*sigh*

First the good news: Joel is dating his distantish cousin Mandy (name change!) in Pennsylvania and it doesn’t bother me!!! Yay!!!!! No crippling pain, no sink into dark oblivion, just a twinge of “punk.”  Bad news: he’s sinking more and more into serious hypocrisy.  We have the kilt, the tattoo, and now he’s started something else which is going to lead to substance abuse, knowing him, unless he wakes up and smells the truth.  My reaction to that was a little stronger, since he told me I wasn’t a stable/strong enough Christian for him when we broke up.

Different ick news: my good friend Robert from high school, with whom I lost contact for years, recently showed back up in my life.  When we were younger, he had a crush on me for several years, but I never reciprocated his feelings.  Well, he’s getting a divorce now and last night it came up that I don’t believe in divorce and remarriage (yes, yes, I know exactly how unpopular that opinion is, thank you) and this morning brought an email about how he feels like I’m judging him (I’M NOT JUDGING HIM!!!! ARGH!!!!!) and how he regrets “giving up on me” when we were younger.  *sigh*  So, I finish the drama with Joel and Maranda only to have the drama with Robert start.  Does this ever end?  Ever?  Anyone?  *laughs*  Ahh well, I’ve been told that it’s all just part of life.  And it is.  My friend just lectured me about how experience comes with age, but without these experiences we don’t get “experience,” just age.

Our Story: the beginning

For the last several weeks, the focus of this blog has been my diagnosis of bipolar disorder and my medication (with free side effects! What luck!), but its origins actually lie in two discrete units (read: people), one of which was my ex-boyfriend, Joel, and our break-up two years ago tomorrow. Since I started taking my medication, the really intense feelings for Joel that continued to ruin my emotional life have, for the most part, disappeared – the “love,” the longing, the feelings of loss and betrayal. And honestly, I’m glad they’re gone, because they were really messing me up! However, there’s still something in me that loves him more than any other guy I’ve known and so I’m going to give you bits and pieces of Our Story (which is, honestly, a very sweet story in some places) in the hope that if I tell it from beginning to end, maybe I will be able to let it go. It is my hope that I can accept that the beautiful existed and let go of the hurt, and finally get my life back. I don’t know how much I’ll do per entry, or even if it’ll be in chronological order, but I think it needs to be done. For a while I thought that it was done, it was over and the meds had helped with the feelings, but this last weekend was special meetings at church and the whole first service was spent with me watching the back door in dread of him walking through it, and I know again that he’s still entrenched somewhere in my heart.

Tomorrow will be the two year anniversary of our break-up and yesterday Joel began his move to Pennsylvania, continuing a life that in no way includes me, except possibly for those moments when he’s walking along and suddenly smells my skin or hears my laughter. Now, I know that I should wish him well and happy, but the bad me hopes that he has those moments for quite a while longer, because it simply isn’t fair that he should forget someone so easily whom he swore to love forever. I admit that I have some bitterness about this, but losing a large part of my innocence and sense of romance seems like a pretty big deal to me.

I want to start this off by laying a few facts out on the line. Firstly, Joel and I started dating about four months before his eighteenth birthday and one month before my twenty-fourth birthday. I realize that a lot of people have strong opinions about these kinds of age differences and a good deal of the time they are perfectly legitimate, but I have an aunt and uncle who started dating when he was 16 and she was 26, so I think it works sometimes. And I thought this might be one of those times. Second, Joel’s mother has been wheelchair-bound since she was 20, he has a sister about eight years younger and a brother about four years older, and their father left their family because of a drug and alcohol problem (stemming, ironically, from undiagnosed bipolar disorder). He returned a couple of years ago, but Joel spent his formative years with a closet alcoholic father and his teenage years raising his little sister and caring for his mother while his older brother continued his college education and struggled with the weight of becoming the head of the household. I’m telling you this because really, seven years is a huge difference in some ways, but sometimes, it really isn’t a huge deal. In my case, it was a heaping helping of both.

My story with Joel begins when I returned from spending five months in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. When I left Joel was a somewhat gawky sixteen-year old with sticky-outy ears and definitely still my buddy’s younger brother. My first clue that things had changed was in February, two months after I came home, when he came up to visit and to paint his grandparents’ house. I went to church for Wednesday night service and happened to go downstairs to the young people’s class. As I walked toward the doors, I could see the back of someone I didn’t quickly recognized and as I walked through the door I suddenly realized who it was.

