Supple Cow

I need to get a lot of things off my chest and the TFP seems like both the best and worst place to do it all at once. That always seems to happen when it's about ubertuber. I am the kind of person that needs to share my rough times, otherwise I carry them around with me for long, long time, but when it involves another member of the community I'm sharing with, something about it never feels quite right. In any case, I have never said a word to tarnish his reputation here, and I'm not about to start now.

About five days ago, we broke up. In some ways, I saw it coming for months and months, but in my everyday consciousness, it was big shock. It has been hard for a lot of reasons. The primary reason for the first few days was that I missed two days of my pill immediately before it happened and my hormones were on a mission to make me cry uncontrollably. This only led to more problems, namely me vomiting pages of conflicting and confusing emotions at him via middle-of-the-night email, which of course, led to him getting angry with me and telling me so. You can probably guess that this just led to more crying. I finally realized that my hormones were the culprit when I later reread my emails and didn't remember thinking or writing 99% of what I apparently had. Next, more emails to apologize, and finally an explanatory phone message. I was forgiven.

Now, the hard part. In 8 months, I grew as a person in a way that I never could at any school or camp I ever went to, or with my oldest and dearest friends. I grew more into the person I am glad I have become while dating ubertuber than I have from any other experience I've had in the past, and I grew because I paid for it. I paid almost constantly with the pain that comes from doing things that make me uncomfortable. (The good kind of uncomfortable, of course. The kind that teaches you things and makes you grow.) While there were needs I had that ubertuber just wasn't the person to fulfill, I knew from the start that we would have a very meaningful and valuable relationship. And so, I ignored these needs - at least, I thought I did - because they were less important to me in the long run.

Last night, I sat up thinking for hours about things that made me cry and then stayed up even longer thinking about why I had these thoughts and where they were coming from. I realized something important in those hours. I realized that I was crying over a love I "lost" that never existed. What keeps me up at night crying over my loss are thoughts of the comforting things that ubertuber used to do that made me feel the good things I did for him. Those were the moments that changed my respect and admiration for him into love. Those were also moments that never happened in real life. They were daydreams: from mornings I would come home from a night with him and feel like I wasn't quite satisfied with the time we had just spent together, from difficult times in my own life when I cried and he couldn't get away from school or work to come comfort me, and from simple wishful thinking. They filled in the gaps where he couldn't for so long that I never realized there was a difference between what ubertuber was and what he meant to me. I've been crying over a person that never existed.

Unfortunately, just because I've realized this doesn't mean that it's going to be easy to separate the two. The ubertuber in my head and the one that lives and breathes still bear too close a resemblance. They look the same, sound the same, smell the same, feel the same... I sure wish they were the same, but they aren't.

I'm not worried that our friendship will end or that I will be plagued by this misdirected love for my whole life, but I am worried about starting over too soon and missing the lesson in it because of my hurry to heal. I suppose this will come in time, regardless. There are a lot of things like this that I worry about a little everyday. I'm sure they will all pass.

The worst part now is that I feel like an ass. For 8 months, I grew and grew like a potted plant in a sunny window, oblivious to the hand that watered me and the pot that held me, feeling very big and proud of myself and saying "Wow, this is finally it. I'm 20 years old and grown." Now it's hard not to say, "I'm only 20 years old and that's still a kid in the long run - what did I expect?" It's a similar feeling to my adolescence when my family told me constantly how proud they were of what a responsible person I was and what a good driver I was, but still didn't let me drive by myself until I was 17. I worked this hard to be able to do this thing that kids can't do, but here I am. I'm still a goddamn kid. Obviously, some things have changed since then and I'm confident that things will continue to change and improve. Yet, knowing that it's going to be better later sometimes makes it hurt worse now.