Posting from behind enemy lines

I'm trying to post this from my iPod Touch and I'm having a hell of a time... Anyway, quick post is that Kristin's staying over tonight so we can have some hang out time. We rented movies, we're hanging out with friends... I guess it's kind of getting a sneak peek of what normal will eventually be like. I've become the cool guy in the movies whose best friend is a girl, and no one thinks anything about it, only I think about it a lot. I guess that's what we never learn about that guy in the movies; what's their history? Why are they "just friends"? Have they ever had sex? Would having it now destroy the friendship? Are they Jerry & Elaine or are they Harry & Sally? Anyway. Kristin's spending the night. She's sleeping in the next room on my couch. This is healthy, right? I swear I only write neurotic...

Like finding a box of photographs yellowed and tinted with age

Wow.  Besides being the worst blogger in the history of blogging, I am making a quick entry before going to sleep tonight.  

So much has happened since I last posted... So much of my life has been completely changed and turned on its head since, when is that?  September 14, 2008.  ((The word is "e-r-r-o" by the way.  Pronounced like "arrow" but with an "e")).  Kristin and I broke up, and this the first time I've been able to write about it since the day it ended. 

December 11, 2008 - 95 days since last post.

Almost one hundred days of sustained, prolonged, murder as our relationship broke into so many fragments that it was unrecognizable by the end.  Kristin began to shut down, to turn away from the relationship around the beginning of September, when she went back to school. She was happy, she was busy, she was fulfilled; but most of all, she was doing it alone.  Not to say that her only happiness should have involved me--far from it.  It was important, however, because this was the first real time that she allowed herself separation from the one constant she had had for nearly four years.

By the time October rolled around, we were in rehearsal to sing at my sister's wedding.  Maybe it was fitting that we sang Eagles, "Love Will Keep Us Alive," because it certainly couldn't have been further from the truth for the pair of us.  I will always be grateful for the opportunity we had to sing for my older sister's wedding, as the song could not have been a better fit for Marissa and Gino.  The stress of being among family, however, desperate to be the happy, collegiate couple in a sea of prying relatives was something neither of us were prepared for. The sensory overload of wedding gowns, tuxedos, babies, cakes, flowers, and doves, even, was enough to force us to look at our relationship from the outside looking in.

It wasn't a pretty picture.

Thanksgiving came and went, and I returned home for Winter Break a week before she.  Given the freedom of a week to clear my mind, I came to the conclusion that our relationship had become incompatible with life and would require immediate, invasive surgery with a very low probability of survival.  The problems that had plagued us over the years hadn't piled up, and there wasn't a new obstacle in our way that we couldn't face. But as a couple, we had ignored and marginalized the one glaring problem we knew we'd have to face from day one.  For her part, Kristin had a laundry list of issues with which she was unhappy, things that she had buried inside her all year and simply neglected to bring up.  This bitterness over my shortcomings was what made her shut down at the end of Summer, and I can hardly fault her for it.

A litany of mistakes and differences can be overcome, but a mountain of an issue--when ignored for as long as we did--simply could not be breached.  I don't want to get too detailed here, as ultimately what passed between Kristin and I is entirely our private business, but I will mention that sometimes, two people can be be so completely blinded by love, that they know not Love.  As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, "but love is blind and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit." 

It was as if Kristin and I were standing but a foot apart, staring into each others' eyes and unable to see, touch, or hear each other.  We were completely cut off from an escape, as I was convinced it was she who was not listening, that it was she who was refusing to hear my cries. Kristin, of course, was convinced that I was not shouting, that my cries were figments of imagination.  Or as Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, "For now we see through a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

Sunday, February 15, 2009 -- One day after Valentine's Day, one week before what would have been our 4th anniversary.

The pain does not subside.  The sickening rage that boils inside the pits of my stomach cripples me emotionally.  I am blind, still; unable to see, to make sense of the world around me without groping about to gain my footing, to set a bearing.  She has moved on in a sense, her grieving from the loss having begun nearly half a year ago.  I am reeling, lost inside my own head as I try to make sense and order out of that which has no logic.  I keep myself together in public, but can only last so long in social settings; it's as if I have late-onset-agoraphobia.  I retreat into solitude far more often than I have in the past, and anyone who knows my fear of being alone will tell you what a significant shift this is for me.  To go from fearing solitude to fearing company... if Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is worth her salt, then I am somewhere residing in the 4th stage of grief right now.  Lovely.  

Anyway, I need sleep, and then I'm off to my comedy-screenwriting class--a welcome escape into laughter that helps me start each week.

I promise a more uplifting and optimistic post in the near future, however these are emotions I've simply needed to purge.  Godbless.