just another entry fucking repeating myself
09.06.20 | 8:49 pm
so i woke up at 2am this morning, rolled around in bed until 2:45am when i looked at my phone and saw that you had texted me.
“so what’ve you been up to?” (the rare direct question about my life) “i learned the phrase ‘down to the wire’ recently.”
i told you i couldn’t sleep, told you i’d learned ‘jérémiades’ recently, and then you told me, “sleep. go to sleep. i’ll talk to you later.” until i told you i was eating a bowl of cereal as a snack.
you told me about your date. it went perfectly fine. you kissed her and went home.
and you spent the next thirty minutes overanalyzing it. talking about the ways she was different from your ex, how your ex was such a feminist (as if that were a bad thing? i reminded you that i, too, am a feminist, obviously, so maybe you were treading lightly with what you meant), but now you feel weird because this new woman is “not feminist one bit.”
then you talked about how this woman doesn’t text much, and how that’s so different, and how that’s probably good for you. you had decided during lockdown to do the opposite (george’s opposite) and so you rarely texted her either.
we ended the conversation, i went to sleep, dreamt about you (we were together clearly in the stupid dream, you had a sister who was an actor and you decided to make a tiktok dressed as a mermaid dancing to a song to ask her to come to the water park where we were), i told you about it when i woke up (except that we were together in it). “wt actual f,” you said.
i asked if i had ever told you about the recurring dream i have (getting married, desperately don’t want to, feel like i have to). you said, “no.” no follow up. so i didn’t tell you. just changed the subject.
i told you about how my brother and sister-in-law are having a baby girl, about how my friends just told us they’re having their second kid. you said you like the idea of having kids, that you’re not against it.
i told you about the book i just finished, how much i loved it, how it ripped my heart out, and then you told me the cutest story about your date when the two of you were thinking about dessert. how you both said you really only liked one dessert. how it ended up being the same dessert. but then they were out of the dessert!
here is where this all got me.
i remarked how cute it was. how another friend has recently found someone and how he’s been telling me all the cute things he’s been doing with her. i said how much i loved cute stuff like that.
“soon you will tell me your cute stuff,” you said.
soon you will tell me your cute stuff.
i don’t know why this triggered such an intense reaction in me. but it felt like my heart fell out of my chest. like he’d just pegged something that i know will never happen.
i told you i’m not dating this summer so it’ll be a while for me.
“you never know. when you expect the least ... it’s stupid to say. but it happens.”
and that hurt even more.
here is the truth: i am terrified that i will always be the person that everyone gets to tell their cute stories to, that i will never actually have any real cute stories to call my own.
i will continue to do what i always do: create a fake version of each person in my head, read more into their actions than is actually there, and therefore never have a true relationship ever again.
all of this — this entire stupid situation — was my own fault start to finish. it was always entirely in my head. and i’m the one who decided to never say anything about it, either.
and i’m so fucking tired of writing the same shit over and over. this whole thing? was a repeat of everything with matt. i thought and wrote such similar fucking things.
soon you will tell me your cute stuff?
no, you don’t know the future. you don’t know if i will actually be alone forever. that’s an actual possibility.
maybe i am too picky anyway. maybe i need to get to know people through this way that creates a false sense of intimacy (like i told you today when we were talking about the texting) and that’s a very specific weird situation. maybe i don’t know how to actually connect with people anymore. maybe i never knew to begin with.
sometimes i want to say, “i’m like x in a relationship,” but the truth is, i don’t know what i’m like in a relationship anymore. and i certainly don’t know what i’d be like in a relationship where i actually felt comfortable and happy and entirely safe all at the same time.
this is a rambly mess.
and it’s because i didn’t sleep well.
and because you think soon i’ll be telling you cute stuff.
and because really, i won’t.
for one reason or another.
i won’t.