2009 has been an awful year. With 10 days remaining, it’s a good time to reflect and make some early new year resolutions.
Things started off great for me in 2009. Things with Jenn were going very well. We celebrated our one year anniversary, and what a year it was. Work was the same as it always was – frustrating, but stable and rewarding. Sandra’s baby was healthy. Everyone was alive. Things were mostly happy.
Then I made a huge mistake, thinking it was a noble and selfless act. I thought I was sacrificing my own wants and needs for the benefit of another, putting her before myself. That was a foolish thing to believe. It was short-sighted. I broke the heart of the most important person in the world to me, and inadvertently made her believe I no longer cared for her.
That single mistake set events into motion that would wreak havoc on several lives, and it’s all my fault. I threw a giant boulder into the stream of my life, and sent the waters scattering all around it in disarray. The ripples have yet to subside.
Lacey died shortly thereafter. While there was nothing to be done about that, and she lived a very long, very happy life, it still broke the hearts of the entire family. I don’t think my mistake had anything to do with her dying. That would be silly. But at the same time, I do, because I’m not allowed to screw up, so I take on the weight of the world when I do
August was a time of loss. I began to realize exactly what I’d given up when breaking up with Jenn, and how idiotic I’d been when dealing with her moving away. I disregarded the love and emotion in the equation and approached it from a purely logical point of view, which was a mistake. The love between us was the biggest factor. But I didn’t want to make her life more difficult than it already was, since she’d just moved and was still adjusting. I lost friends. Terrible things happened, and I reacted to them extraordinarily poorly, and made the second gigantic mistake of 2009, one that will never fully go away. I was deeply, deeply depressed. I was working from home at the time, and for 2 months or so, I barely got out of bed. I lost around 30 pounds. I kept everything that was happening very close, only sharing it with a few people out of necessity. I hated myself for all of it, every single thing that had happened since June 14th.
It took time, but I dug myself out. I’ve always told people that making mistakes is natural. Everyone does it. It’s how you handle the mistake that counts. Learn from it, grow, move on. I needed to let that apply to myself. I’ll never truly forgive myself for any of it, of course, and there are plenty of people out there who won’t let me forget, but I have to learn, grow, and move on.
In October, I began doing that. And during this particular month, people began showing their true colors. Those who I thought were close to me proved they were not, and that the things I’d been sure of about our friendship weren’t true at all. More loss, more disappointment, more disillusioning. I refocused on the importance and reliability of family. I put more emphasis on relying only on myself for everything. I start becoming more independent, an actual, tried and true adult.
In November, the reality of losing Jenn hits when I find out she’s dating someone. I haven’t talked about this publicly in any explicit terms yet, mainly because the situation has been, to put things lightly, tumultuous. When I saw she’d changed her status on Facebook, my heart died. It felt like we’d only just then broken up. I still loved her, and I thought she knew that. Somewhere in my mind I was convinced she’d never stop loving me. I’d told her she should date a couple of months before this, and it took me a full two minutes to type those words to her when I did. She shouldn’t have to be alone just because we couldn’t be together. But now it was real, and I couldn’t take it.
Still, I tried to be strong, thinking breaking up with her was the right thing to do. I try to tell her that I’m happy for her and I hope she’s happy. She didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the relationship, and told me that part of her heart still belonged to me. In that, I saw an opportunity to fix things. I saw a chance to make everything right again. For the first time in my life, I felt the need to pursue something, to fight for something. All the apathy in me was washed away, and I had one purpose: win her back.
I left my house on a very cold and slightly rainy night and wandered around Virginia Beach for hours, talking to myself, exploring my mind, constructing apologies as poetically and honestly as I could. I went over every minute of our time together in my mind. I was honest with myself for the first time – wanting the best education for her was still the reason for encouraging her to go to Kansas, and not wanting to lose her forever because of the fighting and stress was still the reason for breaking up, but there was now something else: fear of living. She talked about spending the rest of our lives together, and having children, and it scared me, because I knew I wanted those things but had lost hope in ever having them. I gave up on that life a long time ago. I’d grown bitter and cynical because of the things I saw all around me. I put up a shield around those secret, abandoned dreams, saying I never wanted kids, refusing to grow close to them. I was afraid of being a bad father. Terribly, excruciatingly afraid of not being able to provide for them, or messing them up by not being absolutely perfect in every way, every second of every day. I was afraid of failing as a husband, ripping my family apart by being selfish or obtuse. I was afraid of letting myself believe I could have any of the things that I knew existed somewhere in the world, but that no one seems to ever actually have and hold on to. Everyone around me comes from divorced parents. Everyone around me has been screwed up in some way by some mistake their parents made.
