WHERE TO BEGIN

SO today again: 9/29

Another ending has begun. Classic and complete with all the tears and disbelief. Today as he picked me up to join him at a good friends good-bye brunch it came to a head at the pet store parking lot. Where to begin:

We went to Love Parade together yesterday. I had asked for the end at the beginning of last weekend as well, with another unexpected explosion before I departed for an out of town job. But as is our way, we didn’t begin to stop speaking. He texted me within the hour, and I picked-up on his fifth phone call. Yes I did miss him too. Madly, and deeply. I spent the 6 hour drive to Ojai over rocky mountain roads in a blinding rain storm crying along to Chris Isaak’s crooning of this very heartbreak. Shaken with sadness, I softened around the pain again, and turned tender where I ought to have been hard. And in that nostalgia all I wanted was to be with my man for another annual Love Fest Parade. We had shined so brightly the year before. Such stars, our image was even in a traveling art show of the scene. Our dancing dip memorialized as the essence of all that is the Love Fest. Seemed fitting. SO when I returned from Ojai I couldn’t help but to agree to see him., though I had set a stipulation. He could only have a date with me after a yoga class to encourage some positive activity at least. We couldn’t come up with anything on the Monday of my return, so he patiently wished me good night and texted me with sexy suggestions the next day. Alone I road my bike to repair and found it closed. Feeling stuck I agreed to his latest page for lunch and ended up at his house. I sat outside while he dawdled until he decided he couldn’t venture out. He had a way to turn every angle in his favor. Persistent and strategic, kind and convincing, seductive and sympathetic, he somehow succeeded to beg me into the bedroom. He hadn’t meant a meal, it was me he was hungry for. His stubborn trumped mine, and I let myself be convinced. I tucked myself into his invitation and indulged. Can I stay? Was my request. Maybe if I just used him for sex, was my current criteria. Would that work to quiet my increasingly irrelevant complaint. But I find I am hard wired to combine those comforts with a hunger for all that comes with coupling. I want to make it my world. He knows that. This can’t be casual. So we woke up together, all cute and cozy again. By all means brunch, and then what? That's the question. There at the pet store parking lot, we came apart all over again. What was the offense this time?

So many triggers in a relationship made of breaking up. He’d indicated that he didn’t want to think of me so far away, off in Ojai, cause he’d miss me so. How that pissed me off. “Dude” I shout in my mind, “you’ve let me go, you’ve cast me out, you’re gonna miss me remember? We broke up?” or was it another ignite, around the other girl that’s just a friend, but he slept with her cause I delayed my return. Which I guess ought to be okay cause we were not together anyway. But he didn’t tell me before we slept together again, AND, AND!!..…. With out filling me in on the new dynamic, She bought my breakfast? Because A. was taking her extra special early to the airport. What’s that?! But they’re just friends again, so her name comes up. And then I found out that actually they slept together another time, without telling me,. I just had to infer from his comment “We’re not sleeping together anymore”, in the plural. Hmmmm? Says who? as she wraps him round her little finger anew. But I forgave and filed it away. All comes with accepting this specific man, and all his complicated criteria.