A Lifetme Ago

Wow. I haven't been here in awhile. And I had COMPLETELY forgotten that I had actually built up a little bit of a head of steam before I abandoned this poor thing on the side of the information super highway so very long ago. (Like over a year and a half ago - yikes!)

Wellll, life has changed. Not that anyone is reading this to keep up. But there's something about shouting into a void that feels good for the soul. "Just getting it out," I suppose.

As I was saying, life has changed. I am now working full time as an administrative assistant and miss terribly the days back when I could make my own schedule - tell "the man" to go fuck himself if I wanted to. Miss terribly the days when I was constantly worried about money and not having health insurance and not knowing what I was doing with my life and not really being able to do that much in this incredibly expensive city because I was constantly worried about money...wha? No. I do not miss those days. Duh.

But I do miss having days off during the week and getting to walk around the neighborhood when it's all nice and quiet and empty. Miss not doing anything, not getting my ass out of the house all day, wasting time in the apartment watching stupid shit on my computer, calling my girlfriend and bugging her but not doing the dishes while she's gone. Again, do not miss those days.

However, I do at least miss those days when I could look forward to my girlfriend coming home from work and making dinner with me. Miss fighting about who cleaned the apartment the most recently, why she doesn't want to have sex with me anymore, why I'm insecure about her going out without me, why we can't do more with our apartment...

There seems to be a theme here...

I suppose what I'm getting to with all of this is that I am at a point of change in my life. Big change. The entire last year was one big shift, in fact. (A phenomenon which seems to have been present in MANY people's lives - it's kind of creepy how many people have told me that 2009 was rough.) Lots of dying family, pets and relationships - my own and close friends'. And it is easy to fall into the trap of looking back at those halcyon days - shading them all with a golden, glowing light - and not remembering the shit that I was slogging through at the time.

But what am I really getting to with all of this? Good question, dear, imaginary reader. Good question. I suppose the thing that is prompting this outburst is that this moment of transition is still in progress and I am at a crossroads of sorts. A point at which I can either really, totally go down a new road or try to maintain one of the cardinal directions I was following, but with some major improvements. Well that metaphor just fell flat on its face.

I have to figure out if it is possible to grow and change as a person while staying in touch with an important person from my life or if I need to totally sever ties in order to fully move forward. Which also means that I have to figure out if I even want to fully move forward. Or if the gamble of trying to hang around and seeing how things play out is worth the possible side effect of feeling like an idiot who has wasted a lot of time if things don't work out.

Alright, I'll stop beating around the metaphoric bush and be direct for once:

How do you know when a relationship is really over? You can say it's over. You can say "Yes, we are broken up. We are no longer dating. We are 500 miles apart. We are just friends." But does that really mean anything when you talk at least once a week? When not talking to the person for more than a week makes you grumpy and a good conversation makes you feel like you're on the moon? When, really, you're still very much still in love with the person? When you've started to think that she might just be one of the loves of your life but you can't quite tell if that's just crazy-talk? When you have both agreed that you'd like to get back together at some point, just "not in the immediate future." When you're pretty sure that she's still in love with you too? If all that is true, are you really broken up?

And what if you really, truly, want to grow as a person? Want to learn more about yourself, become more independent, more confident, feel capable of following your dreams and looking out for yourself. If you want to make sure that if you ever do get back together, you do it with open eyes. And have grown and matured in the ways that prevent you from simply falling back into all of the old, horrible habits that you quite rightly broke up over. Do all of those self-actualizing things that you can really only do when you're single. But you somehow want to accomplish all of that growth while still having that person in your life in some capacity? What do you do then?

What. Do. You. Do. Then?