So, what it is to be done, over, ending? I wrote the ending to my story a long time ago, and I had thought a few times that by-chance I'd gotten it all wrong. I wasn't wrong. It ended the way I wrote, and suddenly I feel a strong desire to work on my novel and actually finish the damn thing. I wrote the ending so long before he even came back that I may have even doomed things in my own little world. Could I have written the ending before even knowing he'd be back again? Could I have doomed everything because I had already written an ending? Maybe I knew all along that it wouldn't end up working out.
I wrote an ending which wasn't a happy one, and the character did not end up with the person she thought she was supposed to. It was very, very different from everything which should have happened. It began as a love story, and ended twisted through something which shouldn't have happened. Everything was messed up, and nothing made sense, though fate seemed to be pushing in one directon. Eventually, it seemed as though there wasn't anything she could do to stop it, so she went with it. In the end, that wasn't how it was supposed to be. Fairy tales aren't meant to come true in real life. Fate, be damned -- sometimes everything just doesn't work out .

Speaking of fate, at the end of senior year, when Joe came back into my life for the first time in three years, I spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not it was a 'meant to be' type thing, or whether it was just him being lonely cause he'd just broken up with his girlfriend. He hadn't come back into my life yet, and I was trying to figure out if it was going to happen, or if it wasn't.
I was in my room for the afternoon, before going to practice, and was listening to my tv while thinking about the whole situation. I was seeking an answer, I think, about whether or not my life was meant to be involved with him, or whether it was meant to fall to the wayside and be passed through to the history of my life. I remember flipping through channels which I didn't get to get to one I did and hearing a voice through the black screen say "Don't worry, everything will be just fine. Things will work out, and you will love."
I didn't really know how to take this. It was like a synchronicity, which I hadn't planned for, weasling it's way into my life.
I turned the TV off and headed towards the practice fields. Along the way, I was still pretty deep in thought when I walked right atop what I thought was a piece of white paper. Being the curious person that I am, I picked it up. Another sign? I don't really know, but I still have that old queen of hearts. Did it mean that I was the queen of his heart, or that I was the one who was supposed to end with him? Did it mean that I had to grow to make my own life about finding myself and my true love? I didn't know. I took it to mean that he was the one for me, and I've actually kept that card all these years. I had lost it, for years, and found it again, almost as though fate threw it in my path once more, when I was moving my furniture out of my room to move to PA for him and for the life we could have.
But what of it now? Was it, yet again, telling me to go and live my own life because I needed to be the queen of my own heart? I'm still not sure. I'd taken it as a good sign, but, perhaps again I was misled by what I thought of as fate.

I hung out with Joe, Geoff, and Lisa last night. I took Spike with me. I no longer feel the need to break down and cry about him, but it is hard to talk about the fact that he makes me dis-like myself because I can't get over that I just wasn't good enough for him to want to be with me. He threw me away so easily that it breaks my heart to think that everything he said must have been a lie. I feel surrounded by the words that you said. I feel haunted trying to remember things you said and decipher whether or not you were telling me the truth. ---------------------->
That is just how I fell, all the time. I want to shut out my memories of his voice, and the memories of the sweet things he said. It wasn't supposed to be this way. I trusted him and his words. I'm inside myself, torturing myself because I can't have been good enough if he was going to lie to me. I get it, I should be so hard on myself, but how can I be worth anything if someone who is supposed to love me lies to me and ruins my world. He was supposed to care about me, and I don't understand how that can just fall away the way it did. How do you just one day decide that you've stopped caring about someone? What on earth causes that? I've loved him for so long that it seems second nature to think about him a hundred times a day, and to be happiest when he's realizing that I am actually alive. Right now though, I know he wouldn't care if I stopped breathing. Yeah, he 'might' feel guilt if I died, or if I ended everything because I just couldn't deal. But, I really don't think he'd feel loss, like I'm sure he doesn't right now. He doesn't miss me, and he doesn't care that he has taken the stability from my life. He doesn't care that I changed my whole life to be with him. He decided that I wasn't someone he was excited to see. He decided that this wasn't worth saving. I didn't know how to be someone he missed. I threw my heart and soul into the possibility of an us, and he seemed like he cut and ran as fast as he could once things were really serious. I miss being in Maryland, actually. I miss the friends I did have there, becasuse there isn't that much here for me right now.

