If you really want to know...

*Don't read this if you don't want to know how I really feel. But there it is. I hope he's happy.

Dear A,

Hanging up on you was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I get queasy just thinking about it, but you left me no choice.

I still don't understand what happened.

You know you could have salvaged a friendship. I still don't know why you didn't talk to me the moment you started to feel differently. That was completely unfair. Instead, I got to feel like crap for a month only to have you come out and refuse to talk to me that night. You refused even though I said I wouldn't be able to enjoy the evening knowing we had something to discuss. Then I slept in the same bed as you, just thinking of the fight we were going to have. I thought it would be a fight, maybe not a pretty one, but I had confidence we could work it out. However, the way you acted made me think it was worse. Boy was I right.You should not have come out here. Why play a good guy when you're not behaving like one?

It's not fair that you invaded my space to tell me you wanted to break up. Now I'm stuck living in the same space where you smashed my world. It sickens me to sit in the same spot. I've had to get rid of half the room to make it feel different, but I know it's not. Then you left me to go have lunch with your friend, which you had said you wouldn't do. You got to escape and leave me alone to try to figure out what happened.

First you told me that you thought you were better off alone, followed by saying I never seemed happy. I don't know where you got that idea. I'm a generally happy person. I love living here, I have great friends, and I'm busy figuring out what I want to do with my life. The thing is, I always wanted to share my happiness with you. You're the person I wanted to tell when something good happened, and you were the person I talked to when I felt angry or down or frustrated. And even though I love it here, I wanted to be with you, so I was willing to go where you needed to be. That wouldn't have been a sacrifice at all. Now I feel like I should have moved with you to Atlanta because then maybe you'd have remembered that you liked having me around.

Then you said you thought you needed time to be alone and that you wanted to move by yourself after you graduate. I wondered if you'd need to do that. I needed to do that, and when I asked you, you said no and that it didn't make a difference to you. And I believed it. Then you said you'd go on break, but you didn't plan to change anything, did you? You said as friends you'd probably call more and visit and not feel guilty so much when you talked to me. That was completely unfair. Any guilt you had you built up on your own. Instead of trying to work it out, you just let guilt pile up and maybe you began to resent me. I guess I'll never know. You said you weren't ready for the "next step" or marriage or anything like that and that you didn't believe in marriage. I never asked you for that. It was you who told me that you wanted to get engaged after you were done with school. That was when you were happy, but I believed you and I had no reason to think otherwise since you never told me otherwise. You also said you thought we were meant to be together and that you believed in fate. I don't believe in fate, but I liked that you felt that way about me. But fate is just an excuse. When things don't work out, you can blame it on "it wasn't meant to be."

You told me you refuse to end up like your dad, and I admired that. You said you wanted to have a good life and get married and have kids so you could be a good father to them. Now you've completely reversed what you wanted, and now you will be just like him. You make poor decisions based on being in one of your "funks" and hurt those who supported you in your highs and lows. How is pushing away someone who genuinely cares for your goals and interests good?

I put more trust in you than I ever have in anyone, ever. Every time you didn't visit or didn't call and talk to me, I trusted that you were busy with school. I understood that you didn't like the phone, and I didn't need to talk to you every day. It took me ten months to get you to call me once a week, and I was so happy that you had listened and made an effort to make me feel like I existed in your sphere. How am I going to ever trust someone again now? Now that the one person I trusted 100% has given up on me, what am I supposed to do with that? I feel like you've used your unhappiness against me. I thought I was something good in your life, but it turns out I was the expendable thing. And since you didn't have the courtesy to talk to me and tell me how you were feeling the moment things changed for you, you ruined our friendship too. I lost my best friend, my boyfriend, and someone I had considered to be family, someone I would have done absolutely anything for within a few minutes. How do you think I feel knowing that you would rather have me not in your life at all than have me as your girlfriend, partner, friend, family, etc? I'll tell you: I feel worthless. I feel expendable and used. I feel like a complete idiot. Here I was believing in what you said, even when your actions said otherwise. Everything I thought was true, based on what you said to me over the past two years, is not so. And I built up my faith in you based on what you said, and since you never told me anything else, I trusted that you still had the same thoughts.

The worst part is that I really liked who I was when I moved here and who I was with you. And now I'm not that person anymore. I'm more of a shell of that person and it's scary to think that I'll never be that person again, and I'm not sure I want to be because that person got her heart broken. I'm not better for this in any way. I'm not happier, or freer, or more tenacious, or stronger, or anything really. Just overwhelmingly sad.

And I like being alone. I understand the need and enjoyment of that. But you were the only person that I found I'd rather share space with than be alone. It sucks to be alone when you know there's someone out there you'd rather be not alone with. 

