Fantasy man

I am still hurt by this
I still feel a little betrayed
And very very silly
I wonder every other minute
what might have
made it different
but I am content in this place
to be at your side
as a friend
and build myself from the inside
to the person I should have been all along
I am grateful for my friends
For those that know me most
And those that hold my heart for me
When I can’t seem to do what’s best
I am resilient
And these days that follow each other
Stacked up like building blocks
Will build the me I know I’m capable of
And the us that exist apart from each other

But I will always wonder
where it might have gone
when the silence builds
and I catch you
staring at my reflection

Indecision

So much depends upon indecision
while
the wind winds my hair around my head
like a poor man’s crown
at once devastating and
forgotten

I lie
Tattered beyond recognition
Beside his bed
While the sky remains
Cobwebbed with night
Skittering across my life
And reminding me of his absence

He is tangled in my hair
Passing for a stranger in the car behind mine
Driving down Harlem at night

He is every white sports car I see
Found his way into my students faces
And ruined me

I no more want him inside me
Then he wanted what he put inside of me
But he is inextricably bound
To my indecision

I am to much bound to him
To much a part of his heart
To ever let him go

my secret:

I see every careful imperfection in his face
I know the hardest scars and darkest hollows of his heart.
I’ve blessed his anger, tasted his self-loathing.
I have run my finger across his pain and heeled it with my tears
For two years I cradled his child’s heart in mine
Tried to fuse his brokenness with my own
Painted him into myself
Allowed him to be my beautiful disaster
He knows my mean imperfections
Every saccharine corner of my heart
I’ve watched him look into my brokenness
To see himself reflected in my eyes
Despite everything
Despite brokenness and because of it
I would willingly pour
Myself out to fill him.
He cast me aside
Still, I would gladly give years
Of peaceful solitude for
One more
Tortured moment of his heart

solitude

When I was in high school I was hyper religious in an isolated sense. By the time I entered college, however, I was hyper employed and way too involved in my current relationship to have even muscle memory of my prior allegiances. That relationship was followed up, with literally no downtime, by another even less productive relationship. That relationship was punctuated by another brief relationship. When I returned to the prior relationship I was desperate for someone to hold my hand and my heart. I was seeking what I had lost by neglecting my spirituality and openly defying nearly every comforting aspect of it.

Now I am sitting at a hard surfaced table at Borders books surrounded by people nose deep in magazines and books, and I am wondering how much I have in common with each of them. I am relationship deprived in a way I have never felt before. I am without a significant other for the first time since I was licensed to legally drive a vehicle, and I am unsure how to proceed.

On one hand, I am terrified. I’m frightened of not having a body to hold and an ear with which to share my day. I am also frighteningly calm for having only recently become single with only slight input into the termination of the original coupling. I am reflecting on my new loneliness, but also on the loneliness I felt while still in a relationship that was falling to pieces even I scrabbled to paste it back together.

At the end of my mental scrambling, however, I feel an intense need to walk and reflect in solitude, and an equally strong need to be surrounded by God and people that love him. Oddly, I am uncomfortable with this declaration. I am at ease with my need for solitude, but uneasy with my need for relationships. I feel an almost desperate need to scramble for romantic involvement that I could no doubt find with relative ease. I am also hesitant to indulge this need because I do not wish to find myself, several months, or even years from now, in the same place, struggling to extract my heart from its entanglement in the arms of a man that no more wants it than the responsibilities that come with it. Even to say that out loud is crushing to my new fragility. I must say it however, out loud and frequently. I must repeat it to myself as frequently as I have dried tears in these last few days, and as frequently as I will regress in the next few days.

I anticipate these regressions, however, and I will fight them vigilantly. I am afraid that I will repeat past mistakes; that I will seek solace in the superficial comfort of coupling, or act out in an attempt to distance myself from my pain. In either case I will only be delaying the inevitable heartache. Right now I am determined to embrace the pain and work it out. Whatever that might look like.

What it was

I’ve been avoiding this. The thought of reflecting has been a little too much for the past few weeks. A lot has transpired, however. Ron and I broke up at the end of May. He broke me. Easily. I cried and drank, acted out, acted stupid. Fuck a few people over. Led a few people on. Drank some more.
At the end of all that, despite my intentions, all I had to show for it was a rip in my favorite jeans and a badly scarred heart.
All I wanted was to forget. All I wanted was to put him as far outside of myself as I could. All I ended up with was a piece of him growing inside of me that he didn't want.
Even now, having committed to reflection, I’m fighting it. I feel the tears forming at the backs of my eyes and breathe, blink and try not to go to deep.
I can’t do this right now. I was wrong, I’m not ready to look at myself yet.

I have always known that UPS presented a unique working environment, but in the last two weeks, it has amazed me with its strangeness. Let me tell you what i mean. Yesterday the entire irregular expediting operation ground to a halt over a failed threesome. In our presort today, a tiny piece metal in my nose garnered more attention than the 270 we hit as an outbound.
In the last three working days I have ripped the crotch out of my pants and worked an entire day without the support of an under wire without drawing the slightest bit of attention, however every time I bend over I have an audience. Yesterday the acting fulltimer in my outbound told me PPH means nothing, despite the fact that my PPH had a large role in putting me at number 1 for the southside and in keeping the rest of my slacker outbound at plan for the last 4 months.
UPS is a place where you can get hit on by male coworkers you've never met over the phone and propositioned by the same three guys you turned down yesterday in the same hour. It is a place that fires people for fraternization but boasts a large number of happy couples and an even larger number of fuck buddies. It is a place where you can flirt your way out of pretty much any situation, and flirt your way into a clean dock, but get fired for the same behavior.
And despite its idiosyncrasies, I'm not sure that I'll ever be ready to give it up.

On missing leaves.

I miss leaves.

At the present moment I am sitting at a comfy booth in the Corner Bakery in Orland reveling in the fact that I just laid the smack down on two out of my three final papers for the semester. Having completed these two papers I feel completely justified in doing a happy dance. Summer seems so much closer now that some of the weight of the Mariner's bird has been lifted from my neck.

Finals not withstanding, I'm done with school. Done. I'm excited for next semester and terrified, but the simple fact that I will no longer have to measure my life by semesters in less than a year feels so liberating.