When Jenn dared to dream about having those things with me, she may as well have been aiming a gun right at my heart. I knew that if I was ever going to do those things, she was the one to do them with. I just wasn’t ready to let go of that fear, and her constant demands that I do made it harder to deal with.
I’m not afraid anymore.
I wrote her long, meandering emails daily, multiple times a day, every day for three weeks. We talked on the phone, and in the beginning, it was always extremely emotional. It was torture for both of us, but the good kind of torture, the kind that comes from intense passion and fighting for something you need to go on living. I felt like shit for every tear she shed, and every restless night, but I knew it was temporary, and it would all be worth it in the end. It never crossed my mind that things might not work out like I wanted them to. I knew we belonged together. I knew she wanted me back. I never gave up hope.
At the same time, I felt like a complete asshole. I’ve never been the type to pursue unavailable women. It’s not my thing, and I know what it’s like to be on the other side of this kind of thing. I felt like a dick for pursuing her when she was in a relationship. But we were in love, and sometimes I convinced myself that he was the interloper here. That didn’t really do much to assuage my guilt, but I never lost sight of the fact that I’d driven her to him, and that she belonged with me, and I wasn’t just trying to wreck her attempts to move on… I was fixing something that should never have happened. If she’d ever said to me “I don’t want to be with you, please stop.” I would have stopped, and resigned myself to a long, long period of quiet misery.
But she never did.
She came home to Annapolis for Thanksgiving and agreed to see me. Well, I told her I was coming whether she agreed or not, and that I hoped she would spare some time for me. She did, and when I saw her I knew it was real, and that what I was doing was right. I knew it the second I looked into her eyes, and I knew she could see everything that words could not express in mine. When I touched her, even if it was just to rub my shoulder against hers in the booth at dinner, it was electric. We were all smiles that day, and I knew everything would be ok. I knew she was mine, and had never stopped being mine.
She broke up with him a couple of days after heading back to school. I went to Kansas the following weekend. He’s had a hard time accepting it, and there’s been more drama than there needed to be, considering the nature of their relationship. I feel responsible for all of it, as I should, because I caused every bit of this. I wish there was something I could do or say to make everything right. I haven’t yet found those words.
What I do know is that this probably is for the best. If we’d never broken up, I may not have realized that she’s the one. I may have carried that fear for the next three years. We may have continued fighting, and much more disastrous, irreversible things may have happened. We had to walk through this fire to get back to where we were, and to get back to our life together.
So. Here we are, coming towards the end of December, and the end of 2009. The biggest mistake of my life is 99% fixed, and my bond with her is stronger for it. The second biggest mistake of my life is being dealt with. Lacey is still gone, and several friendships are still dead in the water, but it doesn’t hurt quite so much when I go to my mom’s house anymore, and false friendships aren’t something to be missed. Truthfully, they were dead weight that needed to be shed a long time ago. And if all goes to plan, 2010 will start off the way every year hence should start: by her side, staring into those deep blue oases she keeps where her eyes rightfully should be.
That was 2009. Resolutions for 2010:
- Continue spending every spare second thinking of ways to make up for my mistakes to Jennifer Rachel Erwin, and continue spending every dime I have making her happy.
- Continue to lose weight. 217 lbs as of yesterday.
- Introduce Jenn to my grandparents. If she does make it down to Virginia Beach for New Years, I’m going to take her to their house. They need to meet the girl that owns my heart. I’ll never forgive myself if that never happens, and I’ll have wasted their love and approval and acceptance on she who will not be named.
- Learn. I’ve been stagnant for far too long. I need to learn something new, anything at all. On the agenda right now: objective-c and the iPhone SDK, c#, and the history of Judaism.
- Figure out if moving to Kansas is a good idea or not.
People who know me know that I overanalyze and overthink pretty much everything. Every sentence, every facial expression, every insignificant action. I dwell. I doubt. I worry, I hesitate, I question, I distrust. I tend to have a one track mind when it comes to people I care about. I focus on them and whatever issue they have, and I don’t let it go until I’ve resolved it for myself and for them. Knowing that, you should all know that I’ve spent every waking minute of every day for the past month and a half pondering the future, and there is no doubt, no uncertainty, no vagueness, not a single question in my head. I know what I want, and I know what she wants, and I know we will have it. It’s not going to be easy, but for the first time ever, I have a goal, and I will do anything to pursue it. 2010 will be the second beginning of that pursuit, and more than that, a personal rebirth – and I can’t wait for it to start.