When is goodbye really goodbye?

When you are a part of something, whether it be a church group or just a few buddies that hang with you by the river every weekend, it eventually becomes a part of you. Sometimes these consistencies, especially when they are people, can change you and your perspective of the world and the people around you. That is what makes goodbye's so hard. Every time I had to leave Michael I felt like I had to adjust to a life that didn't belong to me, and when I would see him again, my life would continue as if I had come home from a lengthy trip away from myself.

I didn't realize that the lounge was the one place that I could return to myself and have a break from the loneliness. The people there are like my family. I always avoided thinking about the moment when I would have to put in for my two weeks. It's been two years now, two years of people willing to do everything in their power to be there for me, a concept I wasn't used to until my first day at The Strat. Not many people work in an environment like that. I was and am very fortunate.

I had this same issue when I graduated from school and moved away from my friends in Varsity Choir. We were so tight knit that I literally had to cut some ties so that it wouldn't hurt so much. Everyone back in San Antonio still had one another; they still hung out, goofed off, even recalled music that we sang years before and sang their hearts out together. I wasn't a part of that. I am not a part of that. I had and have university, a new life to embrace, one that I would have preferred to include my old friends and the laughter.

But this seems harder. We are all adults-- not children-- so to pick up and move or start a family or whatever it is that adults do, we can do it. All of us. And that is going to keep us apart. Some of my best friends, coworkers here at the lounge, are graduating. Some are staying though, so I'll still have people to come back to. But the unit, this family, is going to branch out, and eventually those connections will fade and be replaced with new connections, new people.

Then again, it is in my power to keep these connections alive. If I can make a long distance relationship work with Michael, I can accomplish the same task with my friends. There are so many mediums that can keep these ties double-knotted. I suppose I just fear change, when the consistencies are no longer consistent. I have always had anxieties about new environments, experiencing things that I am not used to.

Maybe this isn't goodbye. Maybe these relationships I've built will keep the anxieties away.

Maybe it took me writing this to realize that.

Tonight is my second to last night working here. I am going to try and take in every detail, embrace every encounter, and smile as hard as I can. I want to remember tonight. I want to make it worth remembering.

Michael and I: Part Two

http://imagequotes.tumblr.com/post/1703698551/via

Haven't read Part One? Click here.

When Michael found someone else, someone who wasn't me, I felt like I had let a fantasy swallow me whole and devour me until there was nothing left but this lingering, unrealistic hope that he still wanted me. My feelings for him thrived on that hope and the power it had over me remained, no matter how hard I tried to expel it, through relationships that followed soon after. That hope destroyed any chance I had at nurturing the potential each of these relationships offered. When I dated, I was distracted by the fear of getting too involved because it would ultimately leave me unavailable for Michael. What if he came to me? What if he changed his mind? Then what would be the point of surrendering to feelings I had for other people? If I surrendered, the feelings could develop... and if they developed, I would move on.

The prospect of abandoning my feelings for Mike scared me. The prospect of being happy without him scared me even more, because if I did those things, would I ever be truly happy with the question of "what if" hanging in the air, haunting me for the rest of my life?

I was torn between wanting to run away from those feelings and wanting to embrace them. It was damaging yet exhilarating because he was having the same issues, the same fears. If it wasn't apparent that we were both struggling, I don't think I would have held on as long as I did. His discomfort with me being with someone else spoke for him.

We also tried to be friends. But I couldn't stand to have him talk about Jill, which was unavoidable. It broke my heart, and yet because I wanted him to remain a constant in my life, however painful, I listened. I listened and I encouraged. I even made up a story about a bullshit dream I had that helped me realize that what I wanted was unrealistic and it had helped me to move on, just so he wouldn't feel guilty for talking to me.

Michael: You know how you said that dream helped you let go? (And it better have, or I'll whoop your ass for saying it did), well... I hope you dreamed it for both of us. Because I've been trying to move on. I'll admit that Jill's made that less than difficult, too. Trying. She...told me she loves me. She's never said it before.

J-Roll:  Does it scare you?

Michael: the phrase? I told her I loved her a long time ago.

J-Roll:  Well, you're happy. I could never attempt to ruin that for you. I won't be selfish, though I want to be. (You can whoop my ass now.) A girl like me can't get over an amazing guy in one night.

Michael:  I'm sorry. Is there any way I can help? Aside from cutting all ties here and moving to San Antonio?

J-Roll:  Y'love Jill. You should be able to talk about her.

Michael:  Well. What else is there to say? I do. I love her. So much more than I realize sometimes. I don't know how I manage to forget, though. Just looking at her makes my heart swell. And ache.

