abridged

So it turns out that I’m posting what I’m about to post (you'll see it above soon) on Valentine’s Day, though I wrote it 10 days ago or so. Only appropriate I suppose.

My last three years I spent my Valentine’s Day with X. It does not make me sad so much directly. It’s a day meant to remind lovers to stop and celebrate each other, and what they have together, if they don’t already. It does not follow that non-lovers should non-celebrate on that day. We got every day of the year to do that, if we really wanted to. :)

Still, it does bring back memories. Good ones, the 3-course dinner he cooked me, the cards, the long, endless kisses. Not all of them good, because a day like that’s bound to set you up for disappointment. Like when he wanted to watch hockey on TV our first Valentine’s. ‘What does it matter so long as we’re together?’ Then there was me, always secretly wanting to spend our Valentine’s having as much sex as we could. Or at least pushing our raunch envelope a little further. I think this embarrassed him sometimes… He told me once that though he enjoyed it, I was trying too hard. Sigh. He did have a point I suppose. Last year's Valentine’s was the hardest in a way, just four months or so before our end. He came over and I rented sappy movies and made chicken parmesan scallopini, and spaghetti with a fabulous tomato and fresh basil sauce, and salad, and breadsticks, all from scratch, with white wine. But I forgot I didn’t own a corkscrew so he spent half an hour trying to open it with a knife, as the food went cold. And not to be daunted, we poured through a sieve and clinked to us, ignoring the little cork pieces still floating inside my whiskey glasses, since I didn’t own any wine goblets either. And then we watched some MegRyan puke fest. Strangely he was always more into the chicky flickies than me. I wanted to go with the sinful and Jolie one. And halfway through, I could not bear it anymore and laid a blanket on the floor and had him sit next to me. And we made out. Haven't 'made out' in so long. And his eyes wandered to the TV screen between kisses and pieces of clothes. And when we were done, I’ll never forget, he joked in his own slangy way, ‘Unecessary, interrupting the movie like that.’

Yes, yes I suppose it was. I tried too hard, I really did. I knew it wasn’t about the sex and the lingerie and the declarations and the dinners and the wine. (Love and sex always blurring lines for me I guess.) Tried so hard to feel a depth I couldn’t feel. Covered it up. Whereas he felt secure and deep already in it, with barely any need to try at all. Except his cards, always heartfelt and simple in what he wrote. And then I stopped trying altogether. And yet still a certain sweetness to those days. And then my depression got so much worse in the following month, trying to figure us out, watching us die, watching me die. I never did return those movies, thought about it, but couldn’t get the energy to pull through. Stopping to remember to actually do it, to take the bus, to walk into the store, face a face, come back, so exhausting. And I would try to kill myself, only my third time in two years, wow typing that out not so fun, though X only knows of one and not this last one either, noone knows, a lonely ambulance ride, hey another bill I haven't paid come to think of it, a nightmare ten hour wait in an emergency room, because wanting to kill yourself is not as life-threatening as some ironically, I was fine, had puked most of it up anyways, the nausea unbearable, just didn't want to go back home, even the crisis team sounded better than home, and I would go home, and I would exist for a week, I would call my sister, I would take a break from X, a break from school, and my mom would come to live with me, to take care of me for three months, try this medication, try that medication, slowly coming alive, slowly feeling like actually doing something, anything, talking with T during this break, erotic stories and puns, finally meeting with him once at the mall, though X knew, and then meeting with T a second time in a lonely park in the middle of the night, because I was feeling so restless as to be insane, I blame it on la lune, head on T’s lap on a bench in a public park with winding creek, fully lit by a full moon, not dark at all, with his sheepskin jacket on me because it was cold, we played word games but nothing else, not jumping him though I wanted to, and then the sun came up and we parted, and it felt just right, sounds romantic but it wasn’t at all, because a backdrop does not a romance make, I was learning already, but just right, just friendly enough, and then my last meeting with my X before he became my X, how I just did not want him there anymore despite all our efforts, both of us, and he could sense it as much as me. And then our end. And then T, and then this blog. You may ask if T took me away from X. I think he was a catalyst in bringing the rolling, dying, sighing inertia of me and X to an end, yes. I left X behind when I finally felt better, yes. Were you going to ask that too? Funny that that’s my whole repetitious story really.. Pages and pages of it saved on my computer, unsifted, but now condensed into this paragraph.

Time compresses memories, easy, polished, bite-sized bytes for you and me.

And of course, I forgot about those rentals altogether, and just this last month, I had to pay their cost in full, plus late fees, plus a big black mark on my credit record. For a bunch of usesless Valentine’s Day DVDs, except for the Jolie one, but even that I can’t bring myself to watch. A little karmic payback from X.

Ah yes, memories. Don’t be fooled, it’s not the day that bothers me.

One last memory coming with him here: a celebration of a non-love, a non-celebration of a love.

(Because already in this posthumous dragging intro, I’ve contradicted myself. And will continue to throughout.)