Some things aren't true until you say them...
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08.03.2004 - 5:07 p.m. So I was cleaning out my vacation email today. Got stuck on this one: Hey. How are things going? Good I hope. Things are going well here. I really like being in med school. The area is beautiful out here, Blue Ridge Mountain area. Answering this one would have been a simple matter if it had not been from the ex. I swear, three years and he still has this unfailing ability to pop up just after I think everything�s nice and tidy in his area of my memory. Three years, no, almost four now since the breakup, and he can still reach across the ether and make me feel nineteen. I know some people reading this may be looking forward to nineteen, and some others of you may have enjoyed that age, but since I�m the one writing this you�ll just have to trust that for me, nineteen was not a good year. As I finished reading, I wanted to be thirty pounds thinner, rich, and married. I wanted to stuff something sharp under his eyelid. I wanted to move to California, somewhere in the mountains where he�d never find me again. More than anything else, circling through anger and guilt and the trapped-bunny whimper, I wanted to not have an emotional reaction at all. I have said I�d stop thinking about him. I have said I�ll never talk to him again. I have said I�ll never again even enter the same room. What I should have done, instead of making grand, ridiculous proclamations, was get a new email. Or better yet, I should have blocked him. Because I can�t do any of those things, as lovely as it is to think about cutting him out of my memory (and all those pictures) and sending him the remains in the mail. I have this thing where I want to be nice. The very strong, very un-me desire to shove him off a cliff makes me want to be civilized above all; anyway I feel that after so long, conventions of etiquette should be followed, which is why I didn�t just hit the delete button. Which, to be honest, I probably also should have done. The path here is clear. If what I really want is to not have him in my life, I have a number of options: I could send a �sorry I�ll be out of town that week� message, even find something out of town to do, and continue doing that until he notices the correlation between my schedule and his visits. I could not reply, and delete the thing, and block him. I could actually tell him not to contact me again. (Although I seem to remember doing that sometime in 2002. Didn�t I? Or did I just think it at him, loudly, accompanied by the Stonebridge Stare Of Death?) I could even do something unnecessarily nasty and hurtful to make sure the point gets across, as is often needed while telling him things he doesn�t want to know. But I don�t see myself following through with any of that. I see myself, as if in a nightmare, putting up with him over coffee somewhere, not that I drink coffee, just that it certainly wouldn�t be at my apartment. I see myself trying to close things, thinking that one last demonstration of coldly civil disinterest might convince him to stay where I want him, away, without necessitating the ugly words he always makes me say. Sometimes I think that if I could just do that, all the scars and echoes would finally fade. But that�s only sometimes, when he contacts me. The rest of the time, I know that what I want is not �closure� in any of its sitcom variations. What I want is a vacuum. And because I can�t excise him from my memories, because I will never live without his scars, I at least deserve to live without seeing him. Or talking to him, or getting random email asking to �catch up.� One of the best ways I can think of to prove to myself that I am not nineteen, or twenty, or twenty-one�that I will never be the person he hurt again�would be to tell him that. Don�t contact me again. Four words, or five counting the contraction, is all it would take. But then it is so, so easy to be brave in one's own diary. Heartbreakingly so. -stonebridge |