So much, too much, has happened. I've wanted to write so many times, and haven't. Partly because I'm trying to strike a balance between the desire to spill it all, as I always have, and reveal things that are no longer just my secrets, and the desire to respect the privacy of those affected.

Respect. That is a lesson I'm learning hard and slow.


I wish I had some beautiful book to be reading.


"They started the fight when the money got tight, and they just didn't count on the tears.

They lived for a while in a very nice style but it's always the same in the end.
They got a divorce as a matter of course, and they parted the closest of friends.
Then the king and the queen went back of the green, but you can never go back there again."
~Billy Joel, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

Brenda and Eddie, the popular steadies.




I'm thinking about too much stuff, too many people. Two in particular, contrasting men with contrasting roles in my life. The one I come home to; the one whose lawn I was standing on yesterday night, asking for him please to release me from the state of insanity that is knowing him, as of late. The grass was wet and the feelings were ambiguous, and all I really wanted was my mind made up for me. Today, I fear he may have done just that. Last night, though, he couldn't decide on much of anything-- in between the overtures I expected was the respect I deserved, and the strongest part of him coming through in his weakest voice, begging me to do what was right for me, in the long run. It's always the asking me to leave that makes me want to stay the most.


Last night, coming home, I was dying to write here about the whole experience, in the form of an open letter to him. I wanted to talk to him, and, to a lesser extent, to the world, about the agonizing ironies of the situation: I got into this mess to feel special, and now the only way out is to remind myself that I'm not. (Not to him, a man for whom no one women could really be that special. "Who says you're one woman?" he replies to me when I make the comment to him, smoothly like a movie hero.) I stayed in the situation because it made me feel, for the first time in a long time, that I wasn't broken, wasn't just damaged goods, like I was perfectly functioning. Now, to leave again, I have to remind myself that it's not true: I am as broken as I have always been, and no amount of picture-perfect eye-gazing and face-touching can change that, nor can the right man (or, in this case, the wrong one.)

I am not a padlock frustratedly paired with the wrong key. More aptly, I am a book that got wet and the pages got stuck together, useless to anyone who will not take the time to carefully pry apart the individual pages and preserve the poetry inside. An onlooker might see the fine leather binding and wish to add it to their collection, but if they try to tear me open without the proper appreciation for the damage and the effort and the reward, then they'll just end up permanently losing some of the text, having taken me, undeserving, from a true bibliophile.


I am completely divided between the self that believes that was a beautiful metaphor, and the self that wants to smack me in the head for thinking such verbose bullshit. A woman divided; that's me.


On with it.