For G,
Hope you enjoy this one at least half as much as you did the first.
I love you.
B
So I started reading the new Jonathan Safran Foer book tonight, cracking the cover and leafing through the first few pages only to come across that inscription. It was dated 21 August 2005. Do the quick and easy math I put together that that was about two weeks before we officially broke it off. You know I keep all of the dates in my head. Sometimes I wonder why. I know that an important date that will be hard for me to get through is coming up. I may decide to sleep through it, or I may just decide to smile through the whole thing.
I remember the day we got the book I started tonight. It was during those dreamlike days when it was all falling apart. I say dreamlike because they weren’t really a nightmare, I just spent them feeling as if I was walking around outside of myself, or I wasn’t walking around at all. When I did come to my senses I felt such despair, and the rushing desire to make it all okay – to solve the problem with one move.
I guess I thought a book might do it that day that we were in Barnes and Noble together. I guess I was grabbing at straws. I guess I thought a trip to the mountains, even if it was a cheesy little tourist trap, might solve it all. Seeing those mountains, something so much larger than us, or seeing the river that has been running long before us or these problems, maybe that type of perspective would give us the saving insight needed to make it all work out.
I realize now that it was all too late then.
When 4 September rolled around, that afternoon when the conversation happened, I guess I thought we would just drift apart. All the words would eventually be naught, the trips to beaches and mountains and Sparkle and Macon and Athens, would be just memories that one day might become bearable. I never imagined that we would have what we have now. That you would come to me. That you would find me valuable again.
It is still like a dream at times to get to spend time with you. Not all that that implies, but sometimes when we have dinner, I don’t believe that it is really you across the table, it is beyond me to think that you could still be there. In a way it is like it is not you at all.
We are now getting to know each other in new and different ways than we ever did before. You are not radically different, just growing. I like to see that. I am doing the same. Sometimes I don’t believe that I will ever find anyone that will love me like you did, and maybe do. I keep trying out, and I realize that relationships can take time to build, but everything seemed so natural in the beginning between us (even though I know that is when some of the seeds were sewn). I still look at you during those dinners and those walks and I try to get beyond the idealized version of you I kept in my head during the time in which we did not really see each other. To the largest extent, I believe I have been successful in breaking through the myth. What still remains is something I am still so in love with. I try to keep my shit together, and by and large I do. I know you know that it still hurts me at times. It hurts when you have to leave and I know you will not be coming back here tonight, because this is no longer ‘home’ for you.
I have arrived at the thought that man was not really meant to live alone. I crave conversation, someone to bounce ideas off, to tell me a joke when I am down. I also crave someone that fulfills that unexplainable little vacant inside. The only one who has ever done that is you. Steve asks me to tell him what I mean when I tell him that and I cannot really put words to it. It just feels like peace and ease. It just feels good.