Listen to my Heart Pound. Listen to the Love Sound.

You're lying to yourself if you think that you didn't know. That your emotions were fooling you. That you truly thought you wanted to be with me.

If you had felt anything like I did, you wouldn't have followed your question of consummation immediately with a what if.

"Will you go out with me? If it doesn't work out, please promise me we'll still be friends?"

I was taken aback when it was asked. The thought would have never crossed my mind. I agreed simply because I was so sure, so sure that it would never come to that. We'd been skirting the issue for months and when d-day finally came I couldn't do anything but entertain my neuro-chemicals as they fired randomly as if in sleep. I had such a rush of endorphins and adrenaline I doubt I could have walked a solid line if accosted by a suspicious authority figure.

So I said, of course we'll still be friends.

But it didn't turn out that way, really, did it? We fought for a long time. Too long. Every day with no sign of you, nothing but short quipped answers to questions, nothing to indicate you had any interest in me at all. I'm sure, from your standpoint, it seemed the same of me. I holed myself up, I cried and ate gummy bears. I didn't frequent our internet haunts for some time. I avoided you. Perhaps not consciously, perhaps so.

We moved past it. We're back to the way we were, as if our whole innuendo had never happened. We're skirting the issue again.

It kills me everyday, but still I want it. I don't want to go back to avoidance. If we never again reach the benchmark of relationship, I can live with that. I'll be lonely a lot and if you leave me, I'll settle for someone new and different and not nearly as in tune with my emotional parameters as you are. Not nearly as good as you.

And when you ended things, you said, "What if I find someone new?"

I could never leave you for someone new. Never.
I could settle.
I could pretend.
I couldn't ever actively leave you.


That is the difference between us.


It may seem sporadic, these breakdowns of existentialism I am prone to. Months go by that I seem emotionally stable and then suddenly, there I am again. A puddle on the floor. It's been over 8 months since our relationship ended, four times the length of time that it lived. What does it mean that the wounds are still as fresh as they were the day they were carved? What does it mean that I've gotten so talented at covering them with gauze and forgetting them for days or weeks at a time?

I think I'm dying.