...hello?...is there anybody out there?...

Ever checked your phone - repeatedly - because it was SO silent you were SURE there was something wrong with it?  Guess I'm having one of those 'adjustment' days, getting used to having emptiness where an interactive, interesting person used to exist.  No texts. No calls.  Email isn't even coming in to make me feel needed.  And the few that do, I pretty much ignore, because all of my available bandwidth is being spent on other unproductive but necessary things, like licking my emotional wounds.  Actually I am making a valiant effort at working from home, but what I'm doing is so technical and over my head that I'm left feeling useless and overwhelmed all over again, which isn't helping the ol' ego so much right now.

Mama said there'd be days like this...actually, that's not what my mom said at all.  What she DID say when she found out about what happened was, "dropped gems still sparkle".  I got choked up for a minute when she said that, but I tried to cover the involuntary sob with a laugh.  That was very sweet of her. And I know that.  I swear I do.  This isn't some ploy to get everyone who knows me to pat me on the back and point out how awesome I am until flip that switch over to the "YEAH, F*** HIM!" phase.  I don't even really want to go there, although it would make my life easier.  I'm trying to work through the pain, not ignore it or deny it.  Hence all the near-maudlin, mawkish verbosity seen here and on my FB page lately.  No way around it but through it, folks.  You can always click the 'x' if it's too much for ya.  I'm trying to learn whatever lesson I'm supposed to learn from this. 

At first glance, the lesson here looks like it might be "you're not as sparkly as you think, old girl."  But I don't think that's it.  Real life lessons don't usually float right on top of the situation like an oil slick in a puddle.  They tend to lurk at the bottom, under the water, where you have to wade in deep and get shards of them stuck in the bottom of your foot.

So that's my explanation (or excuse, however you want to see it) for why I'm wallowing in this pain and being open about it a lot more than is comfortable or even typical of me.  Also because he's completely anonymous, so I'm not putting a known individual's 'stuff' out there, aside from my own.  I know several friends are going through very similar challenges right now, so I'm hoping we're helping each other out by sharing.  

One of the last things he said to me was "some things aren't meant to be understood, they just ARE" or some cryptic shit like that which only left my brain hurting more for my lack of understanding of his WHY.  He gave me the old, "it's not you, it's me" and mentioned that he's just broken in that way.  But c'mon.  You know me.  I want to know why.  He had shared anecdotes of the shitty things shitty women have done to him throughout his life.  And yeah, they did suck muchly.  Many shitty things have been done to this man.  As have been done to me by equally shitty, destructive men.  But it's sad to see that someone chooses to close off future opportunities for non-shitty women to show him a different side of relationships and humanity in general.  I don't know if it's from fear of being ripped apart again, or just sheer exhaustion from having to clean so many stiletto prints off of his heart.  The exhaustion is recoverable, I think.  And if that's the reason, it's a damn dirty shame that I came along in the midst of it.  Just my luck.  If it's fear - that's a whole other matter.  (And YES, I know, there's another option - he's just not that into me.  I know.  More on that later.)

Every man and woman has to face their own fears in their own way, in their own time.  It's like anything important in life - you can't will somebody else into doing something they don't want to do, no matter how good you know it would be for them (and/or you).  You can't make an alcoholic go into recovery and actually recover.  They have to want to recover.  You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.  Ultimately, it feels like a failure, some lack of spectacularness on my part that I don't inspire him to take the leap.  He swears that's not it.  Says I'm "AMAZING".  (His caps, not mine.)  But clearly I'm not AMAZING enough in some respect - to him.  Maybe I am to others, maybe even to myself sometimes.  But to somebody who I thought was a really good fit for me, and me for him, he obviously doesn't feel the same, and I am just having a very hard time accepting that.  Is rejection (real or perceived) from a paramour (or anyone else, for that matter) ever easy to accept?  For anyone?  Or am I just a really sore, disbelieving loser who argues with the referee every time?

