#this is closure for me | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

liz-and-the-blue-bird · 2 years ago

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Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night to me

This one is quite long, as I've been writing it over the course of a couple weeks. I hope this is the last one for a while where I write about the girl, but I've been very introspective recently, so it's possible I end up writing something about that in general.

It's also a lot of disparate thoughts that all are just kinda somewhat relating to her and my experiences in the past week, so there's that too. It all relates, I promise that it does.

Here, these songs are actually relevant for today's story.

My stream discord and I did a bunch of personality tests a couple weeks ago. Stuff like Myer Briggs and Enneagram. These things are never really that accurate and very rarely actually supported by Psych experts, but it's kinda fun, don't you think?

Mine were: ENFP 2w3 or 7w8, sexual variant (I took 2 tests and they gave me different answers T.T).

Some things that seemed common between all the types I was labeled as was that they were all deeply feeling, empathetic, and basically would fall in love really friggin hard.

Yea ok that makes sense.

When the ex broke up with me 8 years ago, I was a big mess. I had to go back home for a little while and just try to recoup. I thought the break up was my fault and was just really disappointed in myself. My grades faltered, everything. My mom was worried I might do the same thing this time, but well, there’s no better way of killing attraction to someone than cheating on them.

The thing with the relationship 8 years ago is that I never really moved on. I always felt in the back of my mind, ya know, “maybe this will work when we’re both a little older!” I remember listening to songs about this and reblogging quotes about it too for maybe up to 2 years after the break up. Even her mom told me to try again in a month after I broke up with her. I guess her mom knew she was very young. And my mom also said stuff like "what if you really do end up married to her?" Moms are powerful. To my surprise, we actually got a chance to do that. But I think she didn’t really grow up, emotionally.

In our most recent relationship, she seemed even more reserved than before. And having seen how she coped, well, it kind of makes sense she cheated. It’s not ok, but it makes sense. She had become dependent on just having someone to talk to all the time, and I was just a busy guy. Again this is no excuse for her, as if it was going to be a problem, she should have brought it up clearly with me, but you know. It makes sense.

After I had broken up with her (and she cussed me out while trying to get back together with me, a very bold strategy), she tried to appeal one more time with me by writing me a "letter." I'd gotten her to start taking notes, so we both had notebooks that we'd write a message to each other with, usually long enough to take an entire page, just relaying something, usually a strong feeling, to each other. So she wrote me a 3 page letter on Monday, two and a half days after I found out, finally apologizing (yes, this was the first time she apologized for the actual allegation), trying to once again ask for me to give her another chance. She seemed confident in it too, because she had started a new notebook expecting me to make her write something to me every day or something along those lines.

I gave her a massive message on Tuesday morning (like... 20,000 characters) that just detailed my days from friday to monday (I found out on saturday into sunday), and explained why I simply would not be able to trust her again. At this point in time I felt nothing but apathy towards her. But I honestly think I may had been swayed if she tried again.

She did not. She sent a message on Thursday respecting my decision blah blah blah blah.

But that's not the point here. When I read her final letter, something inside of me clicked. I felt myself close the door on her from 8 years ago. I have no idea why I'd been holding on to that for so long, or that I even had been holding on to something, but I stopped at that moment. You know, the same way when the AC system turns off in a room you're in, and you can feel your brain breath, let go of that noise, even if you had gotten used to the buzzing.

I felt free, somehow.

But very, oh so very sad.

Wow that gif is a bit direct. Not exactly appropriate, but direct.

Another song.

What I felt strongest was the loss of a future. Since we were long distance, this break up honestly didn't change my day-to-day at all, especially since in the past month or so, she had barely responded to my messages anyway. The biggest change in my habits was I didn't have someone to message good morning and good night to. But what I lost were my daydreams, my imagined future. I lost the girl on my shoulder when we rode on a tour train in Alaska, or the hand to hold through busy Asian streets. I lost the wife I'd come home to and the promised days spent laying in bed. That's what I missed the most.

But none of that was real, so I feet like I'll be ok.

But something that was real that I ended up missing a lot is the body. The person whom I knew would be ok to hug and cuddle. I didn't realize how touch starved I was going into the relationship. Every hug with her felt like heaven and when she grabbed my arm while we were out I really felt on top of the world. I'll be missing that for a while, I think.

That first week after the break up felt apathetic to me. I felt nothing. I used this feeling to delete and defuse as much as I could. I did most of the clean up when I found out, but I still had photos saved in my phone, reference channels on my server, all that. She actually helped in this, if you read my previous post, she blocked me on Saturday. It hurt at the time but it was very helpful down the line, as I can definitely see myself just constantly referencing back to conversations between us when I felt lonely.