I don't remember sleeping very well that night. What I do remember is me staring at acceptance letters I had received in the mail for hours upon hours, trying to determine my next step. There, on my pillow, sat a letter from NYU and another from Texas State University, both symbolizing two milestones in my life, each with the potential to lead me in very different directions. I had wanted to go to Texas State University since I had taken a tour of the campus when I was thirteen. But going to NYU would mean that I would no longer be out of reach and faceless to Michael, that I would be an option in his life.

When I chose to attend NYU, I waited for Michael to get online the next day so I could tell him, despite my current relationship with Clause (but the guy thought his reflection more important than me, so it was easy for my feelings for Michael to derail that train).

But Michael didn't get online. I had gotten used to his frequent absences (he had a life, school, and love) and I knew I just needed to be patient. But the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months. By the time he got online again, he lingered for a little under than ten minutes, then logged off. Ten minutes was not enough time to explain that I wanted to give my future to him. So I asked the standard questions. You know.

"How are you?"

"What have you been up to?"

"How is Jill?"

I couldn't wait anymore. Michael was doing his part in forgetting me by staying away from his computer and I was going to do the same for the sake of my heart and for my fucking sanity. So I asked for a check and sent the tuition to the school furthest from the man who broke me. I was going to attend Texas State. I was going to move on, even if it meant blindly diving into another relationship headfirst without a second thought. 

That was how I met Norman.

To be continued.

Michael and I: Part One

Since the day that I was able to construct sentences correctly, I considered myself a natural storyteller. It took me a few years afterward to discover more about the stories that I wanted to tell with my first book attempts. But it wasn't until high school where the perfect story fell into my lap, one I experienced firsthand- one so worthy, that I spent years just trying to make sense of it and did not even attempt to put it on paper until I felt that my abilities as a writer were far enough along to really be able to communicate its complexities and the story itself in the manner that it deserved.

As you all well know (at least I think you do), I have been dating my boyfriend Michael for almost a year now, but what your perspective of the relationship lacks keeps you from knowing the real truth about what life was like for the two of us just a few years before we had met face to face last June, 2010.

I would first like to say that when I was introduced to the internet, I didn't make a conscious decision to spend the majority of my time and future love life on it. At first I found it to be really intimidating and my agoraphobia kicked in during my first experience in a chat room, but my anxieties slowly subsided as I dealt with anxieties on a more social level. At school, I was the ugly, nerdy girl who had the potential to be pretty. I had cut outs of my favorite anime characters in my binders and was often referred to as "fatty" in the hallways of my middle school. Instead of watching MTV, I watched Dragonball Z. You could say that I set myself up for an antisocial lifestyle that consisted of me on the computer until the late hours of the night, every night. People understood me there. If I ran across someone that I didn't like, I could simply leave the chat or delete their username from my friends list. Life was as simple as a mouse click.

In high school, I started getting attention from the boys and became more involved in extra curricular activities, but the core of me was the same nerdy girl who was terrified of reality. My habit of living online remained consistent throughout the entirety of my time as a student, even now. I wasn't particularly fond of any of the boys at school because they all seemed to be focused more on my maturing body, rather than what it was that I had to say. Online, the interactions were anything but physical, and I liked it that way. I even became involved in a long distance relationship rooted online which lasted longer than any of the relationships I had witnessed at school. 

Douglas was kind and endearing, but fragile and often jealous of my life offline, so to speak. It was my first encounter with what I thought to be love. We had a lot in common. We were together for about a year, and throughout that year we collided with some problems often associated with long distance, but we were young and not prepared for the sacrifices. I say collided because neither of us really managed to overcome them gracefully, as in we fell on our asses and have the scarring to prove it. My feelings for Doug began to drift, and I began to distance myself from a relationship that was dominated by well, y'know.

Then Michael joined the chat, and suddenly the internet did not seem so simplistic.

He did not make it any easier for me to continue to try to make the relationship work. Actually, he unintentionally made the relationship seem like a lost cause. Out of nowhere he came, hurdling into my life like a human life preserver. At first our friendship was innocent, but the further away from Doug I drifted, the closer to Mike I became. He nurtured the side of me that was dormant, a side of me that was happier and content with who I was. I had never encountered such an extraordinary human being in my life. He was the breath that I had been deprived of through years of suffocating verbal and physical abuse from the opposite sex.


Michael: If I could reach through the screen, I would.
Jessica:  What would you do?
Michael: Hold your hand.



We talked every night religiously. I would rush home to this faceless man who made my insides twist and turn and my heart nearly work itself to death. Eventually I found that I was more than willing to give myself to Michael, and that startled me, but for once I really embraced it without a second thought. Once my relationship with Doug had dissolved, I turned to Mike and discovered that he was having a little more trouble coming to terms with his feelings.

Michael: Had to harden to survive.

