Today, throughout our daily texts, I told her that I wanted to rewrite history casually, but told her I would explain later. What I didn’t say, is that right after I sent this email that I am about to post from 6 years ago, I then proceeded to go back to the craigslist ad that had made my heart skip a beat just minutes prior when I saw my future’s photo pop back up on my screen.
This email would haunt me for years to come. It would be the concrete item that tied back to that moment of – well I will not define that emotion right now but what happened next was not what I expected. It’s something that lead to a lot of personal grown ultimately, but at the time it felt like a ton of bricks knocking the wind out of me. As I meteorically stood there thing to catch my breath it suddenly occurred to me, if she did in fact care about me the way I truly believed and still believe that she cares about me – then my first email will probably feel about the same when she reads it.
I have never felt worse about such an innocent email but I learned not to reply to things before I actually read them no matter what it could say. There is no need to reference what the post said because I am afraid that I won’t forget it and I am sure she can remember the direction or at least the lines that she might have preferred for me not to stumble upon.
It don’t really bother me much now because, well it became my reality but at the time, I haven’t a clue.. at all – and it only lead to other discoveries. It wasn’t long ago that I decided to figure out what day it was I zoomed in on the Planet K app and saw a familiar name accidentally, shockingly but accidentally all the same. That was February 13th, so it took about 2 months to figure out who.. which didn’t make the world any easier.
Now I will back track and tell you why I was at home mid day on a work day reading w4w craigslist ads.
There was a point in my life when I was afraid and I just wanted to erase it all. For some reason, I feel like the way to do that is to get in ridiculously irresponsible situations that will always lead to disappoint. usually it involved a cute, straight girl, but I have no idea why I think that is safe. You never take it seriously, because you know that it is not real. They feel the same way and usually have a boyfriend. In this case, her boyfriend knows and claims to be fine with us spending time together. She had a few kids and she worked with me. On this day, she decided to tell me that she needs to choose her boyfriend and we need to stop hanging out. I was irritated more than anything. This was actually the first in a series of events that I could not see coming. I am glad I decided to attempt this with women that I was not specifically emotionally attached to because it was about to escalate quickly. I still thought I was quite attractive and a catch back 6 years ago – so I decided to leave work upset and quickly ended up online ‘to find someone better to distract myself with.’
Within minute I was completely distracted but I don’t think that it was the direction that I was expecting. It was by a woman.. a very attractive one.. but not a stranger. When I clicked on her post, I was filled with excitement. It included 3 photos of her and before I so much as read the first sentence – I responded with the above email as if it was an accident that we lost touch. I was head over heels for her and everything seemed wonderful – until it didn’t. This would have been several months later but apparently I hadn’t a clue for that long. The farther I read, the worse it got. That’s about the moment that I got offended but it wasn’t personal. I don’t know what it was. Possibly political. For the first time, I felt discriminated against because I was a lesbian.. just like all the bisexual women usually talk about. I am not even sure what I was thinking at that point but I know that I wanted to know why I was not good enough.
I refuse to look at many past emails because I only embarrass myself but I know that I must have read that post more than 100 times. It hurt. I was mad. I didn’t even know what I was mad about and we never really talked about it – but I always felt guilty about the way she must have felt after she read it, knowing what I was about to walk into.