Someday, some day, I'll be someone that is missed. I'll have someone who doesn't want to live without me in his life. But for now, I just feel alone. I love that I have my friends by phone -- they've kept me sane these last few weeks. It's edging faster and faster towards this time flying by. I don't know what to do with my life right now, but I can't wait to see what unfolds for me. Joe needs to stay in my past, and if he thinks that coming back within a month and saying he's sorry and he misses me is not going to go over well. I can't do this anymore. I already realized a long time ago that I can't be me around him because I am terrified of being judged to be lesser by him. I just don't want or need that in my life. I fought for a long time to try and be myself and to try and make this work, but I still found that I had a very hard time opening up and talking to him even when he was telling me that he wasn't going anywhere and that he would always be there for me. Funny how it went from that to goodbye in a week. I knew it was coming. And, I hate that I was too blind to see it from the beginning. I might have still come up here for a job, but, I'm not sure what would have happened if that was the case. Either way, I'm here, this is my life now. I made my bed... time to lie in it.

~M

     Well, this picture pretty much says it all right now. I feel very conflicted, and I'm hoping that when Joe wakes up in a few weeks and comes crawling back (as he's actually showing signs of it and Lisa has already warned me it might be coming) I can hold strong and tell him to stay out of my life as anything but a friend. I won't play this game with him -- he's already shown me how quickly he can throw me away for no reason. I won't put myself in a position where that can happen again. It is neither worth it, nor okay with me. I don't like being made to feel that I am worthless and unwanted. I'm still fighting feeling very unattractive, as he never cared to act as though he wanted me. "Sex is Sex" he said once, and I'm done feeling as though I'm unwanted.
     The 'real' me is trying to re-break through this mess of a life I've gotten myself into. Hopefully I can keep it up and keep moving forwards. I'm just sick to death of 'dealing' with Joe. I wonder if I never could tell him I loved him becasuse I wasn't sure I did anymore.
     I would never date him again unless he stopped smoking completely and maybe I'd add in a clause that he had to go see a psychiatrist if his behavior kept being so erradic after he stopped smoking. I hate that part of me wants him in my life because of the way I feel when I think about him. But, I gave up everything and did my best to figure out everything I could so that we could make things work out right. He told me this was the last relationship he wanted to be in, and I felt the same way. Hell, engagement rings had been talked about. I feel flat, and I'm working on feeling as though this isn't the end of what I can have in my life. I'm waiting, and I'll keep waiting and hoping to see what is going to happen. As much as I miss a relationship in my life, I don't miss dealing with his smoking and his moods and walking on egg shells because I couldn't figure out what would set him off or not. I don't need that in my life. I hope that I can find someone who is kind and caring and who appreciates me for who I am.

I'm on the hunt, lookout!

I find it amazing that this used to be my idea of perfection and where my dreams took me. This is the happily ever after I wanted from my life, and actually thought for a time that I had found. Joe said to me, while he was breaking my heart -- again --, that he'd thought that this would be his last relationship, that things would end with me. I guess he was wrong, and I was just as wrong to have been thinking the same damn thing. I was looking at freaking engagement rings. Welcome to major sucking. This is just what I wanted, and what I'd set myself up to believe I could have.

On a side note, why is it that when I start thinking about him, or writing about him, that he pops up into my life in one way or another? I don't like this weird shit at all.

Sooo, I'm doing my best and moving day to day. This year 1/1/11 I am making a resolution to have him out of my life this year. Yes, we might be casual friends, but I will not have him in my life as anything more than that. Hopefully I can stick to this resolution. I don't often make them, but I hope that this one I can actually stick to. 

I'm holding up better -- and though I'm still a bit prone to feeling depressed, but things are getting better. I've re-joined a few dating sites, and I'm hoping that I can be more active and meet more people. I want someone else in my life, but I won't settle for someone who isn't going to appreciate me. I'm demanding more. I won't settle for anything anymore. I just end up getting hurt, and I don't want to do that anymore. 

Anyway, Happy New Year!

I hurt.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Cyrill Connolly

It's Over

Well, end of relationship. I don't have a reason -- neither did he when he dumped me. But, I've got to keep moving forward. I hurt, all the time, but people keep telling me it'll get better. I hope so.

We had something amazing. Maybe we aren't meant to be together, though that's all your fault. But I cannot believe that you'd let us lose the connection we had because you're too much of a coward to be friends with me. I hope one day you'll realize what you threw away, and I hope you hurt as much as you have hurt me. How can you completely throw away this connection -- cause we could probably make really good friends... But I'm not going to fight for something you don't care about.

So yes, I hope that one day you'll talk to me again, but, I will live if you don't.

