One minute it feels like the world is in the palm of my hand, the next I look down and see it's really just a blob of play doh...
26 January, 2003 :: 7:26 a.m.
It's funny, but as I sit around, surveying the fortress ( I can see about 80% of it from where I sit at my computer), I would almost swear that I've fallen back into a relationship. Granted, this is subject to change and I may just be flat out wrong in the first place, but a pair of Teri's shoes sit next to the door, the cell phone her friend Sarah loaned her sits charging next to my coffee pot, there is a towel hanging on the towel rack (okay, I can't see that, but I know it's there) that she used while getting ready to go out with her friend Amy last night.
A funny thing happened the other night...and I don't mean funny-ha-ha, I mean funny-I-never-in-my-lifetime-would've-expected-her-to-be-at-my-door-at-1:30-at-night...that kind of funny. Thursday night I'm talking to Pat online and Teri online...Teri and I end up in an argument, Pat asks if we can get together to discuss our combined idiocy in the department of women.
So I pick Pat up, we grab some beer and head back to the Fortress to chat, download music and contemplate why we aren't gay. I take Pat back to the dorm a little before 1 and come home to watch Libery Stands Still (a movie that wasn't great, but was interesting and thought provoking and seems never to have found its way to theaters). I pause movie to check progress of songs I'm downloading on KaZaa Lite and I hear my outside door open and a knock at the inside door...I open it and there is Teri. I'm not going into all the details of what brought her to my door other than she seems to have found out that the guy she was interested in, but not seeing yet wasn't so great afterall...
I spoke of revenge previously and if I were that type of person, this would have been the perfect chance to say, "Hey, not my problem," and shut the door on her...but of course I didn't do that because either I'm a sucka or a good person, I'm not sure which. All I know is that there she was crying and I still care about her and she said the magic words, "You were the first person I thought of to turn to..." So I let her crash and let her cry on my shoulder and as pissed off as I've been at her lately, I couldn't help but feel the need to comfort her and prove to her that when I said I wanted to be friends back when we broke up that I meant it...even if she did lie to me.
So as things stand now, there's a weird feeling that things have changed between us. She now realizes that, even though maybe I should sometimes, I don't turn my back on friends. I mean, yeah, the thought of, "she's just using you and as soon as she feels better, she's off to meet someone new and lie to you about things all over again," has crossed my mind. I don't care that she met someone new--I care that she broke our agreement; that she lied to me even after I looked her right in the eye and told her to be truthful; that she could only finally be honest with me through e-mail. That is what pissed me off. That and suddenly as soon as she was interested in someone new, she started avoiding me and blowing me off. I mean, I know that goes with the territory of getting into a new relatiosnhip...you spend most of your free time with that new, exciting person...but it ties into the fact that she wasn't telling me that was the reason she was blowing me off even when I asked her.
But she seems to really get it, really understand that all this time, when she bitched about this and that and called me names and all of that, that she was just hiding from herself the fact that she had met a good guy who didn't lie to her, treated her well, tried to make things work...she hid it because of my big sin--I stood up for myself and didn't let her call all the shots. She's used to easy going guys who let her run the show. I can be easy going, but not when it feels like I'm being taken for granted. She seems to finally be seeing me.
The thing is she is also hinting and acting like maybe she wants to try the whole relationship thing again, and while I like how we're getting along, while I've always liked how things feel between us when they are good, I don't know if I want to give it another try. Part of me is curious to see if things could be different, to see if her eyes are really open now--and part of me says don't give her more than friendship because you've given it enough shots with her already and your lives are going different places, things can't work without one of you making sacrifices or changing paths completely. And I don't want to be the one to make changes. I like living on my own, I like being back in school and being free to be infatuated with the video store girl and with Lacey at work (that's a whole entry in itself...because my latent crush on Lacey has become a full-blown crush on Lacey). If I'm right, if Teri wants a relationship again now that she sees who I really am, then why is it that lately, once I've decided that a girl is totally not the right person for me, that I need to find someone who I'm a better fit with, does the girl then decide that she really does love me and want to be with me? Why is it that after I had time to clear my head and decide that Char was the one, does she turn her back on me?...why do I decide that Emily isn't the one only to have her try like hell to get me back?...why now that I've decided that being single and crushing on girls, but not actually being in relationship feels right for the time being, does Teri suddenly decide that I was the right guy after all?
I guess when Teri comes over today I need to ask her just what exactly is happening and what she wants and then try to figure out from there what I want...