on my bed and continued to work. 

There are alternate remedies to help soothe the withdrawal symptoms of detoxing.  For me, writing always seems to suit best.  I get it all out, and immortalize it in my hard drive as though at least some memory, even if an industrial one, has taken it in, internalized it, understood it.  This time, however, my entire body and soul was asking me to place the emerging feelings on the one it belonged to.  Leave the baggage at his door, where it had come from.  I wouldn’t call him.  I wouldn’t text him.  It all seemed wrong, impersonal.  I would use the oldest system of communication that lovers of olden did.  I wrote him a short letter, with everything I felt I had to say to be able to ease my mind from the blaring noise it had been making.  I also decided to save on postage and help save the planet by using a faster mailing service.

 The email I wrote was true, concise, and it went something like this:

“I write to you because there has been no day that I had not wanted to do so, but by good conscience I digressed.  I write to you because you are still very present.  Because it matters not how much time will pass, you will still be here.  Because you never left.  I write to you because I am unafraid to say I miss you; my friend, my rock, my calm.  You.  I write to you in case that you care that I do, and that you know of me that I am.  Just that I am.

And I await nothing, but your own happiness.

My kiss, Karilin.”

Yes, I wanted to think that he would write back, but I know he will not.  Didn’t you read me before?  Rule of thumb: when you’re looking for things lost, they will appear when you least expect them to…  Not when you are looking. 

(Written December 26th 2010)
 
It was a 5.4 in the Central Region of our little island, and people entered in panic.  The end of the world?  Well, it was the end of something; of “a” world.  But it had been falling apart for a long time now, and there was no use in trying to stop it.  Although I did try. 

I always try. 
 
The universe has been speaking to me, but I don’t know what it’s saying.  It sounds like something I would want, but the way things are right now…  I’m beginning to think it’s more of a joke. 
 
I’ve tried to get away from him before, but something always brings me back.  This time, it’s been the “all around me”, and not just myself.  There were two emails I tried to send; along summertime, and about a week or two ago.  I was trying to leave without the slightest noise, in the most peaceful way possible.  You know, cybernetic closure. Our friendship was never quite a friendship, wasn’t a relationship either, and whatever it was -or wasn’t -was hurting whatever it was… or wasn’t (did I lose you yet?).  I knew this just had to be done before it chipped it all like some cavity, rotting from the outside in everything that we had once built and was beautiful.

For some reason, however, the AOL Postmaster put his foot down on the matter, and with dripping cynicism wrote back to me:
 
“Unfortunately, some messages from IP **** weren’t sent…”
“We have limits for how many messages can be sent per hour, and per day…”
“This message has been Deferred.”
“Message could not be delivered for 1 hour.”
“Message will be deleted from queue.”
 
Okay.  So, once was funny, twice was weird.  I let it go, and pretended to play the part, even though I was getting lost along the script.  Then came the third intervention from the universe.  It was last night. And it was just plain scary.
 
Knowing what I’ve been feeling for a long time now –knowing that when I feel this kind of thing, I’m always right –I decided I couldn’t paint over the crevices anymore.  We’re lovely friends, but there’s too much in between what wants to keep our friendship intact.  Mainly, sex.  So, it isn’t intact.  It’s been pounded like a newbie on Fight Club, begging for mercy at a UFC ringside.  Though we always do the customary, friendly handshake at the end of a round, I knew that, if I didn’t throw in the towel, next time I’d be knocked out for good.  So, I was trying, once again, to leave unannounced, to force departing with a crowbar, because I didn’t want the drama that always follows these conversations. 
 
I told him I had something to do Christmas day and would have to take him his present the day before.  After a bit of fussing, he agreed on it.  So, I went to his house, gave him his present (Iron Man 1 & 2, and a very cool leather bracelet and necklace from Aeropostale which, on sale, was but $5.  Hooray for Christmas season!).  He gave me a baking book and a guitar tuner, both which melted my heart.  We ate, watched one of his new movies, and then I told him, matter-of-factly, that I was happy that he was happy, or “tranquil” as he so aptly put it.  And I said other things I can’t remember, trying to keep myself in check, trying to hide the emotion…  But, of course, my mind wouldn’t stop screaming at me, and when the shrieking pain didn’t fit in my brain anymore, tears popped out without a warning, before I could stop them.  
 
Now, at this point I’ve already told him I was going home, and he told me he would walk me to my car and I, not wanting him to see me cry any more than any man should ever see a woman cry, ran away.  He ran behind me.  I tried to get into my car.  And then he asked…
 
“Why does this feel like goodbye?  Why does this feel like I’m never seeing you again?”
 
More tears ran through, a little faster, a little stronger, and I wiped them away forcefully –me, the big macho –when I first felt a little quiver, and saw my car move slightly.  I thought it was my quivering imagination, or that maybe he was moving it with his hand…  Oh, no. A bigger, stronger, more powerful hand, invisibly –and as I was opening my mouth to say that this WAS goodbye, that I WAS leaving, and that I WAS planning on just walking away –shook the earth underneath us with might. I thought I was dreaming.
 
I wish I were dreaming.
 
Maybe the universe has been telling me something, maybe it’s just coincidence.  Maybe I’m misreading the signs, or maybe I’m taking the wrong path.  Maybe I should’ve gone to the mattresses, rolled out punch by punch until the match was over.  But, wasn’t it?  Wasn’t it over?  According to him, after the earthquake, after I told him with detail how every time I tried to do this something happened…
 
“I think we’re not done here.  I think whatever we’re meant for, we’re not done.” 
 
It’s not the first time I’ve heard him say it.  But I don’t want to think about that.  What I sincerely want is that if there is to be any hope left, that it is hope for a great friendship.  Meanwhile, I’ll have time as my ally in this new adventure, and God as the fortress where I reside safely; wisdom will be my shield, courage will be my sword.  It’s a new beginning, and I will see with newborn eyes, and taste the sweetness of everything made anew.  I will delight in the sound of a new tune, feel with childlike wonder, and love others and myself like I’ve never been hurt.
 
I wish the same for him, too.  In the end, all I wanted was for us to be happy, together…  But, maybe “together” isn’t just about presences united, but about a mutual happening no matter where his feet and mine are standing –whether we’re a thousand miles apart or two inches from each other’s noses.  It may sound sad to some, but I think it would be kind of magical if we could both love each other like that.
 
And do I love him. I think I always will.  But let more time pass before I make it certain.  Right now, I just miss you him too damned much not to be biased on that statement.