January 2–31, 2004 — Persistence

It will be hard to explain this next bit. Not because I don’t know how to explain it, but because this isn’t really the place to do so. Because it’s more E        ’s story than mine. But if I really had to sum it up in one sentence — in one very vague sentence — I guess I would say that she made a decision in December that forced me to end our relationship; then, in January, that decision seemed not to work out for her, and she came to me for comfort. Which is where we’ll come in, with me comforting her at this misfortune, at the end of something that had caused me many sleepless nights at its beginning.

I guess the important part is that I was talking to and spending time with E         again even though I desperately needed time to heal and to forget. Part of me felt redeemed, like I really was worth her time after all. But there was too much resentment and too many hurt feelings too close to the surface. I felt I had been forced out, and if I was going to be part of her life again, I wanted it to be my decision and not hers.

I resisted, but not for very long. It is becoming a continuing theme, my weakness when faced both with being alone and the persistence (or just presence) of someone willing to change that. Before the end of January, though we didn’t admit it to each other, E         and I were more or less seeing each other again.

But because we were seeing each other without actually acknowledging it, I found I wasn’t allowed to become jealous when she spent more time than I’d like with people whose intentions I wasn’t sure of. If I challenged her, she told me she wasn’t going to pretend she was in a relationship if I wasn’t ready to return to the way things had been before. As I wasn’t in a position to let myself get as involved with E         as I had been a few months earlier, it became a quiet jealousy, something to add to the bitterness and resentment I would keep just beneath the surface.

Which isn’t to say I was miserable. When we were together, I was happy, and I think she might have been, too. But I didn’t trust her not to hurt me again, and I said a lot of things to hurt her, things I hoped would make her feel how I felt.

As it turns out, trying to hurt someone the way they hurt you doesn’t make things better for either person involved. It would be a few months before I learned this, though. But we’ll come back to that, because learning came later.

January was for mistakes.