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Obligatory Christmas post, & rambling
Dec. 25th, 2008 10:08 pmToday was nice. Quiet, just me and my mom and my brother. We do not do big Christmases anymore. And I like it that way.
I spend much of today thinking about Christmas four years ago, when I was a junior in high school. There were two significant things about that Christmas: one, we went to Miami that day, from Christmas until New Year's Eve. I really would like to do something like that again--Christmas somewhere warm. It's not like we have relatives we're obligated to see; nothing's keeping us at home on Christmas except not having planned anywhere else to go. I'd like to go somewhere.
The other thing was that that morning I broke up with Ben (yes, on Christmas, yes, I'm a bitch, yes I probably should have done it earlier... no, I couldn't do it later, he was leaving the day I got back). Probably not the best Christmas gift ever for him (if that mattered... he was Jewish). But probably the best Christmas gift I ever gave to myself. I hadn't felt so unburdened in years.
This means that today is exactly four years being single, and unorthodox as it is... I feel this is something to celebrate. Obviously, I would've rather thatI weren't completely relationship-retarded the thing with Tony had worked out, but since it didn't? This means four years of not making the mistake of getting myself into commitments I didn't understand, and didn't understand the terms of, and didn't want to be in. Four years of not succumbing to doing something I didn't want to do on the vague notion that other people thought this was a good thing, and hoping I'd see the point once I figured it out. Four years of not wasting time feeling claustrophobic and wondering what the fun part of this was supposed to be. Four years of not trying to figure out all this weird relationship business from the inside, where there is enough reality to it to worry about getting it wrong. Four years of not getting all claustrophobic feeling locked in by dull grown-up stupid words like "date" and "boyfriend." Four years of being FREE.
Four years sounds like a decently long time. I managed to leave that part of my life behind me so fast, it would always startle me when I'd think about it and realize it had only been three years, or two, or one. At one year, it felt like a lifetime ago. And I didn't like those numbers; they were too small, they made it sound like a recent mistake and I wanted to distance myself from it as much as possible. Four years sounds convincingly like it really was an entirely different stage of my life, one where I was young and stupid and it has nothing to do with who I am now.
I am single and I have absolutely no intention of changing that. The chances of something coming my way that I would want to make an exception for are slim, and I am glad they are slim, and I wish I had never run across the one I did. I am not looking; I am not available. I don't ever want to fall in love again. I don't ever want to be attracted to anyone again. I don't ever want to get landed on a date again in my life, and I am proud of the fact that I've never been on a formal enough date that I realized it was a date at the time (it took me over a year to realize that if you're dating someone, anything you guys do together is a date. But I have never been on a date that's just a date, and I'm keeping it that way!). And I absolutely, absolutely, regardless of the well-meaning 'there are other fish in the sea' comments I get from people, do not want to find a replacement romantic interest to get over Tony. I just want to get over him and get on with my life, with my family and friends.
I look at couples, even ones that behave decently in public, and I just can't ever imagine myself being in their situation--I can't see myself holding hands with someone in a restaurant, or calling someone "baby," or saying the words "I have a date tonight," or worrying about bringing someone home to meet my parents, let alone something like having sex be real, part of normal everyday life. It has no appeal and trying to mentally put myself in that situation just seems wrong, wrong, wrong, in every way otherworldly and bizarre. I can't see myself leaving campus overnights to visit the SAME person EVERY single weekend. My brain skids around and my imagination totally fails me trying to create a concrete thought of someone I'd want to be in a relationship with out of distasteful abstract terms like "man" and "date" and "boyfriend." If I mentally put me and Tony in the picture instead of me and abstract-boyfriend-notion, some of it has appeal. Some of it seems less claustrophobic. Some of it even makes a little more sense, but not all of it. And almost none of it becomes anything I can see myself being comfortable with, just another part of life, trusting that this is how it is and it's not going to suddenly dissipate if I make one wrong move. It just doesn't seem like me, even under the one circumstance I can think of to make it desirable and not a sentence.
And it's now four years I've avoided getting stuck anywhere in that world anyway, and I am not going back!
*goes for more champagne*
I spend much of today thinking about Christmas four years ago, when I was a junior in high school. There were two significant things about that Christmas: one, we went to Miami that day, from Christmas until New Year's Eve. I really would like to do something like that again--Christmas somewhere warm. It's not like we have relatives we're obligated to see; nothing's keeping us at home on Christmas except not having planned anywhere else to go. I'd like to go somewhere.
The other thing was that that morning I broke up with Ben (yes, on Christmas, yes, I'm a bitch, yes I probably should have done it earlier... no, I couldn't do it later, he was leaving the day I got back). Probably not the best Christmas gift ever for him (if that mattered... he was Jewish). But probably the best Christmas gift I ever gave to myself. I hadn't felt so unburdened in years.
This means that today is exactly four years being single, and unorthodox as it is... I feel this is something to celebrate. Obviously, I would've rather that
Four years sounds like a decently long time. I managed to leave that part of my life behind me so fast, it would always startle me when I'd think about it and realize it had only been three years, or two, or one. At one year, it felt like a lifetime ago. And I didn't like those numbers; they were too small, they made it sound like a recent mistake and I wanted to distance myself from it as much as possible. Four years sounds convincingly like it really was an entirely different stage of my life, one where I was young and stupid and it has nothing to do with who I am now.
I am single and I have absolutely no intention of changing that. The chances of something coming my way that I would want to make an exception for are slim, and I am glad they are slim, and I wish I had never run across the one I did. I am not looking; I am not available. I don't ever want to fall in love again. I don't ever want to be attracted to anyone again. I don't ever want to get landed on a date again in my life, and I am proud of the fact that I've never been on a formal enough date that I realized it was a date at the time (it took me over a year to realize that if you're dating someone, anything you guys do together is a date. But I have never been on a date that's just a date, and I'm keeping it that way!). And I absolutely, absolutely, regardless of the well-meaning 'there are other fish in the sea' comments I get from people, do not want to find a replacement romantic interest to get over Tony. I just want to get over him and get on with my life, with my family and friends.
I look at couples, even ones that behave decently in public, and I just can't ever imagine myself being in their situation--I can't see myself holding hands with someone in a restaurant, or calling someone "baby," or saying the words "I have a date tonight," or worrying about bringing someone home to meet my parents, let alone something like having sex be real, part of normal everyday life. It has no appeal and trying to mentally put myself in that situation just seems wrong, wrong, wrong, in every way otherworldly and bizarre. I can't see myself leaving campus overnights to visit the SAME person EVERY single weekend. My brain skids around and my imagination totally fails me trying to create a concrete thought of someone I'd want to be in a relationship with out of distasteful abstract terms like "man" and "date" and "boyfriend." If I mentally put me and Tony in the picture instead of me and abstract-boyfriend-notion, some of it has appeal. Some of it seems less claustrophobic. Some of it even makes a little more sense, but not all of it. And almost none of it becomes anything I can see myself being comfortable with, just another part of life, trusting that this is how it is and it's not going to suddenly dissipate if I make one wrong move. It just doesn't seem like me, even under the one circumstance I can think of to make it desirable and not a sentence.
And it's now four years I've avoided getting stuck anywhere in that world anyway, and I am not going back!
*goes for more champagne*
