graceland's Diaryland Diary

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My Achille's Heel

"You just take the bad things in too deeply."

That's what a relatively new friend said to me tonight on the street corner after we drank all night on what was planned to be her buying me a couple of drinks until that guy who keeps picking up my drinks, laid down a $100 tab for the three of us and yet again, left before I could thank him. It's become a pattern.

Everything was confusing tonight. Like last week at knitting, tonight a group of people continued to ask me if my best guy friend has feelings for me beyond friendship after he left. Again, I said I don't think he does. I just think our relationship is paranormal. I think he is the last of really good guys. I can't explain it beyond that. I realize it makes no sense, the way he treats me and we interact, to outsiders.

And then that guy from college came in to the bar tonight. My friend said it was like he came looking for me. He walked into the bar and looked around, zeroed in on me and stayed. His fiance kept calling him, on repeat three times before he turned the phone off completely to stay and talk to me. We exchanged business cards. He tried to approach that other night, when he said that weird stuff about girls in college who didn't recognize guy's feelings but asked him to stop, and I said college was college and wasn't it really just fun when you boil down to it?

We changed the subject and he only came close to it one more time. He said that he knew from the first day of college when he met me, that I was nice and then that the other times when he ran into me and we were in our separate groups, that I was always kind to him. Always nice I think he said. And now I meet you again and you are still cool, he said. I should go home, he said, I should have gone home a while ago, but you are a good conversationalist, I like talking to you. I smiled and changed the subject. He left eventually. It was very late.

And then my new friend and talked about the important things. She asked me about the guy from last year, the one who's been around a lot lately, the one with the GF who left a few weeks ago when we were all out and he stayed behind. We've been getting close. Not exactly like before but close, with a different approach. I know I have to stop it. She asked me why. He has a GF, I said, and I like her. I can't step in and destroy what may be love if I can't be sure I can't offer something better. And the truth is that I can't be sure I can offer something better yet. I am much closer to that, but still not sure. She thought that my feelings should count as well. I disagreed.

I told her a little bit, about how it was. About how he wanted me to communicate how I was feeling without giving on his end, and how I was unable to do that. How it ended. Terribly. The months of not speaking. Then person I became close to after that.

That other person far away cutting me off and leaving me feeling an emptiness, not grief because that's something I know, but this foreign feeling of void and failure. That other person makes me feel like I failed at completing the last step of finding the antidote to cancer. Like I was on the verge of something critical, and I very simply dropped the ball, hurting others more than myself.

The other is something I don't speak about to anyone, because there are no words to explain the connection. All but 2 people in my life who knew I spoke with him don't even know we don't speak any longer, for the lone reason that I can't find words to describe this kind of loss. I can't find words to even start by describing who he was to me. He simply was, but is no longer.

That loss is not something that's debilitating in the crying, fetal position way. It's like a burn on 30% of my body, something that feels like it will never fade, but that I can live with. That I have to live with because really, it's my own fault. And nothing I can do or say can fix it.

My new friend said that I frustrate her. That there are all of these men around me right now who give these signals that I don't read and instead move along alone. I show up alone. I leave alone. I don't reach out and contact anyone. I rarely pick up calls.

I said that I don't know that I can move along with someone right now, as some seem to want me to do, knowing inside that I failed someone as completely as I did. And I did. I did fail that last person. Sense of personal failure is my Achille's heel.

So that's it then. That's where I am.

1:31 a.m. - 2004-04-15

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