The week following, I started to feel impressively sad in the mornings and evenings. Moments where I couldn't reasonably have someone to talk to. I'm aggressively extroverted and talking to someone helps a lot, so it's when I can't do that that I felt truly sad. I couldn't get a good nights sleep to save my life and I had a really hard time motivating myself to go to the gym. All of that.

But I woke up on Monday Feb 27th, I was just absolutely full of rage. Just blisteringly angry at her for what she did. I had moments of frustration that punctuated the sadness before but this time I barely felt sad at all, it was just anger. The cheating made it all feel like a waste. There are parts of me that know I learned a lot from this relationship, but they are all things I feel like I never would have needed to known if she didn't do what she did. I didn't need to know I have a good framework of friends who would comfort me and didn't mind if I ranted. I didn't need to know that my mental was strong enough now to just get right back to work after this devastating ending to a relationship. I didn't need to know that I could easily adapt to not having someone to message my entire day's worth of events to.

My brain started ping ponging between parts of chat I remembered from the DMs I saw her send. Moments where the guy she was talking to told her it was weird what they were doing because she had a boyfriend. Moments she had a chance to stop doing what she was doing, because she had actually told me before that she had "basically cheated" on me. Moments she told me that were just straight up lies. She told me multiple times that she had cut the guy off. And she just kept falling back to him.

I started connecting dots past just times when she would not be talking to me much. She never really paid much attention to when we watched spyxfamily together because, I know now, she had already watched it with the other guy. There was even a moment where he said "I don't care what anyone says, this will always be our anime." The guy at one point even brought up to her that she just fell back to him whenever I was busy. Which is true, I was a busy guy and for some reason she always needed someone to be in voice call with at all times. But I had told her that I was willing to pick up at any time. Literally at any time. And she never tested it beyond the first month when she called me just one time at work.

I don't even have any screenshots on me anymore, I deleted them and yet, here I am, perfectly able to picture these messages in my mind. How frustrating.

I even had talked to the guy, and noticed some similarities. When you talk to people for a long time, you end up picking up on a few of their habits. One interesting thing is that I asked him why he would rarely do voice with her (she had mentioned this when she "broke it off with him" the first time). He said that, by typing, he would be able to think about what he was saying first. I told him, that's interesting, she told me the same thing. And he said, wait, she told me that she hated it when I said that.

Funny that, huh? I guess she just made up reasons to avoid confrontation. And she copied them from him.

Next song.

I guess I'm just going through the stages of grief. I feel like I've already done the bargaining and depressed, but they're supposed to be the next ones? Whatever at this point, we'll roll with the punches.

I've been talking to a lot of friends recently, trying to process all the emotions I'm feeling and just looking to fill the void of talking energy I had sent exclusively to the ex prior. And I've found zero people I've made friends with that were unwilling to interact with me regarding what happened. Almost everyone wanted to provide a little bit of input or at least just listen. I really am appreciative of my support structure that I worked to build up over the past couple of years. A few people I even just randomly asked for a hug even though I hadn't told them my story, they just knew I had a bad break up, and none of them rejected me.

Openness and sincerity pays back openness and sincerity.

I've started thinking over and over again about the phrases that people have been telling me. With my mind racing, I've just been trying to avoid falling into thinking about the ex. I'm trying to understand the meaning of the phrases that people tell when things like this happen. Stuff like "be kind to yourself," "those moments were real," and "you need to grieve the relationship."

I've been using them to ground myself. "Be kind to yourself" is something I'd never really considered. I don't know what being mean to myself in this circumstance even means to be honest. What would I do to myself when this kind of thing happens? Is being kind not cleaning my room because I'm tired or is it cleaning my room because future me needs the mental capacity? Am I ok to not care about my diet for a little bit? I'm still not sure how to interpret this one.

"Those moments were real" is a big one. It's actively stopping me from just angry texting her right now. I don't know why my friend told me this and when I asked him, he seemed to just think it was the right thing to say in the moment. Well I guess he was right. It's hard to imagine those moments as real but at the time, she really seemed to enjoy them. Taking that at face value makes those memories feel good and hopeful for the type of relationship I could be in in the future, rather than tainted and, to use a word that I told her after I found out, slimy.

"You need to grieve the relationship" is interesting too. I'd never seen that before in the context of a relationship. The use of the word grieve. I hadn't thought about it till recent but when you start a relationship, or at least when you get deep in one, you start to operate as one unit. You say "we" instead of "I." You think about things with the thoughts of whether your partner would care about it too. I had stopped considering getting a coupe and started considering getting a small SUV mostly because the ex wanted one. Stuff like that. So now that unit is dead. They've passed away. And I have to work through that. I have to grieve about it.

