Forensics II

Once again, I'm up earlier than I need to be on a Sunday morning. I'll probably go into the office for a couple of hours but right now I'm just going to sit here for awhile and listen to Brooklyn being quiet. No TV, no music, no nothin' -- just me, the fans, the cats, and the squeaky hamster wheel of my brain, which is what woke me in the first place.

I don't sleep much lately.I go to bed at night with my head whirring, I wake up the same way.

This is a problem. I'm a little nutty right now and I don't like it.

The Buddhists say that when there is all kinds of mayhem happening, it's a sign that something beautiful is trying to be born. I'm waiting for that beautiful thing, and my problem is that I'm impatient. I keep wanting it to be born RIGHT NOW, on my schedule, so I can go back to center and start moving through life like an ocean liner once again and quit this "dinghy on a stormy sea" Winslow Homer stuff.

I don't like much of what has come up inside because of what happened to me.
It was easier knowing and more importantly, being okay with knowing, that the thing that everyone else seems to do with such ease is just not in the cards for me. Keeping an ironic distance was easier.

Having had it just beyond my fingertips is so much harder than not even considering that it was out there. Better for me that I hadn't even gotten a glimpse of it on the horizon. I got closer and closer and it seems it was just heat waves off the road after all.

Look, just because I don't want to get married doesn't mean that I don't think it would be nice to have someone love me. It would. There is no nicer thought than the one that someone woke up this morning and one of his first thoughts, after "Coffee," was, "I MUST say good morning to Aileen." And he would do it, and those early-morning emails were always sweet and funny, and made me feel, for the first time in forever, kind of cherished.

I discovered I liked feeling cherished.

It made me feel clean and new. Like I didn't have to go through life with my elbows out ALL the time.

I'm working really hard here, trying to keep the clean and new feeling on my own. I know -- intellectually -- that the clean and new feeling really didn't come from him, but my heart is having a harder time with this than my brain. Someone wrote me a note soon after it happened (the Hurty Thing, that is) saying he hoped now that I've dropped armor that my exposed skin stays baby soft.

What I'd like to do is actually grow some skin, if you want to know the truth. All of these exposed nerve endings may kill me. I would like to stop feeling the urge to poke at the sore tooth with my tongue.

What I'm working on is figuring out how this emotional affair got so out of hand so quickly, while our behavior was actually quite chaste. We never slept together, do you believe it? Despite opportunity and desire, it never happened.

Had we done so right from the start, I would have known what to do next. Proceed with life, be as loving and kind as possible in the moments you have together, and ask for nothing more than what is put in front of you, accept what is given to you gracefully, let him go back to his life while you have yours. Never talk about expectations -- yours or his. Expect nothing, get nothing, and you won't be disappointed.

I can't make up any more stories in my head about what happened to make him take himself away from me. Because it doesn't change that it happened.

I was given all the little why's, but I will never, ever know the big WHY and I am working on being okay with that instead of listening to the evil little voice inside of me that keeps poking me in the back, saying sotto voce, "defective part, defective heart, and you let him SEE it. You fool. You stupid, bloody fool."

For some reason, this evil inner gremlin has the voice of Michael Caine. Why is that?