oceantheorem | (no subject)

Okay, so it's nearly 5 am and I'm still awake. You might ask why. I shall tell you.
IT IS HOT. REALLY FUCKING ANNOYINGLY HOT. TOO HOT TO SLEEP.
I'm angry. I think Connecticut weather is really good at pushing my buttons. First it's ABSURDLY cold for three months, then it can't make up its mind and is miserable for two more months, then the weather is PERFECT for two weeks, and BAM, summer hits you and suddenly it's too hot to move. So annoying.

So there have been a couple of weird things. First, the guy who found my phone mailed it back to me. This is the old phone, the one I got last summer and then lost in October during the Genetics retreat in Massachussetts. It came in the mail the other day, and I took it out of the envelope and turned it on and sat down with it and looked through it. And I was shocked at the rush of emotions that suddenly overtook me. I hadn't realized it, but I had that phone for almost the exact duration of my relationship with Clark. We spent HOURS talking on the phone right after I got it, and when he came to visit we compared phones (we had the same one), and we sent each other countless text messages. The texts are gone from the phone's memory, but just holding it and hearing the tone of its beeps brought back a ton of my memories.
The second weird thing is that the apartment smells vastly different depending on season. And now that it's summer, the apartment smells like... last summer. Which means it smells like arriving in New Haven (which makes me think of road tripping), and it smells like Clark. It's funny that it "smells like Clark," because it doesn't REALLY smell like CLARK, it just smells the way it did when we were... whatever we were. "Dating." So it brings back those memories.
And the third weird thing was being in New York last week to see the Met, and the week before that for the cheese conference. After the cheese conference, we walked over to the World Trade Center site, Ground Zero. I hadn't been there (or to New York at all) since I was there with Clark, so all those memories came flooding back, and I actually found myself missing him. And again last week after we went to the Met, we walked along Central Park for a bit and then went to Times Square, and I had a fleeting thought of missing him again.
I guess this is one of those cases where I still feel the same way--it was never going to work out, and I'm over it--but I also feel a little sad. In severing the romantic relationship, I also lost his friendship. I was so mad at him for so long that I guess I hadn't really noticed. And we were really only speaking every three or four months over the last four years anyway, so I was used to him disappearing for long stretches of time. But I haven't talked to him since October now, and it feels strange. It's summer. He usually turns up again in summer. I dunno if I want him to or not, but I think a part of me does miss him. I guess I'm not mad at him anymore.
Weird.

Anyway. I started knitting the wedding gift for my cousin. It's going to be an intense bit of knitting between now and July 7 to finish it. Especially since I spent an hour tonight un-knitting and re-knitting a row. I forgot to yarn over in one row and didn't notice it until four rows of lace later, and it took me half an hour to figure out that I had to go back more than just one row. Grah. Now I understand lace knitting's appeal, and lace knitting's downside. On the one hand, it makes my OCD so happy to count stitches and be obsessive about where I am in a pattern. And to un-knit rows carefully stitch by stitch instead of ripping out rows at a time and then putting the loops carefully back on the needles. On the other hand, GOOD GRIEF it takes FOREVER to un-knit lace.

Anyway. I'm gonna try to sleep again now. Or knit a few rows and THEN sleep. I could probably finish this square before sunrise....

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Can you tell me the story of Clark? Only if you feel like it. I like your stories.

Oh yeah... It's kind of a weird story. We've known each other since the seventh grade, and he probably fell in love with somewhere around ninth grade. I fell in love with him somewhere around eleventh, but we never quite got around to the dating thing, somehow because of the constant roller coaster our relationship has always been on. He's a very... I dunno, emotional guy? and high school was pretty rough on him, so he spent a lot of time really unhappy, and refused to date me for that reason. That of course made me really angry (because I couldn't have what I wanted, even though he was probably right in retrospect that dating him wouldn't have been a good experience while he was so depressed), so we went through this sort of cycle over and over and over again, of getting closer and falling in love, and then one of us pulling away and the other getting angry. It was a really predictable three- or four-month cycle from about senior year of high school to my last year at Santa Cruz, with a couple of longer intervals while I was dating Jamie.

