What is fair?
Last Monday, the night before Veterans Day, we went out for our annual school informal at a local dance club. Everything was going along fine, I managed to get relatively inebriated knowing full well that I had to be in the hospital the next morning, enough to the point where my dance moves go from "decent" to "really don't give a crap". As we got to my car, I saw that she was sending a text message. Assuming that she was texting the new guy, M, I let my jealousy get the best of me as I made some off-hand and insensitive comment that I was doing quite fine without her these days now and that she can feel free to "leave me in the dust." This led to a full-scale explosion of a conversation that culminated in my admission that I had made the greatest mistake of my life and then asking for another chance, one where I would actually try to talk and make it work instead of waiting until the frustration mounted to the point of catastrophe. She told me that she couldn't trust me, not after I broke her heart by not talking to her for 2 months as she waited for those first 3 weeks for me to realize and regret my mistake; she had no reason to believe that I wouldn't do the same thing again.
There's a certain degree of finality that comes with hearing "It's over" from the one you care about. No matter what your friends tell you about how you should move on with life, hearing it from that one person can really act like a swift kick in the rear to get on with everything else. And so, for the first time since the first 4 days that I found out she was seeing someone else, I actually genuinely felt happy that she was with someone other than me. I felt like I had gotten over this hump, and that life would return to simpler and hopefully gentler times.
Last night, we went out for a friend's birthday party, first at a house party followed by a nightclub outing. From the moment she approached me as we left the house party for the club last night up until an hour ago, I have been riding a rollercoaster of hope and despair, of unconditional love and unremitting self-loathing, of empowering clarity and paralyzing uncertainty. We parted company in confused, somewhat-hopeful spirits but with questions that could only be answered in time, for she would be leaving for New York and India for the next 3 months and would return in time to discover our fate for the next 3 years on National Residency Match Day. We agreed that if either of us still felt something for the other at that point, then she or I would tell the other so that we could resume the dialogue; we also agreed to do our best to move on with our lives between now and then.
She always talks about how things aren't fair, whether it's my actions or the choices she has to make or life in general. I tell her that nothing about life is fair, and I wonder if what I'm doing here is just another example. Our lives appear destined for different directions: she plans on returning home to New York for residency, while I had aspirations of Southern California; we are from two similar but also very different cultures; neither of us have any idea of what will really be in store for us in the future. And while I try to rebuild this relationship that I believe I had mistakenly abandoned to ruin, I can't completely distinguish whether or not my emotions are purely being driven by love and affection and hope that I feel towards her, or if part of this is my subconscious feeling inadequate over how things ended and is searching for a way to set the record straight. The latter possibility is an affront to fairness and an insult to her. I don't want to wind up like J.D. from Scrubs, after he convinces Elliot to break up with her current boyfriend to be with him and then discovers that he doesn't want her anymore.
Three months is a long time. I hope it's long enough for me to realize what I should do.
There's a certain degree of finality that comes with hearing "It's over" from the one you care about. No matter what your friends tell you about how you should move on with life, hearing it from that one person can really act like a swift kick in the rear to get on with everything else. And so, for the first time since the first 4 days that I found out she was seeing someone else, I actually genuinely felt happy that she was with someone other than me. I felt like I had gotten over this hump, and that life would return to simpler and hopefully gentler times.
Last night, we went out for a friend's birthday party, first at a house party followed by a nightclub outing. From the moment she approached me as we left the house party for the club last night up until an hour ago, I have been riding a rollercoaster of hope and despair, of unconditional love and unremitting self-loathing, of empowering clarity and paralyzing uncertainty. We parted company in confused, somewhat-hopeful spirits but with questions that could only be answered in time, for she would be leaving for New York and India for the next 3 months and would return in time to discover our fate for the next 3 years on National Residency Match Day. We agreed that if either of us still felt something for the other at that point, then she or I would tell the other so that we could resume the dialogue; we also agreed to do our best to move on with our lives between now and then.
She always talks about how things aren't fair, whether it's my actions or the choices she has to make or life in general. I tell her that nothing about life is fair, and I wonder if what I'm doing here is just another example. Our lives appear destined for different directions: she plans on returning home to New York for residency, while I had aspirations of Southern California; we are from two similar but also very different cultures; neither of us have any idea of what will really be in store for us in the future. And while I try to rebuild this relationship that I believe I had mistakenly abandoned to ruin, I can't completely distinguish whether or not my emotions are purely being driven by love and affection and hope that I feel towards her, or if part of this is my subconscious feeling inadequate over how things ended and is searching for a way to set the record straight. The latter possibility is an affront to fairness and an insult to her. I don't want to wind up like J.D. from Scrubs, after he convinces Elliot to break up with her current boyfriend to be with him and then discovers that he doesn't want her anymore.
Three months is a long time. I hope it's long enough for me to realize what I should do.