I ain’t afraid of ever losing faith in you

On his birthday, she read my good morning message and then took a phone break for the rest of the day which left me alone to think and worry about how romantic their day might be. I didn’t so much mind her not talking to me – I am not like that, I just get so insecure when I know that she is spending his birthday with him with her phone off and I can’t even see her for five minutes. It just hurts and makes me feel really unimportant in her life. I know that will fade as soon as she starts being sweet to me, but which she is distant, it lingers over my head and makes me feel like she doesn’t take me seriously.

I have to say that the isolation that this year has not made it any easier.

On Friday, I hope that she was having fun – even with him… It just broke my heart to consider that they would be having a romantic evening alone.

I truly believe they are not in a relationship anymore and it’s not like that but the fear seems to still be very real. I just want to be important to her.

I will go down with this ship

The last week and a half has been incredibly frusterating for me. After my car broke down late at night, with help from my dad, I had it towed to my house. After 2 people have messed with in for over 4 days off and on, I am back to waiting until the weekend for the hope that something will go right. Sometimes I feel like I am going to be looking for a new car soon – and I have that feeling.

I have been fortunate to have plenty of people willing to help me get back and forth to work. With my job, I am completely prepared to work from home at any given moment. Just a few days ago, I picked up four hours that I was able to work from home to cover for another employee. Where that becomes a bad thing is when my car is broken, I am struggling so get up the courage to ask my boss if I can work from home for a few days and he declines.. because he doesn’t want people to take advantage of it. He knows damn well my car is very broken – so that translates to that he has no control of the team, to me.

I had a performance review with said boss today and he had nothing but positive and kind feedback. He paused to try to come up with something that needed improving and laughed his way out of the fact that he had none. He told me that I was up for a promotion but that we didn’t get the raises until September. I will almost feel bad if I am the only one that gets promoted out of the 3 of us in the position but I guess that’s what it’s like when you are working on such a small team.

As I floated my way through my day dream – I joked with myself on the way to a bathroom break later in the day; “Now if my future-girlfriend would just promote me.” I can’t imagine that she would know that I call her that but it’s been going on for way longer than I would be willing to admit. Calling her my ex gf would be completely confusing. I try not to even refer to her by her first name most of the time because of this one time this one thing happened. Basically, if she has ever raised her voice even the slightest when talking to me, I immediately attempted to stop doing whatever it was I was doing to cause that. Then I remind myself that life was a lot different back then but I just try to keep my excited girl self quiet HOWEVER the need to refer to my future girlfriend comes up now and then and that’s what comes out.

The first time someone hears me say it they ask questions like, “…What?!?” Then I simply give a sentence or two statement and act like it’s completely normal. Then I just accuse them of not understanding lesbians if they even think twice about it.

Later in the day, a friend called me on the phone. We talked about a site that I am working on for his job and we moved on to him offering me a place to stay if need be when the time comes. I should handle these situations better because I never do it right but somewhere in there I said that I wasn’t looking for a roommate because my girlfriend would be moving in with me at some point. It just slipped out because.. I didn’t really think that he knows much about my life and just seemed easiest but suddenly he got really excited for me and I had to explain that I had no explanation as to why I said that… but she was just still my future girlfriend. Who needs labels anyway. she knows that she is my love and I think that’s all that matters.

And when we meet
Which I’m sure we will
All that was there
Will be there still

And I won’t put my hands up and surrender

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.

White Flag (2004)