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Patrick and I have been talking a lot since Sunday, along with thinking a lot about our circumstances and relationship. He was going to come down on Tuesday night, but given that I had both Jon & Dave here, it probably wouldn’t have been the best idea, since we really needed to talk before doing silly things like that together.

He did come down Wednesday night though, we again spent a good bit of time talking, this time in person… which is something we definitely needed.

I don’t think I can say that we have everything worked out, but then there are also things that really don’t need worked out… because they’re not even on the horizon for quite a while. It certainly feels like we’ve been able to address everything though, and I can say that I know that I’m going to be making the compromises and putting in the effort that I should be, and feel that I can say the same for him. I also feel that we understand where each other is coming from quite a bit better now than we ever have before. It was a very good evening… even if we were up until seven in the morning. I’m very happy with the result too, and I can now call him my boyfriend again.

While at Wal*Mart, which is one of those traditions of sorts, on Wednesday early morning, Dave whipped out his pen after spotting this lone banana. I gave my camera to Jon and he snapped the photo… there we have it.

Fight or Flight.

I was scared, still am, but at least now I recognize it. Instead of opening up and allowing myself to be vulnerable I wanted to run away, it was ‘easier’ and ’safer’ for me. Ridiculous that I want to choose the easy way for something important, but in general I always pick the hard way for random things.

Did I really want to open my heart to someone else? Was I willing to risk going through that pain again? I didn’t consciously have those thoughts because it’s embedded into my entire being at this point: let no one in.

Apart from everything else, I think that’s one of the biggest reasons for what I did and didn’t do. I can’t believe I didn’t realize it, but then I’ve basically conditioned myself to totally ignore that sort of thing too, so I guess it’s at least somewhat understandable. When someone I care for is asking me to be more open, when he is telling me that he feels he doesn’t know me any better now than months ago… he’s knocking on the door and I’m hiding under the bed instead of opening it.

It’s stupid, because I’m missing out on just as much as he is when it really comes down to it.

Let’s call it “risk management” for a moment. When does the risk of utter heartbreak become overwhelmed by the benefits of taking the risk? I think it’s when the big yellow taxi shows up.

I could be deluding myself, but generally when I call it quits with someone I don’t find myself changing my mind… of my own choosing. What I mean by that is, yes, I’ve told Cole to fuck off on a regular basis, but he tends to weasel his way back in, I can’t keep him gone, but it isn’t me pulling him back. It’s kind of a bad way to explain it, but the point is, I usually don’t actively seek to bring someone back into my life if it was me that chose to expell them.

Now, granted, I didn’t want to expell Patrick at all. Well, maybe I did a little, but that was just because I was frustrated; I didn’t truly feel that way. He broke up with me, but I pushed that to happen instead of taking the more difficult path of discussing the problems in person with him. I may be completely wrong, but I think I also kept us from getting back together when I went to see him…. however, after talking to him today I lean more towards the idea of me making that situation even worse.

It didn’t occur to me that I would be making the situation worse by telling him the grit of my mind… and I think there are some things that didn’t come across the way they were intended or otherwise issues I felt were minor somehow expanded into something a bit more major… though I can totally understand why, there are a lot of emotions connected to this sort of thing and as such something that is relatively minor can blow up… similar to how I was so incredibly upset by Patrick not coming down to visit that Wednesday, perhaps.

This afternoon on the way back I text messaged him, asking what he was doing today, but I never got a response. I later gave him a call but got his voicemail… I was hoping he had gone away, in the sense of going away for the weekend to have fun, to enjoy himself. That’s kind of what I did, basically.

I eventually called again, left a voicemail… rambling, because I really didn’t have anything to say to him, I just wanted to talk to him… because I missed him. Blegh, though, you know, I doubt I even said that.

I probably didn’t mention that because I wasn’t expecting the reaction when he called me back… He’s angry… initiated by having the time to think about the things I said the night/morning I went up there. He basically said that he doesn’t particularly want to have anything to do with me anymore. That’s what I heard anyway. Makes me think it’s too late… though he says it may not be; I am a cynic though, obviously. We did talk for a while, I don’t particularly have a lot of faith, but I do have it…

Oddly enough, I’m happy that he’s angry, it means it matters, in a way. It just won’t do any good if he keeps the reasoning from me… and it doesn’t seem like he is doing that, it’s just an observation.

I want to work it out, I just wanted time to think… to come to realizations. One of those realizations is that he actually is worth the effort. I often think, well, I need to be better… somehow, some way.

I feel that I can do absolutely anything if I want to do it, of course that want is usually lacking when it comes to that sort of thing, or to be more precise, perhaps, a definite reason is often lacking. I can say that I wanted to lose weight, which is true, but I didn’t have any definite reason to… there was no driving force behind it. Mights, maybes, and the like aren’t very good motivators for me.