I've recently been watching my friends get married or engaged. Hell, I watched my parents walk to the car holding hands the other day. I just wanted to have that kind of stability to lean on. Now I'm annoyed it got taken away for something that didn't feel my fault.

One more song.

I had to switch phones recently and briefly. I have the new fancy Z Flip 4, the folding phone because I thought it would be cool (and it is! I will fight you!), but I dropped it and it got dent in a way that prevented it from being opened. So I went over to the Samsung store here in Houston to get it repaired. Surprisingly it was covered by the warranty, but interestingly, the only way to repair the problem was to completely change the cover, screen, everything. I noticed because the black actually doesn't match the same color black I originally got, it's shinier. I don't mind but I just realized it's kind of weirdly fitting.

You see, I got the z-flip right at the start of September. I re-met her mid September. She was one of the first friends I had showed the phone to. And now I had just changed all of the external components. This is a phone she had never touched. Poetic, I think. It's kind of a stretch but I like making these reaches. It's part of what writing symbolism is about, ya know?

All-in-all, these most recent few days, I feel like I'm "resuming" life. I feel like I am hitting "unpause" on a lot of things. I originally intended on using my free time in October to make a youtube video about My Hero Academia, and ended up just straight up not because all my free time was used on her. I'm once again planning on making some more different content than just the Genshin stuff (it'll be on a different channel, i'll link it when I actually do it. This weekend is busy). I even fell into a Kingdom Hearts lore rabbit hole the past couple days. When I checked the last time I talked to my real life old college friends about Kingdom Hearts, it was late August, early September. It feels too fitting.

Speaking of Kingdom hearts, let's talk memories. My memory is really contextual. Things don't come back to me without having something to jog my memory. But when I have that catalyst, I can remember deeply. Hyper specific details like dates of messages, fights, disagreements. She found it really annoying when she was trying to get back together with me because I brought up specifics about why I wouldn't be able to trust her.

However, without that context, a lot of things just go unremembered for me. Which is why I had become very obsessed with never losing data. I remember when we broke up the first time, I knew I needed to get rid of all the memories from my phone and devices, the screenshots and pictures, but I didn't want to delete them fully, so I put them into a USB drive, then left that at my parent's house while I went back to school. I looked for that drive briefly when we got back together, but I couldn't find it at all. Maybe it was for the best.

This search for context is why I started taking notes a couple years ago. I could remember basically anything just with a little memory jog, so I started making sure I had things that could do that. For example, my contextual memory is good enough that if someone reminds me of something, I will then be able to recall the exact person I had a chat with about that thing, then remember a specific search term to look up to find that thing. I'm very glad Discord doesn't delete logs.

Perhaps a reason for that is I have this tendency to reread a lot of chats I have with people, just for me to really internalize the information. Especially when they provide preferences. Especially when I'm dating them. She got really pissed when I produced a specific date for her preference that ended up biting her in the butt with how she responded to me. Stuff like that.

I mentioned this in a to me before, but I would reread chats to congratulate myself on managing social situations. Nowadays I'm much more confident in my social skills. I have always been extroverted, but now I'm extroverted with confidence. But I still reread chats, just because I enjoy trying to understand how the person I was talking to feels or precisely means. I feel like I use a lot of unusual words just to deliver emotions as precisely as I can. It's a part of me I am particularly happy with.

And last one.

The five songs I've put in this journal entry to are all from the same band, from the same album. This album is special for me regarding this girl. I had mentioned in my first journal entry about this break up that I didn't really associate many songs with her this go round. That's true. I didn't. But these songs are songs I associated with her 8 years ago. I had listened to the album the first time around the end of my high school, but, at the time, they were mostly just songs I sang on drives home.

When I started dating Lei 9 years ago, these were my primary driving-to-her songs. I loved the singer's voice and range, they were right in the comfortable spot for me to replicate. Interestingly, I fell out of the band until recently. I had switched my music provider from downloaded music to youtube music around 2017 I think, so I just lost a lot of songs I used to listen to. But I know I got back into the band right before remeeting her, because my youtube music likes suddenly list"If I"m gonna fall in love," the last song I just linked, to my likes right before I start adding songs she liked. So I fell into this album again just in time to fall in love with her again. There's specific memories I have regarding each song in the album.

First kiss opens with a line about how a boy is scared by the dad of his date knowing his name. I felt something similar the first time I visited her. Basically just worried that her mom would think I was weird, because we had just met briefly around a month prior and then we texted a bunch. Then suddenly this young boy would drive an hour just to see the girl, and I distinctly remember her mom saying that we wouldn't be allowed to go out yet, until she trusted me more. So we'd have dates just sitting on their couch watching anime. I loved those dates. They felt so personal.