Michael: Roses grow thorns, kittens learn to bite.

Jessica:  Yeah, I guess you’re right.

Jessica:  It sucks though

Michael:  One of those crappy facts of life.

Jessica:  Why do you think I am online all of the time?

Jessica:  To run away from real life and live in a fantasy for a while.

Michael: I need to start facing reality.


Michael was at war with himself. He could not make sense of how he felt about me, us. Could there even be an us? How could we make something so unrealistic a reality? I was a Texan girl, born and raised, still in high school, and he was a New Yorker who commuted to college everyday. The man was torn between wanting to love this imaginary girl and wanting to play it safe. And he did. Soon after, he met someone, and I was left staring at his offline status, wondering what the hell happened. I did not want to accept that his finding someone in New York was inevitable. He was amazing. If I could see it through a chat window, the entire state of New York surely must have seen it.

Jill must have seen it, and she had something that I didn't.

Michael is offline.
[ Last conversation: 20 days, 11 hours, 15 minutes ago]

...She had a hand to hold.

To be continued.

Doesn't Spring Break imply, well, I don't know... a break?

I am going to keep this post vague because I have little to no interest in going into detail about my terribly disappointing Spring Break. Basically, this week has been the shits. Instead of trying to salvage what little time I have left of it, I am trying not to allow myself to fall apart.

One of my best friends is leaving to Michigan in order to jump start her life. The family dog is seriously ill and in response to that my Dad fell apart. Michael is so busy with school we can only manage a real conversation twice a week if we are lucky. My job's pay is less than decent but I love the people there too much to find something closer to home that pays more.

But I shouldn't elaborate. I know you just got back from Cancun or the Bahamas or some other tropical destination with sand in your crack, liquor on your breath, a sweet tan, a rockin' bod and a sweet story to share and really aren't interested in a sob story that will ruin your glow.

I am not bitter at all.

Then again...

All it takes is a Skype conversation and all the bad goes away. You can keep your Spring Break memories. I've got this guy.

"If you could only see"

For all of the misunderstood lovers.

Happy Valentine's Day my lovelies.

Love overload. And viruses too.

Then... At midnight...

...my heart exploded. And so did Michael's news feed. And everyone else's.

Then!

And Michael, being Michael, decided that in retaliation to overdosing on love songs, he'd spam me right back.

And so he did. Then something unexpected happened.

So I clicked it, expecting something romantic on the other side of the link.

Thanks for the virus baby. Happy Valentine's Day.

Day One: Me & Michael

Firstly, in reference to the BIG FAT LIE on my previous post, I am sorry that I did not start the challenge yesterday as promised. I passed out while watching Red Forman hate on Eric. What's new?

So here we go.

Day One of Super Awesome Challenge:
"Describe your current relationship. If single, describe how single life is."

As most of my avid readers know already, I am in a relationship with a Coastie who is currently studying in Petaluma, CA to become an EMT. What all of you do not know is how our relationship came to be. The story is messy, chaotic, and as some say, "could totally be a romance novel." I agree with all of these descriptions. But it is easier to round the five years we spent as friends online into a few words. The difficult part is really spelling it out for people who do not understand the dynamics of meeting people virtually. It is scary as Hell and can really warp your sense of who is person is and who you fantasize them to be.

The difference is that when I met Michael online, he was everything I had already fantasized the man of my dreams to be: intelligent, relaxed, understanding, mysterious, charming, and compassionate. I say mysterious because I don't want him to give everything away on day one, but meeting someone online? Well, it comes with the territory. Then again, how can you truly know someone online? Well, at first, I really didn't. But the more we talked the more we opened up to one another. God, did I fall hard.

But what can I say? He lived in New York and I was a Texan girl still working on graduating high school.

We both found relationships elsewhere, but remained good friends... with a lot of tension remaining between us. I won't discuss the nature of the tension, but let's just say that eventually, it made being in a relationship with someone else very difficult for the both of us. (Not THAT kind of tension, perverts.)

It was a rotten situation for all sides and it was unfair for my boyfriend at the time, but the realization that I deserved better was gifted to me by his actions, not my own. It is hard to stay true to oneself while staying true to another, but I managed to do so successfully until the relationship that I was involved in collapsed in on itself years later. It was then, though I was devastated, that I found it easier to decider the code in my head that disguised what (or in this case, WHO) I was really made for and who was made for me.

Last March we both found ourselves available, and it was then, after all of the waiting, that he decided that enough was enough. During all of the years we spent apart, Michael enlisted in the Coast Guard and was sent to Homer, Alaska for a two year period of buoy tending. And let me tell you, it's not an easy job guys. But he still made time for me, a whole week of leave to be exact. He bought me a plane ticket to fly up there so we could finally know. There was doubt, this fear that maybe we were fooling ourselves. But I was most vulnerable to the even scarier thought of never knowing. I was also still in pieces from the previous and fresh break up.

