"memories consume
like opening the wound
I'm picking me apart again"
[Linkin Park, "Breaking the Habit"]

Before I begin, anyone who read yesterdays journal entry last night (11 Jan 04) should know I updated it today. I realized this morning that I'd forgotten to include one of the most crucial elements: the Bunny in a Pot Conspiracy. I inserted it and reuploaded at the same time I uploaded this.

So... where to begin? Let's begin with 1 year ago, since that's where today's brain-buzz began.

A year ago yesterday, Jenny broke up with me. She's one of only two women who ever made the decision to ditch me, with all my other relationships being either my decision or a mutual decision. I didn't take it well back in '92 when Tracey Skinner decided to end things between her and I, and it took me a year to really get past it. I don't get over these rejections easily, because of the lack of control I have over the situation - life has dealt me a blow I was powerless to avoid, and I am powerless to change or overcome. Coping means convincing myself that it never would have worked out anyway, and so the break-up was merely an inevitability that defies control anyway, but when you have to convince yourself that it would never have worked out - with someone you're still in love with - it's no small task. It takes a while. It didn't take me nearly as long to get past Jenny, but then Jenny and I were not together for very long, so I'd not had that much chance to grow too attached.
Except to the sex. I still fantasize about that. Damn she was a great fuck.
When we split, I did what something I thought was a good idea at the time, and which, over the past few months, I've grown to regret a little. Well, I shouldn't say "regret", as I'd do it again, no doubt, and regret is too strong a word. But let's just say it's become a bit of a thorn in my side. "Shrapnel", as I've come to think of it today, in the wound in my heart. And a wound can't truly be healed until the shrapnel is gone. Otherwise, whenever you move that part - my heart in this case - you can sometimes still feel it in there. My shrapnel:

I wrote her a letter, sealed it, and made her swear to me not to open it until her birthday in 2004.

So for over a year, she's kept this sealed envelope with a 3 or 4 page letter inside, unaware of its contents, like a literary time-bomb. It was well-intentioned when I wrote it. I was feeling very in-tune with her, and wrote what I thought would be a nice gift to her, in fact. We'd just broken up, so I'm sure that there's still some element of "you're making a mistake" or "we really should be together" to be read between the lines of it, but that's really not the point of it. It was meant as a very well-intentioned gift. It was me sending a hopeful message into the future, and expecting somehow that against all odds, my writing talents were strong enough to surpass her having a year to forget me and move on, and that I'd somehow still, despite all that distance, be able to reach inside and touch her heart. Rather egotistical, I know, but my words are all I have. They are my talent and the source of all my power. It was a desperate attempt to defy the curve-ball life had thrown me, and to prove myself capable even in this. But I set a year-long date on it, not thinking just how long a time that is, and how different we'd be by now, and how much might have changed. Or perhaps I did know, and my ego really is that large.

That future will very soon be the present, and having re-read the letter (I kept a copy) a few times over the past year, and knowing I'm a very different person now, and she may well be too, I just don't know how well-received it will be. It's not like she and I are close friends these days, so I probably shouldn't even be worried by it, since its impact will be restricted to a relationship that's all but non-existent for me at this point. But it's not really about her or about us any more. It's about the exercise itself at this point. I want it to be a success. When I wrote it, I wanted it to be a success for my sake, as much as I told myself it was for hers. Now I want it to be a success for her sake, as much as it feels like its for mine. Or is it the other way around? I'm not even any more sure now than I was then.

Rather, what I know is that even though I knew a year ago I'd have to put it behind me, and finally resolved in my mind that our breaking up was the right thing months ago, that letter has loomed over my head like the Sword of Damocles, in spite of the fact that its actual consequences should be minimal.

And perhaps that's the part that's really bothering me - that over the course of a few days, I poured my heart and soul into a project I hoped would have a tremendous impact, that would prove my strength not just to her but to myself, and now, a year of wondering later, just as it's about to come to its completion, I feel almost certain it will simply fizzle away into nothing: no impact, no tremendous change, just a smirk and a "yeah, whatever".

I wrote it because the somebody that I wanted to make me feel like a somebody made me feel like an anybody or a nobody simply because she didn't feel like a somebody with me, and needed to find a somebody of her own - and I don't blame her for that - she's entitled to feel like a somebody, and to be with a somebody. But I knew in a year, I'd just be another anybody from her past, and I wasn't satisfied with that, so I tried to prove I'm not just anybody.

But unless you've found somebody, and you're their somebody, you are just anybody. And that's not her fault, that's just life. I knew then it was an inevitability, and it certainly feels like one now. It'd have been no more sensible to tell gravity to stop affecting you and expect to start flying, but I thought myself so powerful I told the darkness to retreat, actually expecting it would.

It won't. So in 14 days, she'll either smirk and shrug, or, at best, she'll smile and thank me and tell me it was nice, or perhaps she'll even get angry and tell me to fuck right off. But whatever she does, assuming she even still has it and that she remembers to read it, nothing will change between she and I. No apocalypse will come, nor redemption. There will be no miraculous emotional salvation for either of us, nor will we run into each other's arms in slow motion and have a Holywood ending.

I was a paper tiger.

I'll soon be a straw dog too.

At least once it's done it'll be gone. I'll take the sword down, remove the shrapnel, and perhaps I can finally start being real again, in a way I've been struggling to find.