I sent you this box of things that remind me of you. I didn't have the heart to throw them out, but I can't bear having them near me. I hope you don't throw it all out. Anything I couldn't ship, I had to get rid of. I kept a few small things with the hope of one day being able to look at them and not be sad, but I really don't know if that will ever happen. I've kept that heart necklace you gave me, the one you thought I didn't like. It's not my style, but every time I wore it, I thought of you, and that made me love it. I wore it for months at a time.

I don't even know the truth. You told me so many different things and finally told me you didn't think you loved me anymore, but I don't know if you said that because you knew it would make me give up or if you said it because that's what you felt all along. I don't know anything, so I get to deal with this having no idea what you really think.

If you want to someday be friends, it will have to come from your end. I had to delete you from my email, phone, and facebook to keep myself from calling or writing to you or checking up on you. Like I told you, I know that you will one day figure yourself out and realize that you are not a miserable person and you will be the guy I know you are for someone else. I can't be the one asking you for friendship because I've already begged you enough and it's not fair for me to always hope that you will change your mind. I hope you do reach out and try to be friends with me, but I have the feeling you won't, which makes me feel even worse.

I wish I'd never met you, or at least that we'd only become friends. I think we could have been lifelong friends. You should never have trusted that your "high" in Boulder was going to stick or that another "low" wouldn't change everything you did and said. You knew how you were and still pursued me. Was it worth it? Nothing is worth the way I've felt for the past month. I don't want to be me anymore or have anything to do with the life I've created here. I can't even visit my family and friends in GA for a reprieve because I know you're nearby. It's not fair that you don't have to see me right now or hear anything about how I'm a complete mess. I don't sleep, I don't eat much, and I can't even enjoy my alone time because all I do is think about this. I am completely lost.

None of this has to do with me needing you. I never needed you. I was never dependent on you, but I could depend on you. I chose you. The fact is, I wanted you in my life.  I wanted to be there for you and have you be there for me. I wanted to give you space when you needed it and support when you needed it. I just wanted you. And now you don't want me, and I still don't understand why. I am sick just thinking of you waking up one morning and deciding you're better off alone. How can you be better off alone than with me?

One day I will hopefully be able to think about this and not get upset, but I think instead I will be trying to block it out because it will always make me sad. It will always hurt. Maybe I'll end up with someone else, but I'll always think that I'd rather it be you.

Every time someone asks about you I have to say it again. That YOU broke up with ME. That I had no say in the matter. That I don't even really know the truth because you kept changing your story. After over two years, you owed me an effort to try to work things out. At the very least you owed me the full truth. You barely said anything. You just let it happen and didn't blink an eye. And no one on your end will give you crap because you don't let anybody in. So soon I'll be a just that girl you dated for a bit, if that even. Whereas to me, you'll always be the one who made me feel worse than I ever thought imaginable. Yet, I still love you. And I miss you. I miss talking to you, watching movies with you, making fun of things with you,hugging you, cooking for you, telling you the good things that have happened and ideas I have, and everything...

Now I'm just a wreck. Not because I don't have you. Because you hurt me in the worst way possible, and I will never know what went through your head. I don't want any part of the last three years of my life now. All of it makes me sick to think about. It's all ruined. I am ruined. I hope it's not permanent, but even so, I know it will last a lifetime.

-E

Testing...1...2...3

I've been working on a short story that I've grown rather fond of, but even though I feel like there should be more (or perhaps less), I'm not sure what to do with it now. It's very internal, progressional, and a true representative of how I think. So I'm going to do something I've never done before and share it online for all to see (eek!). Please feel free to comment via the comments section or through my email. At least on here it can be illustrated. Also, there are a few footnotes that go with it...but I couldn't figure out how to do footnote in the blog yet...so we'll look at it without.

Also, I'm doing this in an effort to keep blogging, but I have little of interest to say these days. Just fighting to not be so sad.

Black and Blue

Emily slides her bag off her shoulder and hears the snores creep through the uninsulated wall. She follows the rhythm of quick inhalation, pause, two, three, four, and whistling air escaping. She imagines the air trapped in the man’s fat nostrils. He must be fat to breathe like that. Emily muses how completely unabashed one is in sleep. Making such raspy noises with no worries wafting in and out with each breath. Oblivious to the quivering walls and wide-awake neighbors. Sleep brings truth, she thinks. And perhaps the man is actually conceited, but Emily hears him, sometimes, moving about, trying to make as little noise as possible. This can’t be easy considering his size. Emily saw him most recently a month ago(?), looking uncomfortably snug in the back of a taxi. He had seen her too, she knew, because he threw his gaze to the another window when she looked his way.

