I went out with an old friend last night and met her new boyfriend. Since I’ve known her for over 9 years, she wanted my opinion, and basically my approval, since I’m pretty much the only one who really knows what she’s going through. From what I’ve heard of him, what I saw of how he treated her and how she reacted to him… I like him, I approve, but I did tell her to warn him as we left that if he hurt her, I’d kill him. After all she’s been through, she deserves to be happy more than any other person I know. If he hurts her, I swear on whatever god, devil, or spirit you may believe in that I will hunt his ass down like a rabid dog.
So then in the car as I was heading home, I started thinking about the “threat”, and how they were with each other and I started thinking about my “relationships”. I haven’t dated a local guy in years. I’ve had friends, fuck-buddies, whatever, but no relationships. The guys I always seem to fall for, connect with, whatever you wanna call it, always live hours away, so there’s no chance of the relationship actually working out. I don’t know if it’s true that there’s no decent guys around here that I’ve met yet, or if this is just a self-defense mechanism to keep from getting my heart ripped out. Yea, there’s always the chance of getting a broken heart from a long distance relationship, but there’s usually not the connection that can result in getting your heart ripped out and stomped on. Even if your heart breaks, you still have it.
Here I am, in another long distance relationship. We met through MySpace (yea, I know, I know, trust me, if I haven’t already heard it, I’ve thought of it myself). We’ve been talking for over four months, “going out” for two. We had all these big plans on how to make this work, he was going to move out here and move in with me and start all over since he’d been through some shit and wanted to leave it all behind him. Well, then more shit happened, and now, we don’t even know if he’s going to be able to make it out here for my cousin’s wedding in October, just for the weekend. We haven’t talked about living together, or where we’re going with this in over a month. I don’t blame him at all for what’s been going on with him, shit happens, I know this, but of course I still have to sit here wondering if anything he’s ever told me is true or not. I mean, hell, I don’t even know him, he could be lying about everything he’s ever told me and I have no way of knowing. Yes, I am realistic enough to know that. I really like him though, he makes me laugh, we get along, we can talk on the phone for hours… is it love, I don’t know. How the hell am I supposed to know what love is anyways?
I’m enough of an optimist to hope this will work out with him, but I’m also enough of a pessimist to wonder if maybe we should just break this off right here and now and spare me the pain of it happening later like I know it’s going to. There’s just no way to make this work out between us.
Neither of us is ready or able to pack up and leave our lives behind. My family is here, my friends are here, my job / career is here, just like his family, his friends, his job is out there in NY by him. Even if he is able to make it out here in October, what’s the point? Can you really have a relationship based on one weekend every 6 months where you get to see each other? NY is just too far from WI to make a long distance relationship work. And I can’t ask him to give up everything to be out here with me, if I’m not willing to do the same for him. I mean what, throw all my shit into storage, lose my apartment, lose my job and move out there to be with someone I’ve never actually met before, with no job, no friends, no family, and no guarantee that it will work? Knowing my usual luck with relationships, it’d be over in a month, and then what the fuck would I do? Come crawling back to all the “I told you so’s”?
I was a fucking idiot and got my hopes up that somehow, this time, it would be different.
I was wrong.
And when this ends, I think what’s left of my heart is going to shatter. Not just break, but fucking shatter. After the last one, I told myself to not get attached again cuz no good would ever come of it, but of course I didn’t bother to listen to myself.
Why the hell do I even have a heart if this is all that’s going to happen to it?