“Joel!” I shouted, being quite overjoyed at the prospect of seeing someone who had been my friend for years and who had been faithful in emailing me while I was gone. But when he turned around, it wasn’t Little Joel, my crush’s younger brother facing me; it was Joel, the young man, and in my head I said something resembling “oh crap,” because I knew that I was in deep trouble. Gone was the baby fat and the awkwardness and instead there he was, Joel, looking very much like a version of the man of my dreams. His face split wide in a smile and we met in the middle of the room, where he hugged me, and I really knew I was in trouble, because he was seventeen years old and I didn’t want him to let me go. Later he told me he hadn’t wanted to let me go either, which could explain why the hug went slightly longer than the socially-acceptable limit!

I’ve talked with other friends and we agree that it’s not the person’s youth we’re often attracted to, but the possibility of the man that could be simmering just under the surface. So, in the interest of inquiry, have you ever been attracted to someone completely inappropriate? And not just because of age, either.

Overkill

Last week was horrible, awful, terrible, a nightmare, a wreck. My hormones were bad, which made everything seem that much worse and I felt like the world was conspiring against me. Well, and my manager, but I think that’s really just because he is….. who he is (she said, for once suppressing the urge to say really, really mean things about him.).

And I wound up on a van with eleven other people on a road trip down to Sacramento for special meetings at our church down there, which, I must admit, had been part of the freak out stress for last week. But I was going down to see my family and friends, and I was doing it without having to pay a red cent for fuel.

After service I went outside, looking for one of my cousins who I wasn’t going to see for the rest of the weekend, and when I found her I took three steps towards her and then turned around and went back inside. She was standing next to Joel. No one told me he was coming and it was like a punch in the gut to see him there. Not just because every time I see him is like a physical blow, but because two years ago in Sacramento for special meetings we were together for the last time as a couple and here he was, beautiful and charming as he’s ever been. And I love him. After two years full of pain, betrayal, anger, every negative thing I could feel about him and think about him, I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone else. I know his faults and he irritates the living crap out of me with the way he acts sometimes, when he turns into The Prophet and gets all spiritually snooty, and I still think he’s wonderful. A lot of the time.

Worse was yet to come the next day when he showed up wearing a kilt. This might not seem like a big deal, except a) it’s not exactly an acceptable fashion statement in my church (which is/used to be his church) and b) he knows that I’ve always a had a serious weakness for men with the guts to wear kilts/sarongs in public. In fact, while we were dating I bought him a sarong that he wore quite a bit, lounging around playing video games and grooving in the park. To see him there, in a black kilt, being (in part. Not the rebellious, closed-eyes- to-his-own- behavior-and- its-meanings/repercussions part.) so many things I’ve thought I want in a partner for my life was just… hard. I called my parents (not a Normal Thing) and wound up crying (really not a Normal Thing!).

I guess I’m still struggling with understanding how love, which we’re taught to think is the unbreakable bond between two people, can fail like it did. I recognize that the book and the movies and the songs and the poetry all lie, and really represent what people want more often than it represents what they actually have, but really getting it seems to be a bit of a problem. There’s a song (by an artist I can’t respect at all, even though I like his music) that says “all you need is love is a lie/’cause we had love but we still said goodbye” that pretty much sums it up. He loved me and now he doesn’t. How does that happen? (“One minute we speak of fruit, the next of love… how does that happen?”)

One of my cousins (I have seventeen first cousins and I’m pretty close with most of them, hence many references!) is in love with a guy (kid, really, but then, she’s only 20) and it reminds me so much of me and Joel! Knowing that what you’re doing is stupid, knowing you should be distancing yourself but not having the strength… *laughs* My only hope is that he will turn out to be a little more steady than my music man (this other guy is also a musical genius, but in the classical way, which means he has some of the same foibles and frailties). So no one is bored with my emotude for the evening, I would like to say that other than Joel, I had a great time. I got to share a twin bed with the Human Heater, reconnect with a lot good friends, make better connections with new friends, get my mind out of its constant rut of my little world and spend time with people who mean a whole lot to me. A little moment of mad melancholy was worth it to be reminded that when others think I’m an “eccentric” (when they’re being nice), my family and good friends still think I’m cool.