Forever January

“Can I trade-in this new girlfriend to have you back?”

So went the confession of The Yankee, mostly in jest since we both know we can’t go back to what was once there. I simply don’t think I could manage another break-up from him, and in all honesty, I’d prefer something else.

I never thought the day would come that I would want someone more as my lover than my boyfriend. He would still be significant, of course, but not the significant other. Just my lover. I think we’d work better that way — less pretence, fewer veils. I love the line of openness we have now, and I’d be loathe to lose it again.

Another thing I’m loathe to admit — I’m getting the hang of this singleness. I’m growing numb to the loneliness and silence in my head. When you’ve grown numb to that, what rush is there to head back into a relationship that you know would be doomed from the get-go? I find that last chap I was interested in dashed my hopes of being with someone and since then I’ve felt cynical and overall fed up with trying to be with someone.

If it isn’t distance, it’s finding someone else over me. I suppose I’ll say here — candidly — I’ve battled with my feelings of self-worth for many years. I don’t have self-esteem issues or self-confidence issues … But self-worth? When something goes wrong, I view it as an inadequacy and flaw on my part and honestly now, I need to stop that.

Stop it, and eradicate that line of thinking before any new relationship. I don’t deserve to feel like I’m worthless a seventh or eighth time around (or whatever number of failed relationships I’m on now — I’m certainly not counting anymore)!

I need a new outlook on things. I think it’s slowly coming my way.

I miss our beginning — when things were shiny, new and exciting. I miss the rush to find one another on-line. If we didn’t have this physical distance between us, where do you think we’d be right now? Would you be here with me, right now, with me in your arms? How quickly would our lives have changed?

I’m missing something. I can’t stop thinking about it.

I’m thinking it’s you.

Tu me manques.

Slip on. Slip off. I stare at my hand in a half-state of disbelief. This doesn’t fit anymore. This little piece of metal that symbolised my life in one of the lands of the Midnight Sun no longer fits.

I had to press The Finn hard to give me this little wedding ring. And after I got it, I never took the thing off. I finally removed it and tucked it away on April 21, 2006 — the day I packed what possessions I could fit into two suitcases and came back to Louisiana: broken-spirited, broken-hearted and unwanted.

And now it doesn’t fit me at all. It slides around and slips off. I’ve shrunk, it seems. The little ring and its petite diamond don’t fit me, just like the person I’ve become doesn’t fit in the life and dreams of the person that I left behind in Finland.

I used to miss The Finn so much in the beginning. Not the man who told me he didn’t love me anymore over a cup of coffee, but the man I married — the one I fell in love with. Even while I was with The Yankee, I would sometimes find myself pining for what I had with The Finn.

In a state of natural progression, The Finn seldom enters my mind anymore. Instead, I find myself waxing poetic about the life I led with The Yankee — the intellectual companionship we provided for one another, the laughing and snuggling and cuddling at night. I miss him and I find it really is just a shame we could never fall in love.

Nothing fits anymore. I’m breaking in a new path, finding new niches for myself. This little ring — like many things — won’t ever be worn again.

It simply doesn’t fit.

I suppose my desperation for SOME sort of change in my life forced me to go through with it … The idea was spilled out into the air and after hours of mulling my mind said, “Fine … I’ll do it.”

I think I’m a pound lighter and I can’t pull my hair back into a pony-tail anymore.

But, it’s a change. Indeed, it’s a change.

I look across the room and wonder what’s going on in your head, what internally verbalised thoughts are firing across the synapses in your brain. I get up to leave, I pause and then sit back down. In my mind the silence is echoing off the walls, suffocating the life I’ve tried to rear in my head.

And I walk down the halls of my mind and look in the empty rooms that were once full of laughter and light and things. “Someone used to live here,” the barren walls say. “Someone used to live here, but we don’t know who.”

“Neither do I,” I reply. “They’ve gone and left us. We just have ourselves and the silence in between.”

When I was small I used to lay on the floor in front of my window and watch the dust particles float in the sunbeams. I would pretend in my head they were all microscopic stars, each one collapsing into a black hole somewhere in my body.

And perhaps these internal, microscopic black holes have grown since then, pulling me away from the outside world.

I want to take these metaphorical scissors and cut them out, throw them away — I want to be freed from the silence and the dark. Instead I dig out memories of you with my nails — memories that could have brought light to the dark — and bury them deep elsewhere. Bury them deep, and walk away.

Listless dreaming, I mourn the person I destroyed, feel remorse I never really got to know her before I erased her existence.

Once we could have been a rara avis — now I’m just half the person I once was.

“I’m looking for the girl I fell in love with eight years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I mutter as I look up at the stars. “I killed her. She’s somewhere amongst the stars, chasing the novas that glimmered in her dreams.”

We can’t go back, the ripples of the past fade into the ocean’s arms. There’s only the stars in the sky, sun slipping below the horizon. There’s only this, there’s only now.

And there’s so much I always want to say, but I keep it within. I pour out little fragments of emotion here, there, spilling my soul out in drops. But who was ever clever enough to collect those drops as one and see their colours swirl together into a great amalgamation of emotions?

You think you know me.

You don’t know a thing.