I think it's because I go with my gut feelings a lot.  It's almost never wrong.  I think that's what's tripping me up.  In previous posts, I said that my heart and my brain do not agree on this issue.  My Disneyfied heart holds out hope, while my logical, analytical, computer-geek brain tries to shout louder than the romantic ninny in my chest cavity can whine.  The heart is located nearer to the gut.  Maybe that's where it's getting all of its ideas.  Overheard rumors.  I'll need to install better soundproofing between my guts and my heart, I think.  I can tell you that the two times there have been in-person confrontations about this matter, when I was going to ask him something and everything depended on his answer, my gut reacted BADLY from the moment the 'date' was set.  I was physically ill.  Almost instantly.  Like I knew I wasn't going to like the answer, or I knew that it was going to be negative.  My gut knew before my brain was ready to process it.  Some would just call that nerves, but I don't.  I'm not a nervous person by nature, even though he has a way of unhinging me.  I truly believe that our gut is an emotional center, and science is starting to back me up on this.  And on those two days, my gut was dead on about what was going to happen.  Shit went sideways, bigtime.  Exactly what I was dreading.  

The difficulty I am having is that this selfsame gut of mine is what 'felt' the connection with this guy.  I can only speak from my side of the table, but it was unexpectedly electric.  And not just the new-love novelty jitters, it wasn't like that.  It was a comfortable but deep connection, a knowing, a familiarity of "ahhhh, yes.  THIS is what we never knew we were looking for."  And believe me, I was NOT really on the market or looking when I (re)found this person.  I was not lonely.  This was not some rebound thing I sought out to heal me after my divorce.  I was happy to be free of a shitty husband.  Happy to be alone.  I thought we'd just date and have fun, but, at least for me, it started to feel like something way bigger than I had expected.  And apparently bigger than he wanted.

At the end of the day, I have to respect that.  Maybe he didn't feel it to the extent that I did, but he basically confessed to me in an email that he's human and did feel something too, and I DO trust my gut on this one.  I wasn't making that connection up.  But I'm not going to chase it.  I have my pride, what's left of it, after pouring my heart out in some very honest (and predictably long) emails he was patient enough to read and respond to.  I've told him from the beginning, "I will always be honest with you, because I like you and respect you, and I have nothing to lose.  You aren't mine to lose."  So I have been brutally honest, even when the brutality was only directed at myself, and didn't serve to make me look in the least bit cool or aloof or even in control.  I just let it all fly, maybe seeking to give him the understanding denied to me.  

Maybe "acceptance" is the lesson at the bottom of this murky puddle here.  I know that's a 'zen' thing, to see an emotion, acknowledge it, separate from it, and let it go.  Stop trying to swim upstream against it or fight it or deny it.  Just observe and detach from it.  I have accepted many things that I think others would have had difficulty with.  I've let two marriages go, with very few tears shed afterwards.  (The tears fell during the relationships, maybe I was just dehydrated and exhausted by then.)  I realized one of my husbands was - is still, and always will be - a sociopath, and that he fooled me for almost 6 years.  Makes me feel stupid, but I accept it for what it is and I don't beat myself up about it.  Those are pretty major things to just let pass by my mind without glomming on to and exploring the pain like you do with your tongue in a hole where your tooth had once been.  But THIS?  Mere rejection from 'some guy'?  That I didn't even have a 'real' relationship with to begin with?  Until my gut and my brain can agree, I'm afraid the WHYs are going to continue to eat up my mental bandwidth.  Of which there is precious little to begin with these days.

So I will do what Dory told Nemo to do when things get tough:  "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming..."  That's how fish get oxygen.  So it shall be for me.  Not swimming, per se, but putting one foot in front of the other, keep Zumba-ing, house music -ing, cat-loving, cooking, cleaning, house makeover project-ing, computer geek-ing, until the memories aren't so sharp and painful and the "WHY" fades into a "what was I thinking about again?  I forgot.".  I hope.  I don't like beating dead (or live) horses, but I kind of just want this carcass to disintegrate so I don't have to step over it every time I turn my thoughts inward.  I have learned more physical discipline lately while I work to get in shape.  Now I need the mental and emotional discipline to stop sticking my tongue in the hole where that tooth was so I can feel the pain again.  I'll tell myself that tooth wasn't that great anyway, it probably - obviously - had something wrong with it, or else it would still be there, right?