Emily brews her tea and curls up with her knitting needles armed. She works on a pair of socks in burgundy. The TV next door blares. The fat man is awake and watching another game show. He always turns up the volume when he wakes up. At night he watches game shows, in the morning, cartoons. He watches movies on weekends, sometimes keeping the same one running back to back. Emily isn’t sure what he watches during the day, but thinks he’d switch to sitcoms. She never hears the news or talk shows through the walls. The man does not track the outside world.

Her hands stop purling when she hears a loud cough from upstairs. The woman upstairs, Emily knows, stays in bed most days sick with some incurable disease. Emily only sees nurses ever going up there, never the woman coming down. Emily imagines she is thin and covered in translucent skin. Late at night, she hears the woman’s moans, and Emily’s not sure if the woman moans in her sleep or moans because she can’t sleep. The socks are for her. Emily plans to leave them outside her door. One of the nurses will take them in. A woman in that condition does not want young, pretty visitors.

When Emily turns the heel, she tucks her work into her bag and heads to bed. She pauses in the kitchen, listening. Silence above, TV next door. She tilts her head towards the floor and listens for Aaron making movement. Aaron lives below her and spends more time awake at night than asleep. She hears the faint electronic gunfire from Aaron’s wartime video games. Instead of following her drowsiness to bed, she wanders downstairs to visit him. She doesn’t bother to knock since he won’t hear her. He never locks his door claiming he has nothing worth anything to anyone.

Aaron sits in the corner of the room, splayed out and almost horizontal in his chair. His eyes glow in the bobbling light from the TV. He squints at Emily, but his fingers keep darting around his video game controller. Who’s winning, Emily asks. The terrorists. Us, Aaron says. Want to play? Emily declines and watches Aaron shoot civilians to gain life points. Are you hungry, Emily wants to know. Aaron forgets to eat. She believes he subsists on soda and pizza from a shop two blocks away. They are open until 2 a.m. She remembers two times she saw Aaron shuffle out of the apartment complex and up the street. He walked with short, slow steps; hood up and hands in pockets. She doubts he does this more than once a week. So once a week she brings him part of her dinner. She’d bring more if it ever got eaten.

She spends several hours sitting with Aaron, making one-sided conversation. He doesn’t seem to mind.

*

Emily doesn’t own a TV, so sometimes she sits close to the fat man’s wall and plays game shows alongside him. Unbeknownst to the fat man, Emily pulls her ottoman close to their shared wall and whispers answers into the wood. She won’t say them too loud, lest the man hear her and think she’s trying to outsmart him. Emily thinks a man his size might feel his mind is muddled and slow to match his body, even if it isn’t true. Perhaps it’s fear that keeps him so large. Fear freezing him in his chair. Emily would be scared to face daily activities dragging a dozen extra Emilys around with her.

She hears the night nurse and the afternoon nurse laugh with each other as they switch shifts. They are just outside, breathing the fresh air of the evening. Emily hopes the woman upstairs does not hear their laughter. She thinks a sickly woman like that, one who can’t (or perhaps won’t) come outside, might loathe hearing others enjoy their lives. If I were dying, I’d want to live it, she thinks. Not wait it out, locked away. Emily thinks fear keeps the woman in bed. Fear of enjoying life and hating to leave it. 

Aaron is not home when Emily walks in later that week. She picks up the dented pizza boxes and soda bottles and leaves Aaron a plate of spaghetti and garlic bread on his recliner.

*

She sees a doctor conversing with the evening nurse when she arrives home. Emily assumes the older woman is a doctor by her bag and matter-of-fact tone that trickles down to Emily’s ears. Never the same doctor twice, of the half dozen Emily has heard speaking to nurses in the hallway. This doctor glances at Emily in the parking lot and says nothing.

The upstairs emits slight squeaks and gurgles all night. The TV next door crackles static until four in the morning, and muted gunfire surfaces. Emily listens, wrapped in her unraveling blanket, and considers the emptiness of the noise. The mechanical sounds keep her awake until the fat man turns his TV to cartoons.

*

On Saturday, when rain sluices down the window panes, Emily wakes before sunrise, startled by the haunting thunder. She curls up with a blanket and lemon tea, waiting for day to overtake night and filter through the storm. The rain drowns out all but a tiny hissing snore from the fat man. The intermittent whistling air halts as the fat man rolls over. Emily counts the couch spring squeaks as he rolls: two to start, three more for the torso roll, and two for the legs that flop to follow.

