Sorry.
At least I’m honest about it. About the unintentional lying. Usually if I lie it’s on accident.
The more I write and am able to sort through my feelings, the more I let go of the person I made him out to be in my head. The person that was easy to hate. The more I let that person go, the harder it is not to miss the person he (for the most part) was. The more I write about it, the easier it is to talk about everything. Even the good things, which are somehow harder to talk about and remember than the bad.
On this date four years ago we officially became a couple. Three years ago we went to Santa Cruz for Fourth of July and our anniversary. We came back home Sunday night and had champagne and pizza for celebratory dinner.
I still have the commemorative cork from the champagne. I brought it with me when I moved out.
You’d think after all this time I would have thrown it out. After how hurt and scared and angry I was. For nearly three years.
But no.
I still have it.
I think this is a pretty clear indicator that I will always have love for him.
I guess maybe I should explain why I would ever miss the person I spoke about here, in the series of posts that probably made you want to kill him. But in all reality, I would not have stayed with him through all the fighting and abuse if there was not some kind of redeeming factor.
And there was.
It was love.
Not just my love for him, but the way that he loved me. That’s why it still hurts. Love so deep, my heart is permanently scarred.
I suppose if we hadn’t cared we wouldn’t have fought. And we definitely cared. There was a lot of unhealthy dependence on each other and some addiction issues that had absolutely nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.
Imagine dating your best friend in the world.
You could spend days together and still not be tired of each other. You have so many inside jokes that you might as well be speaking another language much of the time. You make each other laugh and understand why the other person is the way they are. But you are also completely attracted to each other physically.
Maybe it was because he was really A.D.D. and a little spastic and immature, but he was the only boyfriend I’ve ever had who could keep me occupied for longer than a couple of months. I never got bored. He wasn’t predictable, which is apparently really important for me. I think it’s because I sometimes tend to be unpredictable, so people who can't keep up bore me. Plus, we were both stuck somewhere between ages five and eighty, never settling on a particular age to be. Just generally choosing all of them with great inconsistency.
He was one of the few people in my life who actually understood me. The downside to that is that he knew how to really easily push my buttons and, since I was on-edge already, he could easily send me into crazy-lady screaming freak-out mode. Sometimes he did it on purpose because he was a dick. Sometimes on accident. And sometimes we would have a full-on raging fight because I refused to dispose of bacon grease and he would leave it in the pan for me to deal with when I did the dishes. (That was kind of a complicated recurring fight.)
The times that we weren’t fighting were good (no, fantastic) enough that it took me months to move out even after shit had hit the fan.
I wish I had known then that he wouldn’t stop for me because he needed to stop for himself. We both needed to learn to love ourselves more than other people. To do things for ourselves and not each other.
I wish I could have been mature enough to ignore his picking and not fight. I wish he had been mature enough to stop picking.
I think I can safely say that, if given the chance to go back and do it all again, we’d do things very differently now than we did at the time.
But, then, hindsight is always 20/20, isn’t it?
So now you know. Despite all the time I spent hating and fearing him, Bambi will always have a special place in my heart. A place no one else will ever take over. Which basically means I’m screwed and I’m going to end up a lonely old lady with lots of cats. Unless I somehow become a famous opera singer.
A girl can dream.
