changing

When you spend 4 years with someone, it's more than just ending a relationship, it's ending your conception of how your life is and will be. 4 years and then those 2 shitty months. That's longer than I spent in college. In fact, that's longer than I have done anything in my life except perhaps go to elementary school. I honestly looked at Eric's mom and thought she would be the grandmother of my children. I saw my future in his eyes, for better and or worse. But now I can look ahead and see how much better my life is getting already. No more compromise.

The first change is getting out of LA, most likely for good. The most fundamental change is not always waiting on Eric. He was gone so much, and my evenings and weekends were always left up in the air because I wanted to make sure that there was no possibility I might see him before I scheduled anything else. Now my schedule is mine. It's a good experiment to see how you would live your life if there were no limitations.

Brilliant and eloquent Claudette, writing from the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, had sage advice and recollections about her own life that sound eerily familiar.

"what's especially cruel about a relationship with cheating is that the cheating is icing on the cake, so if you have cheating for icing, you know what that cake tastes like... sand, rocks, some ca-ca. i was mad about so many other things and the cheating was like this salt in the wound insult over injury."

"i don't think you should look back and try and pick out if there were signs you should have seen or what. in the future, if it smells like shit, you'll know it - no need to analyze the stinking heap in front of you to guarantee that. plus, i think that's a 'blaming the victim'ish mentality - in a relationship of years and the level of intimacy you two had, its bizarre to think that you should even have to look for signs. really, if i could change anything i would tell him to be a man about the whole thing and tell you he's done before getting someone else involved. 

in relationships its really as easy as that, and if he couldn't manage that, its certainly not your fault. you were his girlfriend, not his jailer - if he wanted out, we're of an age where he could have just said so."

I guess she's right, and I should quit trying to understand. Now it's just cataloguing what comes into my head and spitting it out to remove it from my psyche, to wipe the slate clean.

Yesterday I woke up at 7am to take sake for a walk, worked on my boards until about 6 (with breaks for chatting and taking sake to pee), went to yoga class, and cooked and ate dinner with my friend Susan and her fiance in Potrero Hills, then I came back and chatted with Ziah for awhile before going to sleep. I like this new life.