*

Non living is a quiet thing filled with pieces of sound that mimic actual existence. Non living resides on a lower frequency with little need for activity or interaction. The way Emily sees it, a person’s frequency wavers along at an internal level until interaction causes the frequency to jump.

*

Emily can no longer be certain a fat man lives on the other side of her wall. She hears movement in slow drags. She thinks the fat man has been replaced by a walrus whose breathing rattles his nose rolls and whose body slugs along the carpet in grunts and groans. A walrus and his perpetual frown.

*

Emily hears little from below for the next three days. Upstairs the coughing grows more distressed. Next door the TV remains mute for days at a time. Emily imagines a catatonic walrus staring at the silent, blinking screen.

One evening Emily hears a loud series of thumps on her ceiling, like a stack of books hitting the floor in a domino effect. She hears the night nurse’s muffled voice speaking low the floor and two pairs of feet moving in discrete steps.

Emily can’t remember what day she last saw Aaron. Was it three days ago? Or was that when she gathered up the previous week’s rotting plates?

*

They take him out in a blue body bag. It’s such a dark blue that it is almost black and Emily wonders why it’s not black.

She sees them wheel the body down the sidewalk, to the unlit ambulance.

She wonders what its like to exhale and feel everything slip far away. She exhales on the window, blurring over the body bag.

Will she one day wake up zipped into the black space of a blue bag?

Through the glass, the ambulance lights drift silently from view.

images by sunderland book group, no second chances, and aimless direction (respectively)

My First Half Marathon

I've been a terrible blogger lately. There's been a lot of crap going on in my life, and I just haven't had the heart to write...however, let's recap a bit and I'll talk about my long-awaited first half-marathon race.

I wasn't sure I'd make it to the half-marathon I wanted to do. Lack of sleep, no appetite, and poor training wasn't the best way to get to it, but I wanted to do it just to see if I could.

I ran the Slacker Half-Marathon from Loveland, CO to Georgetown, CO on June 26th, 2010. Don't let the name fool you. You start out at about 10,000 feet and end up at 8,400 feet, so yes, there are some great downhill sections to the race. However, the first mile of the race is a gradual uphill, the last half mile is uphill, and there is a combination of flat and up/downhills in between.

Now, I've never run above about 9.5 miles at a time before, so I knew this would be pushing it. I started out slow and forced myself to keep an easy pace. The first 5 miles were on a dirt-packed trail in the shade, so that felt great. After mile 5, the path merged onto a road that ran alongside I-70. The rest of the race was on pavement, and boy did it get hot!

I felt pretty good through the 6.2 mile mark (a 10k, the longest race I'd done up to that point). Of course, I then thought, "I'm not even halfway yet...yikes!" I kept going and was able to use the steep downhill parts to my advantage and conserve energy on the uphill portions. I did stop briefly at miles 6 and 8 to grab a cup of Gatorade (which is darn near impossible to drink from a cup while running). By mile 9, I was starting to feel tired. My legs were becoming jelly-fied, but I was still breathing pretty well (another concern of mine at that elevation). I did chew on one of my Powerbar energy gummies, and I'm not sure whether or not it helped, but I felt pretty good after I hit mile 10. Then I thought, "Ok, 3 more miles, that's just a 5k." Just a 5k turned out to be pretty difficult on jelly legs. I knew if I walked at all, I would never get going again, so I pushed along and prayed my legs didn't give out.

The last 3 miles was purely a mental exercise. I just kept telling myself I could make it, only a little farther, etc. When I hit the last half mile, the uphill part, I was really struggling. My legs were not cooperating, so my breathing became ragged in an attempt to get more oxygen to my legs. Somehow, I managed to sprint the last 100 yards to the finish and am happy to say I ran the whole darn thing. That was my initial goal. I also wanted to finish in under two and a half hours. My finish time was two hours and thirteen minutes, so I was ecstatic!

After picking up my awesome tech shirt, I had to hobble (literally) a little over a mile back to my car. That's kind of mean, huh? I had to sit in my car for a good 20 minutes before my legs felt normal enough to drive. I got home and soaked in an ice bath and took it easy for the rest of the day.

The next morning, my legs reminded me how angry they were. My quads and ankles in particular were the most sore. Surprisingly, my calves, shins, and knees really didn't hurt, so that was good news! That's the first run I've been on that I actually felt pain the next day. Sure, other runs have made me a bit sore, but nothing like this. Thank goodness for ice packs, icy hot, compression socks (which I wore in the race) and ibuprofen.


Race photo by Foto Jack

I'm planning to do my next half-marathon in August, so that gives me another month to get some good training in. That will be followed by the Warrior Dash. We'll see what happens!