What I Can't Say

I say all sorts of things that I shouldn't.  I know I've hurt people's feelings (probably most often my mother's) with careless and callous words, but even so, what I probably regret more than anything are the times when I should've said something or wanted to say something and I just didn't. 

The other day a friend introduced me to the Daily Mission Project (which in itself is really fun to read), and in my browsing, I came across April 19th's mission: "Think of one person in your life you wish you had said something, anything to. Track them down and say it."

When I read that, I knew exactly who I'd track down if it were my mission.  Luckily, it's not.  I don't know that I would ever actually send this to him, but if I did, it would go something like this:

Dear ____________,

A while ago, a guy that I really liked broke up with me. I was so blind-sided by it that I didn't even know what to say at the time.  I made some lame joke so we could laugh away the awkwardness and brushed it off as though he had just told me that he couldn't get tickets to see Avatar in 3D and not that he had just told me that he couldn't see us working out in the long-term.  When I got home, it still hadn't registered; I was simply stunned.  What just happened?  I started to wonder if part of the reason he had ended things was because I had been too emotionally distant with him.  Had it even been clear to him that I liked him?  I wasn't sure.  I couldn't sleep, so I wrote him an email in the wee hours of the morning, telling him how I felt and explaining to him that the only reason I was even bothering to tell him any of this at all was because the one thing I regretted the most about my past relationships was not telling this one person how I felt about him at the time.

That one person is you.  For whatever reason, that regret - not telling you how I felt about you at the time - has managed to resurface from time to time in the last few years.  It bubbles up most often when I'm feeling particularly alone or when yet another potential relationship has gone awry or when I meet someone who even remotely reminds me of you.  The puzzling thing is that I don't know why it's a feeling of regret.  There's no "what if?" trailing that feeling.  It's not as though I think, or even wish, that things could have turned out differently.  Circumstances are circumstances, and to me it seems fated that you and I were only meant to cross paths for a short period of time.  Regardless, I still wish you had known how I felt about you at the time.  How much I liked you.  How uncharacteristically emotional I was when I had to leave you.  My friends have all said, "Well I'm sure he knew on some level how much you liked him."  But did you?  I guess sometimes I worry that you think I only dated you because it was convenient.  Because you were there at the right place and the right time.  But if that really is what you think, then you're wrong.  You were there at the right place and at the right time but you were also the right person.  The right person for me.

If life is all about timing, then our timing could not have been more or less perfect.

Without regrets,
____________

Evidence, Part II

Okay, so my friend emailed me today to tell me that my last post was depressing even HER.  Oops.  I know the title says "sometimes depressing" and I guess so far, it's been more "mostly depressing" than anything else.  I think it's just a phase.  Or maybe it's just seasonal affective disorder.  Luckily, spring is around the corner and so is a potential date.  Today, I found myself rather prematurely wondering what I might end up writing about him - this kind of random, totally new guy who hasn't even earned a spot in the alphabet yet.  I'm not even going to go into how weird it is that I wasn't thinking about him but what I would write about him.  Truthfully, I don't foresee myself having a particularly strong reaction to him one way or another since I didn't when I first met him, but for the sake of argument, let's say I do.  Let's say I fall completely 100% head-over-heels, madly-in-love with him on our first (not-even-set-yet) date.  Will I still want write about him in an unfiltered way, knowing that if things turn out badly, those permanently inscribed words may haunt me (and depress others)?  I decided the answer is still yes.  Sure, things may turn out terribly and those words may evolve into painful evidence of yet another one of my failed relationships, but I am not going to let that concern stop me from memorializing how I feel because...you know what?  One of these days, I will write some sappy journal or blog entry about how much I like someone and that someone, whoever he is, will be thinking the same thing about me.  And when that day rolls around, my words will no longer be a sad reminder of how wrong I was, but of how right I was.  And then one of you lucky girls will have to go back through these entries or my emails to you, find those gag-inducing sentences and read them out loud at my wedding when you give the maid of honor toast.

And that is when writing it all down will have been totally worth it.

Evidence

It turns out that I have two journals.  There's the ugly, brown journal that I write in from time-to-time and then there's what I like to think of as my travel notebook.  I bought it a mere four months after I bought the ugly, brown journal, partly because the second notebook is conveniently-sized, lightweight and durable, making it more travel-friendly, but also because when you're on an overnight train in Egypt, it looks a lot cooler to whip out a black, Moleskine ("the legendary notebook of artists, writers, intellectuals and travelers") than it does to whip out an ugly, very journal-looking journal.

So yesterday, I was trying to find something to bring around the city with me and remembered my travel notebook.  Looking for the first empty page, I flipped past foreign hotel phone numbers and phonetic spellings of "thank you" and "hello" in four other languages before discovering that the last thing I wrote in my Moleskine was a journal entry about 'D'.

I couldn't bring myself to read what I had written.  From the first few lines, I realized I had written it just after our third date, which meant that it was right about the time that I started thinking he was perfect for me.  I couldn't read any further.  I knew it was probably a girlish gushing of all the things that I had learned and liked about him so far, and I just did NOT want to think about how much I liked him or how hopeful I was at the time.

