Get it back.

I think they're wrong.  Profound experiences, even the negative ones, are supposed to be chock-full of learning lessons and shaping opportunities, but when 'supposed to' fails us (yet again), what then? 

I haven't the answers.  I lack the resolve or energy or both to figure them out. 

I wonder how he'd feel if I told him I was a worse person for having known him?  Would it make him sad?  Would it make him think that was just my stupid, shitty perspective?  I'll probably never know, but the fact, for me, remains...

...I'm worse for knowing him. 

I'm less confident.  I'm less trusting.  I've lost faith—in most things but most devastatingly in the two things that kept me soaring above it all—myself and love.  I'm skittish and awkward and at a loss (or I'm just lost).  I don't date anymore and I don't believe people when they tell me pretty much anything.  I barely write and I can't bring myself to finish any book I start.

I didn't think I could choose someone so wrong for me, someone so cowardly, someone who would lash out at me instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt, someone who could abandon me and then blame me for it. 

I spent over 5 months actually believing he was strong and that I meant something profound to him.  I thought he understood me and shared my value system.  I thought he wanted more from life than suburban hell and yard work and school plays and block parties and mask after mask after mask.  I thought he wanted a life where people, a few select people, knew him, instead of a million people who simply knew his name. 

Was I really that wrong? 

I am such a fool.  I feel like a stupid, lovesick, hopeless little girl.

Jesus, why did I even bother? 

I guess I did for two reasons: love affects me in more intense ways than it seems to affect most people and jesus christ did I love him.  That fueled everything: the good, the bad, and the grotesque.  And I remember an 18 year old girl who had barely been loved who met an 18 year old girl who loved her so fiercely and purely and epically that she finally woke up.  I remember that feeling, my world expanding and filling, going Technicolor.  I just wanted him to feel that, too. 

But it all seems so futile now, so stupid. 

I've moved on in a lot of ways but it's not over.  I just want it to be over.  He haunts me in the little homes he built in my mind.  I don't go more than 8 hours at a time without thinking about it or him. 

I'm sad.  Both pathetic and bereft, actually.  And I'm ashamed that I still feel like this because my life really is wonderful.  I live in a home surrounded by people and things I love.  I have the family I never knew I always wanted.  In three months I will have a beautiful baby girl.

But this relationship, this profound experience, scarred me.  In some strange way, I knew he had this power the whole time.  That's why I was so terrified of loving him.  I couldn't help it but I knew that if he rejected what we birthed I would forever lose a part of myself and the loss would be vast, the pain palpable and ever-present. 

How could something that forever changed me be so meaningless to him?  I'll bet he's already convinced himself he never really loved me.  Maybe he didn't. 

I doubt nearly everything now, but I never doubt the fact that I loved him.  And I still love him.  Not that it matters.  I guess it never really did matter.

Love has always had the power to change me and my mind and my life and I think now that I'm a freak.  Because nothing was ever going to change him, least of all a headstrong, passionate moron like myself. 

I used to think love could do anything.  But no.  Love bows to fear and inertia and anger and circumstance.

I miss my naïveté.  I miss the me before him.  I wasn't perfect, but I was sure and hopeful.

I need to believe it's possible to get it back.