Beyond time and space.

On March 28, 2006 at 8:23 p.m., I wrote the following in my journal: "After a year, this mess is over. Now I have a life to get to."

Every now and then, when I'm least expecting it, that feeling comes back and I want him gone and out of my life forever. He'll do something that's completely within his discretion to do (I, after all, am not his significant other), and it will piss me off to no end. And then I start wondering where I'd be if I hadn't driven out to meet him on March 11, 2005. What would my life be like? Would I still be in Connecticut? I have a group of friends that I met because of him. As wonderful as they are, would I be better of if we'd all never met? I think about what to do. I could delete him from my life, but in doing so, I would be losing so many other wonderful people. I would lose those people in my life who make me think, who make me laugh, who accept me despite of my numerous faults, and those I find myself confiding in more and more often.

I think about all these things, and then I remember what I wrote on April 7, 2006 at 5:56 a.m. on a morning I couldn't sleep:

A decade ago, Jane used to tell me that ours was the type of friendship that transcended time and space. That it didn’t matter where or when we met again, but that when we did, we would slide right back into our friendship as if not a minute had passed. I wanted to believe that the beauty of that sort of friendship actually existed, though deep down, I’m never quite sure that I actually believed her. I even think she knew the last time we saw each other that it was the end. I hadn’t really seen or talked to her in a year. Something, some intangible feeling was missing. I came to her house wearing green pants and a baby blue t-shirt, both from Abercrombie – a traitorous act in and of itself – and didn’t stay long. When she called me later that summer, I made up some excuse not to see her. I was tired. I didn’t feel like driving. And she couldn’t get through to my place because of the tournament. That was in May. I stayed in town until August of that summer – 1998 – but didn’t see her again.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe I was tired. Or maybe I felt like moving on and leaving her and everything she represented to me behind. Maybe I thought we had nothing left to learn together and no way to help each other grow. I remember thinking how she was only content when she was unhappy and that I couldn’t live with that anchor. Maybe, though, she really wasn’t that unhappy, and I just mistook insight for discontent. But this is all just mere speculation and surmise. Truth is, I have no clue why I did what I did.

Regardless of the reason why, my doing what I did left a big, gaping hole in my life. I was just too foolish to realize it then.

Then, at the worst time possible, I met him. But even amidst all the whirlwind drinking and sweet smelling smoke and relationship disaster and muddled confusion – even with all that going on, he managed to remind me of a part of myself that I had lost. A soul? A feeling completely impossible to describe? Or maybe just the friendship of someone who cared to such a degree that speaking about it makes it seem trivial. Again, questions without answers. I just don’t know. I just want that friendship back, and worry that I may be completely silly to think I’ve found it again in someone else. It was so simple, so unmarred by cynicism (not that we were free of such, but the relationship itself was), and so unconfused by sex and bullshit. I’m well aware that the latter was never true of him and me. But when you break it down to its essence, its very core, maybe he was right, and that was the sort of friendship we were supposed to have: As Jane said, the type of friendship that transcends time and space. The type where it doesn’t matter where or when we met again, but that when we do, we will slide right back into our friendship as if not a minute had passed.

Maybe it is out there. And maybe I better realize it before it’s too late.