In the last month or so, I honestly haven't thought about him that much.  Which unfortunately also made me realize that if I wasn't even thinking about him, then for sure, he was not thinking about me...  In any case, working non-stop, going out-of-town and seeing 'E' were all great distractions this month.  Of course, every now and then, 'D' did seep into my thoughts.  Usually when I try to get over someone, I try to forget what I liked about them and focus on all the negatives.  I haven't really done that with 'D' (although I will admit that when I saw him for the first time two weeks ago, I did think to myself, I am definitely cuter than him).  Instead, my thoughts have centered more on whether I really liked him specifically or whether I just really liked the idea of him.  The idea of dating someone who could fit into my life.  The idea of not going on any more first dates.  The idea of being 26 and ready.

I do think all of this is true.  So much of life is about timing, and surely timing did affect my state-of-mind when I started dating 'D'.  Yes, he did fit a lot of my "criteria" but would I have thought he was that great if I had met him two years ago?  Probably not.

Still, no matter how much I try to make why I liked him less about him and more about me, the evidence that could potentially contradict all of this there, in that travel notebook, in my own handwriting, unread.

On Writing

This past weekend I went out of town, and when I got back on Sunday, I dug out my paper journal.  Once upon a time, I journalled regularly.  My favorite journal was this gorgeous leather one from Crane's with pages that felt like...fresh mozzarella.  Soft and slippery and almost squishy.  Now my current journal is this drab, brown, cloth-covered, hardback book that I bought at Ikea for like $2.  I've had it since January 2008 and there's not more than a handful of entries in it (3 in all of 2009).  When I stopped journalling regularly, it was because I was writing simply out of habit.  It was like brushing my teeth - if I didn't do it before I went to bed, I felt guilty!  My entries had become robotic, nothing more than a daily account of what I had done that day.  So I made the conscious decision to stop journalling daily and just write when I really felt like writing, which usually meant when I was feeling particularly emotional.  

On Sunday, I pulled out my journal for exactly the opposite reason - I was feeling rather unemotional.  By all accounts I had a very eventful weekend, one that may eventually inspire a flurry of posts here.  But when I sat down at my computer, nothing came to me.  I kept starting and stopping.  Everything I typed, I went back and deleted.  It was like thought after unrelated thought kept floating through my head.  It was almost like I felt indifferent to what had transpired over the weekend.  But I thought, surely, surely, there was no way I could feel nothing about it.  Surely it had to be because there were just too many feelings and too many thoughts that I couldn't pin even one down. 

So I journalled.  I put pen to paper.  There was no going back and deleting or cutting and pasting or moving things around or coming up with better ways to phrase things.  It was just one big purple-ink jumble of my unfiltered thoughts.  I hoped that writing everything out in a frazzled stream of consciousness would help me to sort of what I was feeling.  But it didn't.  I'm still puzzled by my lack of any strong reaction to this events of this past weekend.   But maybe that's just it.  Maybe I don't need a "takeaway" from this weekend.  Maybe there's nothing to figure out.  Maybe it's okay to shrug and just move on.

The Beginning, Take 2

I think it's only fitting that my first (slash second) post here is about how terrible my memory is. Short-term, long-term, all equally bad. Case in point: this morning, I was clicking through some blogs and thought, oh hey. I started a blog about a month ago too! So I tried to go to it. I went to allinthedance.blogspot.com, then I tried wereallinthedance.blogspot.com, then I tried allindance.blogspot.com before I gave up and just logged into my gmail account. I must say it's a good freaking thing that blogspot and gmail are linked otherwise I never would've remembered my password and I would've given up on the blog thing altogether.

So all that being said, the thing that I love about writing and journaling and well nowadays emailing, is that I can go back and read exactly what I was thinking at a certain point in time. Because usually I can't actually remember. I used to really love (well, I still do) a good old-fashioned, hand-written letter. But the problem is, you pour your heart out in a letter, stuff it in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, send it off, and it's gone forever. I mean, unless your ex-boyfriend is just crazy and sentimental enough to tuck it away into a book for safe-keeping, and you're on good enough terms with him to say, "Hey you, remember that letter I wrote you when I was 16? Can I read it?" (Although hypothetically, just hypothetically, if I were to ever write a letter like that, I would obviously make a copy of it before licking the envelope... ) Anyway, I've been pretty introspective the last few days (a direct result of boy troubles, job troubles, and general quarter-life what-the-hell-am-i-doing-with-my-life troubles), which always puts me in a reading and writing mood. I write long-winded emails that I'm sure are really hard to respond to and I read back through old emails that I wrote to girlfriends, ex-boyfriends. The amazing thing is that whenever I'm emotional and start fishing through my inbox, the emails my exes wrote me don't make me cry (at least, not usually). No, it's my emails that make me cry. My own words make me cry. So I have no one to blame for my puffy eyes but myself!

More than that though, I'm really just surprised at my own words. Like, wait, was that me? Did I write that? Did I actually think that? Did I really feel that way about him? I guess my surprise is a result of being really good at compartmentalizing my feelings. Pushing them aside and just forgetting that they exist. So, the point is, I had initially planned on writing this blog completely in the third person. It was going to be an experimental ground for unrelated posts, loosely autobiographical but largely fictionalized. A collection of short stories and maybe on occasion, a baby novella of a few related stories. And while I think I probably will still post in that way every now and then, the point of this right now is more for me. For me to remember. For me to remember what it was like to be 26, living in New York in 2010. The ups and the downs. The good and the bad.

So here goes. Here's to remembering the present.