Misery Date

I got wasted a couple weeks ago with Nicholas.  We ended up spending a few chilly hours alone on a moonless beach just south of Gaspee Point, looking out at the bay and talking while huddled under blankets.  At one point, he cut in.

"It sucks loving someone who's not around, huh?"

I paused because I couldn't figure out how he had pinpointed my emotions so perfectly without any background info.  We talked a little more about it, but I made him guess as to who the mystery guy was.  He got it wrong, and eventually I changed the subject because I was uncomfortable.  Nicholas reads this blog, so now he gets to find out who it is, and so do you!

Flash back to last winter, right around Thanksgiving I guess.  I met a guy who was in his senior year at RISD at the time.  We instantly liked each other very much.  We dated sort of quietly for a time, while I thought much too hard about the circumstances.  He was graduating in the spring, and pretty much had no choice but to move back home to Virginia for a while once that happened, until he figured out whatever his next move was.  To me, this read as an expiration date.  The first guy I ever fell in love with also moved away.  I stupidly followed him, and it ended up costing me everything I had, including two years of my life that I'll never get back.  I was scared of it happening again, so in typical self sabotaging fashion I told this guy I couldn't see him seriously, and disappeared for a few months.

I suppose I thought that if he were out of sight, he'd be out of mind, and I could spare myself the heart wrenching breakup wrought by shitty circumstances down the road.  Unfortunately, the damage had already been done.  I was more or less in love with him already.  As it got to be early spring, I started to panic, realizing that this person I was crazy for would be leaving here thinking I was a heartless jerk, so I sort of renewed my relationship with him in the last couple months before he left.  In retrospect, I don't know why I bothered.  I guess it was a last attempt to win some influence over this person who I knew I'd miss terribly.  It was also an apology I knew wouldn't be good enough.  Anyhow, he graduated and left.  Since Virginia is an incredibly dull place that he hates, I thought maybe there was still a chance I'd see him back here again.  I just found out he got a job in San Francisco, and he's moving there as we speak.  My feelings about it, as with everything else on earth, are complicated.

I'm happy that he got out of Virginia.  He's entirely too smart and too creative to live in a place like that, at a time like now.  I'm also happy because it's a great opportunity for him, and I have many more reasons to be in San Francisco than I'd ever have to be in Virginia (which is to say I'd only go to Virginia to visit him).   If/when I get to visit my friends out there again, he'll be on the list as long as he can put up with me. But over the top of that, I have the familiar, horrible sinking feeling: the feeling that this means I'll never see him again.  Even if that isn't true, the fact remains that as an amazing guy, he can have anybody he wants, and there is certainly no shortage to be had.  I'm basically a distant memory with nothing to offer.

There are those people who can blindly follow their heart wherever it takes them, and things just seem to work out.  I am not one of those people (as much as I'd love to be), and when I give in and indulge myself, things do not work out.  The situation with this guy brings me into direct conflict with my spectacular ability to be screwed over by fate.  I am always caught between what I want and what's right for me.  Having fucked up so much in the past trying to do what I wanted, I find myself trying extremely hard to resist it and do what's right for me.  Doing what's right for me turns me into a bored, miserable person.  Doing what's right for me is what led me to run away from him in the first place.  Furthermore, doing what my heart tells me to do often requires a choice between two things that I love equally.  In this case, it would be a choice between a person I love, and a place I love; this beautiful, bizarre corner of the earth called Rhode Island where I live.  Even if I "went for it," how could I make that choice?

I guess it's all very selfish, but it tears me up because it just doesn't seem fair.  None of it does.