The moment I saw him was like the moment on the ice in the movie Serendipity. Oh yeah. I found my soul mate kids. What makes me giddy is knowing that this is just the beginning.

"Epic fail"

The other night, because I am a super awesome girlfriend, I made cookies and peppermint bark for Michael to add to the package of Christmas presents I planned to send to him in Petaluma. I sneaked a bite of each to make sure they were boyfriend quality... and also because I have a problem not consuming baked goods when they are placed in front of me. That's one reason why I consider the holidays the scariest and most regretful time of each and every year.

I went to the post office to send the package Mike's way and discovered that it would be cheaper to divide my rather large box into two smaller boxes. (That makes little sense to me, but hey person behind the counter, you're the boss!) So because I am frugal, I took the box to the side of the counter and began distributing Christmas presents, cookies, peppermint bark, and pieces of the disassembled steamer that I got him and folded the boxes up.

"Tada!" I said victoriously.

"Oh, you're not supposed to fold them on the bottom like that."

I looked at the boxes in shame, the glory of my speedy transferal ruined. I think I even pouted.

"Look, it's okay! I'll just..."

The man opened up the bottom of the box cautiously, taped it up, and began typing something on the computer. The other box was in my line of sight and a line was beginning to develop behind me. So I, trying to be time efficient, decided that I should work on fixing the other box while the man did his thing. Only when I opened the bottom of the box, parts of the steamer and cookies flew out onto the counter. Yeah. There were so many mental groans occurring behind me they were almost audible. I stared at the box in the same manner of defeat as before. When the man turned around he actually face palmed, and I followed suit. I reached forward to fix the mess that I had caused, but I was stopped when spotting the man's hand in the air. "No, no please. Let me."

"Thank you," I squeaked. I left with my head ducked down in embarrassment, though I usually laugh when I'm nervous. But I could have sworn, though it may have been my subconscious, someone whispered "epic fail" just before I left the post office.

Yeah. I got in my car real fast.

I'll Be Home For Christmas: The Darker Side of the Tree

If you have been following my posts chronologically for the past few months, especially during the month of October when I was preparing to fly to Alaska, you'd be caught up on how difficult it was to communicate to my family that I was ready to start my life with Michael. I'm not a Mother, I've never been a parent or a figure of the sort, so I acknowledge the fact that I won't understand their discomfort with the idea until later on when I do decide to have children.

But when you are ready to break away from an adolescent lifestyle and actually make some big decisions about your future with someone you love, it's very hard to give the people who disagree with the changes the time of day. However, on this trip I have discovered that there will always be opinions that you may not agree with, but they still deserve a listening ear.

I have enough respect for the situation to not share all of the details with my readers, which I am sorry about, because there is a lot that I want to say that I really just can't. I will tell you that my trip to New York was unexpectedly cut short due to some family conflicts caused by a variety of miscommunications, but there is nothing I can really do about it now. I am back in Texas, doing my best to cope with what has happened, while Mike remains in New York with his family during the holidays. The worst part, other than the fear of his family disliking me, is the forced separation. I have never felt so much resistance within me when standing in line for security at the airport. When I passed the threshold, and Mike watched me walking away from a distance, I could feel an absence within me. Something left me when I let go of his hand. More left me when I saw his face. I don't know what I took home with me, but I'm convinced that it's not much.

Luckily there were some friendly faces awaiting me when I got home. I have great friends. It was also nice to see my Mom, who insisted that I share a bed with her because Dad is out of town and she missed me.

I have updated you the best I can without overstepping my boundaries, so I guess this serves as a warning that I might not be as peppy as I usually am. I think my blog and my readers will help me heal. Hopefully that happens before Christmas.

Just Got Off of Work and I'm Ranting Again

It is sad to me that I haven't written a blog in a while, though I'm not surprised; my inspiration is out of reach for the time being. My current yet extremely temporary muse is this overwhelming feeling that has a grip on me. It's an idea that makes me feel anxious and out of control. My current status on Facebook is this:

As a child you are encouraged to pursue your dreams wholeheartedly. When you mature and begin to make sacrifices to pursue said dreams, you are viewed as unrealistic.

If life were to achieve perfection, it would be this: I would drop everything that I am doing (my job and my school) and I would go to be with Michael. When I was in Alaska I got a taste of what it would be like to have him coming home to me everyday. I for once felt content. Then I left. 

I've reached a stalemate in my life, some sort of obstacle I can't find a way around. I know what I want, I just can't have it right now. But I want it now. Even worse, I thought that writing this book would help me cope, but I can't finish it with him gone. It is about him after all.