After I graduated and moved to CT, Clark and I started talking again. He was in Florida (he moved there after we graduated from high school, so our friendship has been largely long-distance for the last four years, but that didn't really matter because we've always had a 90% internet friendship, even when we attended the same schools). Finally, it seemed like we both wanted the same thing at the same time, and he was willing to make sacrifices he'd never been willing to make before--like talking on the phone instead of just on AIM. So we started spending HOURS on the phone together, like seven at a time, and fell in love again.

He came up to visit me for a week, which was a little awkward. In the nine years we'd been on/off, we'd never kissed, and that one week was sort of trial by fire--all our firsts crammed into one week in August! He was about to graduate from his program, and was looking for jobs all over the country. He got an offer for his dream job at Microsoft, doing something he wouldn't hate (which was a miracle, for Clark), and which would pay enough that he could retire waaaay early and be totally taken care of. He didn't tell me they gave him the job. He lied and said he didn't get it, because he didn't want me to pressure him to take it. What he really wanted to do was move to New Haven to be close to me, which would have required that he move in with me, since there were no jobs in the area and he wouldn't have been able to support himself. I was totally against that idea and definitely not ready for him to make that big of a sacrifice. In retrospect, I definitely didn't love him as much as he loved me, and I think refusing to let him move up here was probably one of the kindest things I've ever done. But it made him unhappy at the time. And when he finally told me that he'd turned down the MS job and lied to me about it, I got really angry and we had a series of fights about where the future was going and who needed to make which sacrifices and could we even be a real-life couple anyway, or did we work only on the internet? It was kind of ugly, and at the end I think I told him I never wanted to talk to him again, which I truly believed at the time. After nine years of a roller coaster of uncertainty, it was kinda nice to make a decision and finally have the door closed (as opposed to half-open half-closed).

Now I feel kind of bad, because it's so rare that someone comes along who will love you as much Clark loved me, but at the same time it definitely wouldn't have been fair to him if I'd allowed things to go farther. My heart just wasn't in it. Even though I'd loved him for years, somewhere along the line I must have stopped romantically loving him and starting thinking of him as just a friend. And like I said in the post, I was used to him disappearing and reappearing every few months, and I think the idea of him becoming a permanent fixture kind of scared me. As much as I cared about him, he took a lot of energy to love. And I just don't have enough energy to keep pouring love into him hoping that he'll start to love himself.

Anyway, that was kinda long and rambly and it's really only bits and pieces of the whole story. He's a good guy, though, and I do wonder what he's up to now. I don't even know what state he's in, or if he ever got a job. I hope he did... he has so much potential....

I think it must have been the right thing to do if your heart wasn't in it and if it wasn't what you felt like committing to. The right thing for you AND the right thing for him.

Oh wow. I can understand its being nice to have the door closed in the end...

I'm sorry I don't have more to say. I love hearing about this stuff.

Nine years is a lot.

No worries. I'm glad you like hearing about it. It's good for me to go back and write things out and summarize them--I think that's how you learn from life. You've gotta sit down and figure out why you did things and where they went wrong and whatnot. Thanks for reading. :-)

And yeah, nine years IS a lot. And I definitely miss his friendship.

Lifeline baby, lifeline! It's the only way to go with lace. Well, so I hear - I mean to knit a lot more lace than I actually accomplish, but I'm also planning some wedding gift lace. I have a bit longer though, until Labor Day...
With you on the heat thing. I grew up in PA and it's the same there, and in Chicago where I went to college. Miserable cold, then a brief respite, and then WAY too HOT and especially way too HUMID!
-SP10

Yeah, I know I should have used a lifeline... but for something that's only 48 rows long and 33 stitches wide, I figured I could afford to be lazy. It really wouldn't have made a difference anyway... I only had to go back four rows. The big problem was that I couldn't figure out WHICH row was mutated, so I kept un-knitting and re-knitted the same rows and trying to figure out why I kept coming up one stitch short.
Oh well... like I said, it made my OCD really happy. :-P

I don't understand this weather thing! Why doesn't everyone move to California?

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On lace...

Re: On lace...