Wherever You Go opens with "an hour away from home" which is exactly how I felt everytime starting my drive to her in Austin, the drive being almost exactly one hour. I have never really felt home ever since leaving my parents at the start of my college. I remember ending some of these to me's with "I want to go home" because, well, I just don't feel comfortable wherever I lived. But I always felt at home with her. Her hand in my hand was my home. Both when we were together 8 years ago and now until I found out. We never had to do anything fancy, I was just happy to be with her. Even when I was just watching her sleep because I would always wake up earlier than her, or when we just sat quietly in the car on a drive home from a date, or even that last night while waiting in the lobby of the ER, I still felt more at peace than almost anywhere else.

Ever Enough is how I always felt about our situation. I knew it was hard doing long distance, both now and before. But I was always willing to do my best, put in my maximum me. When we dated 8 years ago, my dad at one point scolded me for visiting too often and not focusing on schoolwork. On the contrary, this time, my dad scolded me for not being willing to sacrifice more. This scolding made me resolve to just visit her even for a few hours in the future, but I found out almost immediately after making that mental decision. This song made me wonder if what I did was enough for her. Evidently it wasn't.

There's more with the album, but I think I've made my point.

I had forgotten all those memories, only remembering them when we started dating again. Now the songs are hes again, but I'd like to reclaim them. I really like this album and the band is no longer a band. So I don't want these songs to be dedicated to her. It'll take time, but I'll work on that.

The first and last songs I've linked are special.

Somebody out there is weird for me. I never really super liked it. Like I liked all the songs on the album, it's just the perfect kind of album for my taste in music, but this was never really one of my favorites. But she actually liked it. It actually made it to her own music playlist. To her, it felt like an affirmation to all girls that they deserve love. From the comments on the video, it seems that's a common interpretation.

But to me, it always sounded like a break up song, an amicable one, but a break up song nonetheless. The singer is telling the girl, "sorry, I can't love you like you deserve." I'm not sure why I have this interpretation, I think it's just because I can't imagine a guy just saying the lyrics of the song to a girl without also being in love with her and being unable to provide for her. The affirmation meaning implies that the creator wrote this for all the female fans in the audience in a concert, which just feels weird given the rest of their songs. I'm not sure.

If I'm Gonna Fall in Love is special for me. This entire journal series was originally about getting over her and eventually became about providing myself an outlet to understand my feelings. Well that's a lie, it was actually about trying to get her to see how sadboi I was and take me back (since she made an account on tumblr from my urging and followed me) (fun fact, she's still my first follower on my poetry account which doesn't matter because she doesn't use tumblr anymore), but when I realized that wasn't going to happen it became what it is now. There were definite moments in my life in the past 8 years where I had decided love was just not worth the effort. Times where people tried to tell me suicide wasn't right because "don't you want to see the future?" And me thinking there was just nothing to look forward to. And there were turning points where I finally combined those ideas in a positive way: Love wasn't worth it, work on myself to find that reason for living, and if I fall in love, then they're gonna make me as excited as she once did. Make me willing to do hour+ long drives every few weeks just to see her beautiful face for a few hours.

That's what the song is about. I remember telling her about all these thoughts, because I was trying to recap her on my life over the past 8 years we had spent apart. Something like, "the girl that made me as excited as you, ended up being you, again!" You know, corny stuff like that. I pretty easily said that stuff. I don't really have a sense of embarrassment for my feelings. I'm proud of them.

It's probably the closest thing to a break up song I had regarding her 8 years ago. And, you know, I think I prefer it to all the negative ones. I'm angry at her, yes. I'm sad at what she did, yes. And honestly, I don't think I really care what happens to her from now on. But I feel like this relationship showed me that I'm good now. That I am such a powerful bundle of positive emotions that I can handle when I get hit with big fat negative ones. I can hunker down, work on myself for a long, long while, almost a decade, then fall deeply, madly in love, end that love horribly, and then feel confident enough to just want to do it again. I had some friends who thought this event might give me trust issues, or ruin my feelings about love, or get me suicidal again, and I must admit that all that has come to mind. But I found the positive feelings prevailed much more.

I'm gonna get better, regardless of the roundabout way it takes to get there. And better doesn't mean getting over her, it means going past where I was right before her. Resuming life and growing beyond. Finding new friends, becoming even more mentally strong, maybe actually getting a diet to stick for once, and hopefully falling in love again. It might take a while, but that's fine.

I've got a lifetime.