There’s only been, to my recollection, one person that has blatantly told me they weren’t interested in me because I wasn’t “skinny” ….of course I’ll never be skinny, nor do I particularly want to anyway out of realism. I know it’s a big issue though, no pun intended, it’s quite obvious. I’ve met more people lately that were attracted to me, but as usual I’m generally not the slightest bit interested in them… for the very same unsaid reasons… yes, I realize that makes me a hypocrite.

The point of that is… there’s someone who accepts me as I am in that regard. He likes me for me… which if you recall was something that rather amazed me; however, I didn’t lose the weight for him, I lost it for me, but the most important thing here is that without really doing anything other than being him he provided me with a reason, with the motivation that I can’t really muster on my own.

It hit me then tonight, when I started thinking about how I wanted, was willing, to put more effort into it, to be more open about how I’m feeling… I just don’t feel that way ordinarily. There has only ever been one person for whom I wanted to improve myself…. he’s filled that spot when I wasn’t paying attention I guess.

I took a very long time “off” from the whole idea of dating after Davey and I split up… I tried something last summer and it failed miserably. Cole came along and there was enough of a “placebo effect” where I didn’t particularly care anymore and felt content to just stay single even longer. When that started to wear off I found myself wanting… After months of virtually nothing, I had given up on Matthew (odd that I should return from being with him today if you really think about it) and then JayPea, failure and a miserable one at that. I guess one could think about them, if the desire was strong enough to be optomistic, as “practice” runs of a sort… to gear up and slough off vestiges of the sadness.

I always found it a little ironic, somehow, that the main reason I ended up meeting Patrick in the first place was that I was fed up with JayPea being a little shit. I’m worried, in a sense, that I just simply settled though… If you take out all of the actual feelings involved, which is impossible, but for the sake of discussion, I took the first person that came along that seemed to be genuinely interested in me. I would certainly not become involved with him if I wasn’t interested, right? I think that there are so very few people that I actually do like… and even fewer that I feel a sort of “passion” for, I suppose I would rather have that passion along with mutual interest, but it seems so impossible…. the balance that occurs so rarely.

I think that I didn’t appreciate Patrick enough, I think the reason for that is because it came too easily, I never really had to work at it. He put so much effort into the relationship initially that it seemed there was little for me to do, I then apparently missed that invisible point where I should have been putting effort in. We both developed an underlying unhappiness with each other, but failed to bring that to light because as I put it ‘we needed to say the things that we think make us freaks’ …we just didn’t. Instead of developing plans for us he began to basically avoid me in hopes that I would pick up the slack… basically a game of sorts, but we both ended up losing… the impression I had was that he was losing interest and my general tactic is to let things go. I’m not much for relationships on life support anymore and it really started to seem like that was the next step.

Jon and I started spending a lot more time together… we’d make plans generally a week in advance. Patrick started to feel like he was being robbed of my time because he’d want to make plans on the day we’d do them, but my time had already been occupied by Jon. He’d started working even more overtime… closing up our schedule possibilities even more. I guess what galled me was that when I didn’t really have anyone else to spend time with, because Jon was in Mexico with Eddi, and, well, the other people were just… less than ideal, that’s probably when I spent the least amount of time with Patrick too. I had nothing to do… so I invented something, as I usually do, which this time was gardening. I should have seen the cue… to have known that I needed to put more effort into the relationship, to have been much more pro-active, I just wasn’t.

As I said, we were both unhappy, or otherwise not quite satisfied. It seemed to me the best course of action would be for us to take a break from each other and recollect ourselves… figure out what we really wanted, from ourselves, each other, or others unrelated.

To make it worse, and I really do… while not so much regret it, resent myself for doing it, I manipulated the situation. I didn’t really set out to do it, but I was just so worn out and discouraged; my actions led to a rather convenient, if disrepectful, course of further action.

I had plans with Jon last Monday, just as the week previous. Patrick asked me to stop by on the way to see Jon, and I agreed to… but that meant waking up especially early and considering I’d been in Philly to help my brother move that Saturday, to which I had only two hours sleep prior to and then drove back home the same day arriving back at nearly four AM Sunday… I kept changing my alarm clock until the point that I needed to leave to get Jon… somewhat precluding me from spending any time at all with Patrick. In the car, before I’d pulled from the driveway, Jon called; him calling me because I’d not called him by the time I should have. If Patrick had done that that whole day may have went down differently, it’s difficult to say.

