Your best friend reaches out to me every day. I don’t know if it’s because of the stuff with you and me – hell, I don’t even know if you’ve talked to him about it – or if it’s because I’m helping him with some of the IT modernization tasks for the back office now that I sit there. Really, it could be either, given that the day I moved there was the day we had that marathon gchat that has all but wrecked my life. But I choose to believe it’s because he’s a good friend to me and because he cares about me. Neither of us have spoken your name in each other’s presence in over five weeks, and I’m grateful that our friendship can still exist outside the bounds of yours. He asks me every day how I’m doing – and to be fair, I don’t know if he’s asking on a serious, I’m-concerned-about-you-level, or if he’s just being nice, but I always answer as though it were the former.

“good morning, what say you?”

“it’s an angry morning”

He joked about me having woken up on the wrong side of the bed, then apologized sympathetically for my angry morning. I replied that lately my days are either angry, cripplingly sad, or ambivalent. Today: angry.

After crying myself to sleep last night I woke up full of nothing but memories where your actions were careless and hurt me, or your behavior was embarrassing, or I just looked like a jackass. I was so angry all morning, it took twice as long to do my makeup because my eyes kept welling with angry tears. This afternoon my boss mentioned your name, in conjunction with an effort you had worked about four years back, and I missed the following 10 seconds of his point because I was frantically trying to keep my shit together. My workday was less than productive, to put it delicately.

Since I knew I was a lost cause anyway, I left work a little early, hoping that if I caught the 4 o’clock yoga class at the gym I could find some peace of mind and get centered. Thirty minutes in, and a few flow combos later, I successfully cleared my head and was concentrating only on my breathing and the poses. Our instructor asked us to find our way to a meditation pose of our choosing so we could bring our heart rates down and re-focus our breath. I sat there in butterfly pose, trying to control my breathing, listening to the instructor talking about contentedness, and accepting ourselves in our current state and learning to love ourselves. At one point she said something along the lines of: “During that flow you may have had some thoughts or sensations surface that you’ve been avoiding. That’s good, that’s natural. These are things that your body is telling you to notice, to deal with, so that you can let them go and move on. When life hits us hard, we tend to rely on what we know, to crawl back into our shells and seek comfort in what we know – ”

…and that’s the last part I heard because I burst into tears. It resonated so strongly with me because that’s exactly how you described the last 3-4 years of your life. That you had been hit so hard by multiple things in a short period of time – and yes, babe, you certainly had – that you then spent all your time restructuring your life around the things that you know, not taking any chances, not letting anyone get too close, not allowing yourself to deal, and heal, and move on. (That last part I added myself. But it’s my thought process, my blog, and I’m taking creative liberties.) You said, in so many words, that because you knew what you were getting from me as a friend (albeit, with benefits) that you wouldn’t let it go any further than that because beyond that was Unknown. You even shared with me a major blocker for you, that in your words “was one of the biggest reasons that’s kept me from dating you”…and I’ll save that for another near-future writing session. But there in the dark yoga studio, my tears blended with the sweat on my face, my sobs with the room’s heavy breathing, and in that moment I ached for you. I ached for me. And I ached for the “us” that should have been, but never was.

This evening, after yoga and more cardio, I went to my brother’s house for a visit. Every hug I get from my nephews is like a shot of morphine, and I don’t see them nearly as often as I should or would like. Regardless, while I rattled off the things on my “what I’ve been up to” list, I casually mentioned that you and I were officially not speaking to each other. I was more than a little dismayed by how positive and supportive my brother and sister-in-law were about that. My brother, who has been a rock in my life the last 7 years, said “This will be good for you. If you can give it enough time so that the emotions fade or are gone altogether you’ll more clearly see all the reasons why he isn’t right for you.” All I could say was “I hope you’re right”, because I was getting pretty close to tears again. I think it was obvious, too, since at that moment my 7-year-old nephew stopped in the middle of the game he was playing with his brother and climbed up on the couch and hugged me. A dose much needed.

I drove home thinking about how much my brother’s words stung, and why. I simultaneously want to believe that I’ll be able to get over you, and that I won’t have to because you’ll figure your shit out and realize that you love me and we’ll spend the rest of our lives together. The reality is that the pain of loss is intertwined with the hurt and bitterness and if there’s any chance of a happily ever after with you, then we have to start over. I have to come without the hurt, without the bitterness, and without the old love. And to do that, I need to heal without you.

I suppose what I told your best friend this morning wasn’t entirely accurate. Turns out that the anger and sadness and ambivalence don’t take turns ruling my days; rather they are all together inside me, probably holding hands in a line and bouncing on their toes with the anticipation and eagerness of their next stint in the spotlight.