My life at the Moment

Day to day I'm growing more into what my future might actually end up being at some point. I'm looking forward to it, and I'm scared of it at the same time. I am pretty happy with my life at the moment, though I have trouble from time to time being able to really know what is going on. I'm not certain how to just be sometimes. I'm so used to the same old things that I am not quite sure I really know how to just sit back and relax. I'm not use to the whole 'girlfriend' role. I don't know, really, what I'm supposed to be and do most of the time. So, I try to be myself. I am working on that, that and not worrying so much about EVERYTHING. I hate that about my personality and my genetics. If I could change one thing about my life and who I am, I would take away the extreme anxiety and worries that I feel a lot of the time. I don't feel like that is 'me'. I know that I would always be more prone to thinking about other people and ow what I do would effect others, but I wish that I could go without worrying about everything. I'd be less stressed and there would be so much less crap on my mind ALL THE TIME. I really dislike feeling like I'm going crazy because of the way that I think. I swear my mood can change right off the bat and I just don't like it at all.
I'm trying to stay with running more and more and trying to stay more active so that I can do my best to keep the anxiety and such at bay. I'm doing my best and trying to keep open and talking about the things which are on my mind. Joe is good about paying attention to what is going on with me. But, I don't want to feel, or want him to feel, as though that is a requirement of us being together. I'm doing my best, but it is taking some time for me to really feel 'safe' opening up. I don't want to hand him my heart on a platter only to get it minced and served back to me. I always have argued that each time he is back in my life he is different and the situation is different, and if ever, this is the case now. I cannot believe how far we have come in what we are doing. I'm constantly amazed by my twist of fate here. I cannot wait to see where it takes me, and what we have in store for our lives together. Hopefully, we can stay friends if anything does happen to go horribly wrong. I feel like both of us have to fully work out the relationship between us in order to move on in our lives. And, I'm okay with that. We can and will take care of it and I know that we will be able to do what needs doing to get to a happy point. We'd have adorable kids, if we had that happen....

We could have a long future, and I look forward to finding out where this new adventure will take us. I have not yet bound the book with out ending in it, as every time I feel that the ending has been written I'm delighted and frightened to learn that it was yet another chapter in the book about who and what we are. Amazing, sometimes, that we have done this so often. I hope that there is a long life of writing and adventure in front of us... we have the potential, and I can't wait to write it out... I do so love happy endings.

The Caligrapher's Daughter

This book was the first book in a while to keep me reading for a few weeks because I couldn't finish it all at once like I normally do with books. I don't know why it surprises me that there are books which exist which will not be super easy reads for me. It wasn't a hard book to read, but the things that are in the book are very heavy subject matter, and the way that it is written gives a most interesting look at some of the less appealing aspects of the history of the people of Korea. I did have a few issues with the fact that the book itself was written from a bunch of different people's points of view and the names of the characters and the proper names by which they were addressed in Korean society were commonly switched and interchanged. It was a bit hard sometimes to follow the changes in the speaker and the common names throughout. It was to a point where the same sentence in a few places would refer to one character by different names. It made for a bunch of re-reading being necessary to really get the things which the author was trying to say. I didn't really appreciate it sometimes, because it made reading go so much slower.
I enjoyed the story, felt genuinely attached to the main character -- though I really found the relationship between her and her father quite annoying. He blamed her for a lot of things, and in the traditional Korean society, did not even name his daughter, so our character did not really have a name for the whole book. That was weird. The main reason it was so weird was that it wasn't really ever explained fully as to what the heck was going on between this man and his daughter.
I loved the descriptions and the writing style throughout this novel. I rather loved the way that the author took the time to see all the beauty which surrounded our character, even when she was in her unhappiest days. The love story which ended up entertained throughout this piece was beautiful and the thing born of ages where one could marry and never again see one's husband.
Overall I'd say read this book, absolutely. I would advise that you take some time to really sit down and read this. It is heavy and covers many topics from the many years this character lived. It ends with the fall of the Japanese after the atomic bombs were dropped. The ending is a bit sudden, but the book is certainly worth the read. I rather enjoyed it as a break from the normal books I read.

Next on the list, and I hate to admit that though I started it last night, I'm almost completely done with it already....

I read Alice Hoffman's The Ice Queen and have been enraptured by her writing style ever since. I had no idea if this would live up to the first book I read or not... but I knew I had to find out, as Angela highly recommended it and I felt that I really should take it in and read it as she LOVES this book!