Driving north on I-81 I have two options, literally a fork in the road. One option takes me to I-581, which leads to I-83, which leads to Jon… Granted, I could always go north on I-83 to still get to Patrick’s, but I’ve rarely done that. The other is to stay on I-81, which leads me to Patrick directly. I found myself unconsciously merging onto I-581… along with that I made a conscious decision that I was going to break up with Patrick and I’d rather not have to drive alone after that… plus I definitely didn’t want the person I was going to see afterward, directly leaving from Patrick’s, to be Jon… I hated the idea of how that would look.

If I was right about how Patrick was feeling, being that he felt similar to me, then my arrival with Jon would be enough to …. …give him the position of power… …make him break up with me. I was right.

It’s fairly rare that I do something and rather immediately wish I hadn’t… but I have to say that is one of those very situations. It was a shitty thing to do… or rather, I’d say I should have picked a better way to do it. I guess that’s why I found myself driving up to see him at 2AM Wednesday morning, so we’d have the opportunity to have the sort of discussion that should have taken place first. I spent the night there with him, just sleeping, not because I was too tired to go home, but because I wanted to, because basically I felt I needed to spend that extra time with him, not necessarily for him, but for me. I want to try to show that I do care, that I do like him… I just couldn’t be his boyfriend anymore… at least until I was able to really think about things. I hadn’t been holding up my end of the bargain, so to speak.

The reason I went up there was because he called me Tuesday… which was quite a surprise actually. I found myself missing his call at nine on Monday, but I was distracted enough to not think about it too much. I was in the car when nine rolled on Tuesday though, and there was this “silence” that fell… I’d taken him for granted, and I finally realized it for certain. I remember saying something to him about that, and how I didn’t want to take things or people for granted, but he seemed to look at it differently, something I still don’t really understand completely. I suppose that was why I was so surprised when he did call me, not at nine of course, but at 11PM. He’d apparently wanted to call me, I guess that in a sense had been a habit for the last few months, to put it overly simple. He asked me how I was, I said I was okay, because as I told him the other day, whenever someone asks me how I’m doing or if I’m okay, or if anything is wrong, etc, I rather consistently lie… everything is always okay, nothing is ever wrong. He wasn’t okay. I knew I had to do something.

I did what I honestly thought was best… at the time, but I’ve had second thoughts, I have to admit I haven’t a clue what I’m doing… all things considered now though, I believe working on something that has been good is truly the better option.

The grass really isn’t any greener on either side. I seem to want only what I cannot have, and if I attain what I believe I want, I quickly find that I no longer want it anyway. Perhaps it has something to do with expectations, I try to generally live without them to ward off disappointment, but I often have such great expectations anyway and more often than not find the satisfaction isn’t quite there during the afterward.

So I screwed up, basically, because I wanted to take the chance… nothing major or catastrophic really, but I did hurt someone I care about, and ultimately I think I hurt myself too. I find myself worrying or otherwise complaining about how others in my life tend to do things to spite themselves unknowingly, when it should be glaringly obvious to them how asinine it is; I do the very same thing… just with important and less tangible matters.

I went out lastnight, the first time in as long as I can remember, as “single” versus being involved with someone. I enjoyed myself immensely, but it felt shallow somehow, not completely fulfilling. Mainly it served to illustrate to me my first point; there was a guy who could barely keep his hands off of me… and someone I could barely keep my hands off of… not the same person, I wasn’t interested in who wanted me, and who I wanted wasn’t interested in me. The reality wasn’t as black and white as my explanation, but I say this for the sake of making the point.

Reality can come back into view shockingly quickly sometimes. At nearly 5AM this morning I woke up, realized that I wasn’t home and that I was in bed with two other guys. I realized that earlier I had let someone basically grab me wherever he wished, I guess attention is attention, right? …not quite. With explanation the above realization isn’t as shocking, thankfully. Due to Matthew’s and my own excessive drinking lastnight it was absolutely out of the question that we leave the city so we stayed at my friend Luke’s place; we were barely able to walk the block and a half to get there. Before sleeping it did become rather abundantly clear that nothing more would (or should I say likely would?) come of our involvement, which is both relieving and discomforting. I did enjoy him kissing me, in a way that was pretty much all I actually wanted, because I ‘failed’ to do that when I wanted to rather long ago… Intellectually I just can’t see myself being involved with him more than that, plus, even more… I see Adam when I look at him and that simply isn’t fair to anyone.

I have a problem with settling with something… or perhaps I should say accepting the situation as it is. I can do it for a while, but eventually it wears on me. I’m generally much more of an “all or nothing” person, a claim Cole would be easily able to bolster. I suppose I find it difficult as to where the point is where I can accept something for the long term without deluding myself in the meantime. Even today I’m probably deluding myself with a certain relationship, but I’ve managed to appreciate it at face value. Can I do the same with the other in question, will it wear on me as I felt it doing today, or perhaps it can better yet, where friendship is friendship, period. I just don’t know.