closure.

it's hard to tell which pains me more: the realization that i have lost a certain innocence that i had just a few short months ago, or how unfathomably naive i have been in my past. i ask because i have been drawn to revisit some of my earliest entries here, those concerning The Breakup, curious to look from the safe vantage point of a new love.
i remember at the time being so certain that he'd been telling me the truth about why he had to leave, about why he didn't want to be with me. i remember clinging to that belief like it was driftwood, like it was water and air. i remember needing to believe that there had to be some sort of reason why he left me. i couldn't accept that he'd just stopped loving me, if he'd ever started. i remember my friends shaking their heads, worried that i was hurting so much, and not believing for a second a single word of the pretty words i was holding on to.
looking back at all the things i wrote about the entire sordid affair, i realize that my friends were right. it was horseshit, every word he said to me. and i feel like a fool for ever believing it. more so now when the word around the campfire is that he has another girlfriend; everything he said about needing to not be involved with someone, to figure himself out without the prop of a lover, was utter rubbish. it wasn't that he didn't want a lover; it was that he didn't want that lover to be me. and it is to his credit that he didn't want to say that to me outright; he had at least that much concern for how i felt.
and you know what? that's fine. i'm finally okay with that. now, i'm just disgusted with myself for ever having believed it. for ever having needed it just to get up in the morning. because i should never wrap up my self worth in what an ex-lover thinks of me.

but by the same token, i am saddened that i don't think i'm ever going to do that again, fall wildly in love with someone with arms flung wide and no considerations for reality. that piece of me has been locked up so tight i can't even find the hinges. and it does manifest itself in my relationship with d., every time i keep my mouth shut, every time i hush him for talking about the future. he has decided that when he looks towards his future, he's started seeing me in it. and i can't get behind that the way i would have a year ago. i am reluctant to open that last chamber of my heart again, that blind optimism and good faith and unfaltering trust, because the last time i did it i stopped functioning properly for a short period. and that does sadden me, because i want to fall headlong into this, i want to be rapturously in love with no reservations and no fear. but i can't. not yet. or ever, really. never again will i give that gift with no ribbons to surreptitiously tie it to the apron strings, should i need it back.
which is not to say i'm a completely cynical old bird about the whole thing. i'm no longer pushing d. away with everything i've got. i've let him in, a move which has already proven to be a good one. but i fought him at the beginning, and sometimes still consider running hard and fast, so that i don't lose another piece of my heart, my innocence.