The sorrow.

I wrote this earlier today...fuck it, I'm publishing it. It's my life, it's my blog, and I have the right to be selfish. I've paid for that right a thousand times with my own tears, and no one...no one...has the right to complain until they've tried walking a single step in my shoes over the past month and a half.

Furthermore, this is very likely to be my last blog post for a while. Following this last moment of catharsis, I don't think that I want to share my life with the world any more, outside of my close circle of family and friends. The world is cruel, sometimes. I'm going to write for myself and myself alone. Those who want to be a part of my life are invited to share it with me. I'm deleting my facebook profile as well, to isolate myself from the party pictures and the flip status updates and the new friends and the place where she left our love behind. It's too painful, and I can see too much through friends of friends and through my self-destructively over-competent nerd skills.

Over the last year, I slowly allowed myself to fall in love with a young woman who came to Portland from the east coast, and who shall remain nameless. She planned to go to graduate school away from Portland and I planned to come here, to Japan, so we knew that our relationship, if it progressed, was, at best, going to be difficult and, at worst, doomed. In the early stages, it was an ever present shadow, but we enjoyed each other's company and so things moved forward, regardless. I fell in love with her first, and told her so, gently. The feeling had been building for weeks, and I couldn't keep it inside any more. Love must be shared. I waited patiently over the course of more weeks for her to reciprocate. I didn't push the issue, or jealously demand her love. Eventually, one beautiful morning in her room, she told me that she loved me too.

This is hard. This is really, really hard. Gotta keep going...I need to get this out of my head.

And so we loved each other, and it was very good. I gave her my heart. I cooked for her, I cleaned for her, I picked her up from work when I could, and I was there for her whenever and wherever she needed help. I was content. I recall one rainy evening when I picked her up on the side of the road. She had called me, on her cell phone, for help. Her bike had a flat tire. I came and got her, and I felt such great joy that I could be with her and that I could be there for her...just one small memory out of the many times that I offered her my love and encouragement and support.

I was in school throughout the course of our relationship, taking a heavy classload, but my time with her was precious and so I sacrificed as much as I could to be with her and still accomplish my goals. I did. I did both. I graduated with excellent grades, with honors, and yet I still enjoyed my life as much as possible, together with her and with my friend, B., and my cat, Ashes.

And eventually I graduated. Our time together, now becoming short, grew sadder and sadder, but it was still mostly happy and good. We loved each other and, as the time of her departure grew nearer, we gradually made greater and more extravagant claims of love. We did not want our time in Portland to end. But, after a wonderful, terrible, bittersweet week of living together, in my apartment, come to an end it did.

It was excruciating. I cried and cried, much like I am now, but there was nothing to be done. I called her every day, and we spoke on the phone at length. We talked about our plans for the future after my trip, living and loving together in San Diego, where she was going to grad school. I was looking for work in Japan, and expected to find something directly, but the jobs that I'd applied for never materialized. For the first time in my life, since I'd started school, and giving a shit, it was difficult to achieve my goal. It felt like failure, although I know that, thanks to my own perfectionism, I was being unduly hard on myself.

I told her, one hot day in August, that I wanted to just come to her college town to be with her, instead of moving to Japan. That was the beginning of the end. On the phone, she went icicle cold and berated me for my decision. Rather than joyful, she was clearly upset and very nearly on the verge of outright anger. The fact that she was right didn't lessen the sting of rejection.

It wasn't the first time that she had reacted in that way. In April, my roommate told me that he needed to move out, and her roommate told us that it would be OK if I moved in. I told her that we would need to discuss it carefully before we made any decisions, trying to take things slow, but, again, she went as cold as the Arctic tundra, and told me that she needed some time and space. I barely heard from her for about 4 days, before the thaw came and we were together again.

It should have been clear, then, that she had some very serious commitment issues regarding our relationship, and I should have broken it off right then, long before we got to the point, later that summer, where we were mutually declaring the depths of our great love from 2800 miles away.

I am a fool.

So, her sister stepped in and calmed the situation down before it melted down into the inevitable explosion. After all, we still loved each other. I could just go to Japan, as planned, and we would just see what would happen. No need for any dramatic action.

