Once Upon a Dream?
I had a dream last night. A catalyst that helped put everything into better focus. I'm still not seeing everything as clearly as I like to but at least I have a better understanding of how far my mind has twisted things. The dream itself was deceptively simple - or at least the parts that mattered. It was as if someone heard of my situation and thought they could put everything right again and make me happy by pulling a few strings. My ex calls me on the phone and confesses that contrary to what I've been led to believe for the past year, she does still love me with all of the passion that she used to. We go to the beach and play volleyball with some freinds and afterwards, as we lie next to one another in the sun we can feel the tension between us again, pulling us together. Everything is back as it should be... right?
But it's not. Even my sleeping, subconcious mind knows better. Knows it isn't right. Knows that bringing her back isn't the answer, no matter what the excuse. Because the truth is she isn't who she used to be; who I used to believe she was. And she never will be. I will never see her the same way again. Anyone who knew me would know that if we were to ever end up back together it would be under radically different circumstances and rather than some nostalgic return to the past it would be an ironic reconnection of our future selves. I woke up feeling sick by the audacity of the dream. Angered that the Dreamweaver would have the nerve to dare to think a vision like that would make me happy.
But the vision opened doors. For the first time in weeks I had something to say to Lisa. I talked contiunously for the entire session, not so much for her benefit as just to think out loud and finally fill in some of the holes that have been nagging at me for years. That dream helped me realize a few things. When my ex left, I was distraught and it took a while to get over her in the traditional sense. It wasn't until late fall that I did, and I managed to acknowledge the truth of her absence. But something was still wrong. As it turns out, when she left, something snapped inside of me, and I've been broken ever since. Despite the fact that she and I came to amends about the breakup, I was still a shell of not only my former self from within the relationship, but paled even compared to who I was before it as well. I had lost functionality in both realms of my personal life.
When I was in high school I had a lot of female friends, and I knew that a lot of them had crushes on me. Apparently a lot of them also had crushes that I didn't know about. But I welcomed it because I was confident and felt that it reflected who I was and that I was deserving of the respect they placed in me. I went to my brother's place over the weekend and there was an incident where a housemate asked me where one of my brother's girlfriend's friends was. When I told him I didn't know, he mentioned that "I should go for her" because "she's semi-attractive and has a thing for me" and has apparently been talking about me when I'm not around. I was shocked. And then I was shocked that I was shocked. Since junior year I've degraded to the point where I cannot fathom why anyone would be interested in me.
In talking it over with Lisa I posed a hypothesis that even I find offensive. While my ex and I were together, she continually pushed our relationship forwards. When I didn't want to do long distance, she argued for me to give it a try. When I tried to back out after the first week of college, she came to visit me and convince me to keep with it. When I visited her and she asked if I could see myself marrying her, I said I didn't know because I had never thought about it. She was always pushing us further, bringing us closer together and I loved it. But then something went wrong. We hit the glass ceiling. As college students who had agreed to marry upon graduation and had planned our futures together there wasn't rationally any further that she could push our relationship. So it stagnated and she got bored and left. She had pulled me to the zenith and abandoned me there. She had always said that she got bored with all of her other relationships and we had thought that she had found something special in me that we managed to last so long and go so far, but what my hypothesis poses, what I fear I've been thinking subconciously since she left, is that there was nothing special about me. That she had merely reached a point in her life where she wanted to go for broke and I happened to be the next guy to come along. And that had I been anyone else, she would have pushed them as far as she could too.
I am not a unique snowflake. Whatever I thought that she must have seen in me didn't actually exist. There was nothing special about me. I just got taken on the roller coaster ride of a lifetime because I happend to be standing next to her in line at the right time. And I have to admit, that ride has scared the shit out of me and I'm afraid to ever go on it again. With anyone. I feel as though I didn't belong there, that I didn't deserve to go the places I've been. My personal hobby has long been unravelling the twisted skein of my subconcious, and I've spent a long time trying to understand the nature of my past and present relationship with her. But the problem is, I think I've reached a dead end. I've long since passed the point where she could help me; in fact it reached the point where my frustrations with my progress left me so embittered that I couldn't bear to talk to her anymore and I've had to cut contact with her for now. And there are still overwhelming voids that I can't fill by myself. I need to find someone who cares; not in the way that she did where we ended up with our future spread out before us so dramatically, but just a little. Enough to begin to reenforce that confidence that has been so completely decimated by her abandonment. The catch-22 is that without that confidence, I am unwilling to seek out such a person on my own.
So until the day that I can restore my lost confidence, I continue pressing on, as I have for the past year, struggling to pass as content but never achieving happiness.