So, I haven’t written in quite a while and at least part of the reason has been my blog’s … ummm…. spotty “up-and-running” status. That’s at least part of the reason for my silence. Another part would be the anxiety and workload one takes on when putting together a school yearbook (to that end I’m taking tomorrow off so that i can produce the required 40 pages over the next three days). Then, of course, there’s my quasi-relationship with You-know-who.

I’m not exactly sure when things took a turn for the worse, relationship-wise. We had a pretty good holiday season. We spent Christmas day together watching DVDs at my place and having pizza. Then we got together several times New Year’s Eve weekend. We didn’t actually go out New Years Eve because she was feeling under the weather but it was nice watching more DVDs and just being together. I hadn’t originally had very high expectations for our time together during the holidays, but it was genuinely nice to spend some time together, particularly New Year’s weekend when we saw one another four times. Yikes. Alas, after that weekend things got to the point where she declared to me that she needed a break and took off for a weekend trip to San Simeon January 27th.

Okay, I couldn’t argue that she definitely needed time away from the hustle and bustle of her single mom existence. The fact that I was one of those whom she felt that she needed time away from kind’a got to me. Wow. I used to be one of those whom she turned to when she needed to get away from her life. Add to that the knowledge that this is a woman who won’t go to the movies alone, there was no way she was going to take some weekend trip alone. When we saw one another the Friday before her trip she offered no details where she was going and definitely no hint about whom she would be going with. It pretty much broke my heart to think that she needed a weekend away from me.

When I did the math, i figured out that she must have gone with her late sister’s husband. I was confused and hurt. I knew or believed that there was nothing between them physically, but finding myself on the outside, with her spending the weekend with another man just wasn’t going to work for me. Of course she came back in great spirits and all energized saying that she missed me. Yeah, she’d gone someplace with someone else and because she had a pretty good time she thought about how much fun it would be to go there with me. Alas, call me stupid, but i had a hard time getting past the fact that she went with someone else and that I was what she was trying to get away from in the first place. That’s probably when things dipped into the red and never quite got back.

I’m not really one to just ignore things like this so I confronted her about the weekend and she said that she didn’t want to tell me about going with her late-sister’s husband because she didn’t want to upset me, like going and not telling me was going to make it better!? Then she countered that she didn’t make a big deal when I went to MacWorld Expo in San Francisco without her. Ignoring the fact that I didn’t go there with a woman or to meet a woman, and the original plan was for her to come along but she showed no interest so I went alone.

Funny, I thought on my last evening in San Francisco that one of our problems was that, given our pattern of only seeing one another once every other weekend, that it might be good to lighten the load and get together on the Thursdays when she was going to be with the kids the following weekend. I thought, instead of putting so much into our twice monthly visits, if we saw one another every week I’d be less likely to be so “wanting” to be with her. When I told her what I was thinking somehow my efforts to lighten the load and have a more “normal” relationship got translated to me being a controlling person and wanting to always tell her what to do. In other words, I was just another person making more demands on her, when what she really wanted was someone to treat her like a princess and take care of her. I agreed that she was “entitled” to that, but it was pretty clear that my efforts in giving this to her was being tripped up by my need for her to need me enough to want to be with me and choose me. We were very much on two very different wavelengths. Or maybe not. But the means to bridge the similarities over what we needed from one another seems to be pretty much dissipated.

So we’ve talked four times in the past fifteen days and have averaged a good three days between phone calls. It makes sense that she would be at that “get out and be with people” stage in her post-divorce life. It doesn’t seem to really include me as being more than a friend. But then she’s been offended in the recent past when I’ve mistakenly treated her like a friend (splitting the dinner bill or saying something stupid in front of my siblings about her owing me for her part of the movie tickets). So, given all of this being alone and silence I’m confused about what I’m supposed to do or what I mean to her.

For the past two weeks she’s been mostly overwhelmed with all the things that need to get done at her work and her mom having chemo treatment and just trying to make ends meet. It makes sense that she wants someone to come in and sweep her off her feet and take care of her. Of course, she would also want that person to not bug her at work, and pretty much stay out of the way when she doesn’t need him. I pretty much failed in that department and everything I did seemed to push her away more than draw her close. I guess I was a just a bit too real with my vulnerabilities and wants when she wanted someone more stoic and more emotionally self-sufficient. The fact that I’d hung in there all these many years also contributed to my less-desirability in that she didn’t want to be beholden to me for my “years of service.” I don’t blame her. Who would want that? But my mostly selfless devotion should count for something. Nah, for her it’s another black mark that puts her in too much of a disadvantaged position. It was meant as a gift, as something that I did because that was who I was and that was the good that came out of me as a result of being in love with her. The gift seems to have lost all of its perfume and power.

So the days have turned into weeks and I try to figure out when or if I should say anything. I always seem to have a difficult time knowing what to do. I guess that I could just walk away and assume that it’s over, but that’s not me. I need for the air to be cleared and knowing our amazing failure rate when it comes to breaking up, one cannot go on assumptions. it’s almost funny.

And then, after what seems like bad day after bad day, she seems to have had a pretty good day today, leaving me with the burden of not saying anything because I don’t want to fuck up her one good day in weeks. Ugh. This is so stupid. Of course I can’t say anything tomorrow because she’ll be up to her eyebrows with work followed by a weekend holed up in a motel room outside Bakersfield where her eldest will be participating in a paint-ball tournament. We haven’t used the “L” word since her get-away weekend and given another week or so, that should be enough to get the “it’s over” point across, one would think. Of course last weekend I was thinking that we should just take the next month or so “off” at least until her birthday in the beginning of April, but that would require I say something about what I want from all of this, and that’s as welcomed in the very few conversations we’ve had as a loud smelly fart in church. Ugh. Of course, writing (and publishing) any of this makes me out to be a whiny little asshole whose sole purpose in life seems to be to take what scant little joy she can muster up in her daily existence. All I wanted to do was make her happy. I would have done anything to make her happy. Too little too late and I’m an asshole for saying so. And I still want to see her happy, I just know that I cannot continue to exist in this invisible non-person level in her life. I have this stupid impression that someone should want to be wanted by me and want me in return. I know it’s not that simple, but given how convoluted things seem to be right now, I’m with Alexander the Great and I’m just going to cut the fucking Gordian knot instead of trying to untie the damn thing. JBB