Rather than look for work in Japan from the United States, I decided to just take off. I had money, and I slowly stashed away the important things and got rid of the things that had tied me down for years in the States. I eventually left my dear Ashes with my parents, at the cost of such great pain that it is better if I don't think about it. The plan was to look for work here and we'd just see what would happen.

As she left with her parents for graduate school, I immediately noticed another great chilling, more coldness. Where before we had talked for an hour a day, every day...now, on the eve of September...nothing. No calls from her, barely returned text messages. I still don't know exactly what happened. She never really told me. Our ability to effectively communicate somehow died on that trip, and I have to learn to accept that I'll never understand what happened.

I broke up with her on the night before she arrived at graduate school and while I was moving out of my apartment, a horrific undertaking even without the onus of a breakup. I shouldn't have had to do it, but she wasn't strong enough to hurt me. I think maybe she hoped that things would just peter out over the course of time, but I don't really know. I probably never will. Maybe I jumped the gun and if I had just let it ride, things would have worked out much differently. Again...I'll never know.

We talked, we expressed our need to remain friends and to remain in contact. She told me that she wanted to be in my life, to be part of it. She told me this repeatedly over the weeks, but again...I felt the coldness, the detachment. Two weeks went by without contact, after what I felt was a particularly thoughtless conversation, and then she called out of the blue, and we talked, and we reaffirmed our love and our desire to be friends. Again. And I felt better. Again.

When I left for Japan, she was the last person I talked to in Portland. We declared our love, and our desire to be friends. Yadda yadda yadda...so meaningless, now. I had sent her a package with a note expressing myself. Same song and dance. My love for her. My desire to be friends, to stay in contact. I wrote it on a piece of paper that she had sent to me with her birthday present, a t-shirt that she'd bought for me, and a souvenir pen. Considering the number of hours and the amount of thought that I'd put into her present a few months earlier, I suppose I should have been insulted. I wasn't. The note was what really mattered...it's sitting next to me, but I will be putting it away shortly. Maybe I'll just destroy it. It contains, again, more declarations of love and friendship and desire to stay in touch. God, it's all so fucking hollow now.

After I'd been here for about a week, I sent her an email asking her for an update and explaining that I really needed to know how she was doing and what she was doing. I'd been feeling isolated here and I really needed to hear from her. I needed to know that she cared. She took over 2 days to take 5 fucking minutes to bother to respond to my really heartfelt plea, and her response broke my heart...again.

She told me that it was really over and that she needed time to put herself back together and that she wanted limited communication between us. She ended the note with "Best," and then signed her name, as if I were a business acquaintance or an old college buddy.

I have to respect her wishes, even though my only desire in this world is to hold her and to whisper in her ear one more time. I have chased and chased and chased and given and given and given. I've offered her my soul on a platter...I can't chase her or give her any more.

It's over now. It's over and I need to move on. My unanswered questions will remain unanswered, and our friendship will become a friendship in name only, not in either words or actions. As of this moment, I fully expect that we will become just another pair of estranged ex-lovers, and that is the very saddest part of this story.

It's her, though. It's her choice. I've done nothing to deliberately hurt her...I've done nothing wrong. She wants me out of her life, at least in any meaningful sort of way. How can I argue? Why should I try to convince her otherwise? I can't. I won't. Not any more. It is useless.

I will stop giving myself to people in this way. In the future, I will wait. I will set my standards higher, and I will choose as carefully as possible, and I will bail out of any relationship at the very earliest sign of any great flaw or misdeed or emotional detachment. Those 3 fatal words, "I love you," have been my downfall for too, too long. My soul is shredded and scarred every time I go through this, and this is the worst yet...I can't do it any more. I had dreams of children and marriage and a love that would last me the rest of my days with this woman. And now I have nothing. The taste is bitter, so bitter.

My self-declared and mutually affirmed Great Love has died. It is taking more than a little of me with it. I will not be a fool any more, but the wisdom I now possess has a very nasty cost.

Goodbye, my love. I hope you have what you need. Tomorrow is another day for both of us. We face it without each other. Goodbye.