12 posts tagged “hb”

HB has been trying to make plans with me all week in his unreliable way.  I assume he wants to see me because I told him I had a present for him.  So he showed up at the bar last night, with his girlfriend, Yankee Girl.  Which is fine, just he doesn't usually bring her out with me.  Ever.  And she's okay, I don't dislike her, I just, ugh, you know, she's never going to be good enough for him in my mind.  She's certainly pretty enough, but she's not that interesting and she and I really don't share any interests.  Even the things that cross over we come at from such different directions.  And I'm not making excuses, I know I'm not going to like her simply because she is his girlfriend, but even trying to be objective, I just can't find things about her that interest me.

Anyway, they came up and we hung out and talked, mostly about my day job, as YG and I have many mutual social acquaintances through work.  Mostly I stared at her and tried not to think that she was temporary and he was really mine.  Although I sort of even get the sense that she felt that way.  HB sat across from me, and she sat at the end of the table with an empty seat between us and her.  He asked after my family and about how my mom was doing and the whole thing was sort of stilted and weird.  And then when we left he kept saying he'd see me Saturday, though I don't recall making any plans with him.

It does not matter how much I tell myself I am over HB.  It's so not true.  It's fine.  I just need to make sure it stays like this: friendly, easy, with just me being judgmental and filled with a tolerable, low-level ache.  That I can bear.  Probably for the rest of my life if I have too.  I do not want to feel like I am pining for him, like I am missing out by not having more than his friendship.  I don't not want to feel more lonely because of his absence from my romantic life.

Two things: 1) I have the perfect plan for what to with the returned gift from CK.  It's clothing so I am going to give it to HB and feel smug every time he wears it. 2) This boy I see around the hood, we'll call him Boy Next Door, is very cute.  Friday night I left my card for him, with his coworker so he could pretend he next got it. Well he got it and called tonight.  I am in a much better mood now.  Plus DD brought us dinner and DD and FF sat around talking about beating CK to death with a shovel. Yes, I feel much better.

Still no word form CK.  He can take his childish ass and fuck right off.  As my nearest and dearest said, he could have at least given me the coward's break up in text messages.  But no, not a peep.  So I did the only thing a girl like me can do, went right out and slept with someone else.

We didn't actually have sex (erm, depending on how you're defining sex), but we fooled around a lot.  We went for a drink, talked for forever, went back to his place, talked more, made out, I spent the night, and we fooled around more in the morning. Then he made coffee and breakfast in bed, and we laid around in our underwear and watched Repo Man. So overall, as far as dates go, pretty much excellent.

Not a thing though, just some guy I'm friends with and now, it would appear, friends with benefits.  That's cool though.

As far as break-ups go, I'm all over the place.  Like I have no closure, no idea if I did something, or he met someone else, or just decided I wasn't worthy or what.  Which I find pretty upsetting.  But since it was long distance, and he hasn't been calling much for weeks now, I'm not really feeling the loss in every day life.  Mostly I'm pretty practical and matter of fact about it.  I haven't cried much yet, but am still expecting a massive breakdown over the whole thing.  I can feel it bubbling up inside me.

Of course HB came out of the woodwork right as all this was going down (though as far as I know he had no idea it was going down) and he's been making an effort to hang out with me a lot and asked to work on a long term collaborative artistic project with him.  This is awesome, as we are just friends and I love hanging out with him.  However in the past week I have had the following conversation no less than five times:

well meaning close friend: "how's CK?"
me: *explains the jackassery*
wmcf: "oh sweetie, I'm sorry."
me: "it's okay, I'll be fine"
wmcf: "I don't understand why you aren't just dating HB anyway."
me: "..."

Seriously, it's like a conspiracy, except most the people I had this conversation with don't know each well enough to conspire about anything.  So, I am back to fantasizing about dating HB, but I think I'm best leaving it at that.  At least for now, until I get my equilibrium back.

HA!!  Okay, HB just called while I was typing this to see if I wanted to go "hang out"  When I told him I was sick, he prodded and poked, until I explained the coughing, the snot, the unshoweredness and the firm position on the couch in sweatpants.  "Ew, maybe I don't wanna see you," he replied.  "Naw, I still do, but you don't, so call me when you're better.  Maybe tomorrow or Thursday?"  *sigh* He really is such a good boy.  Even my mom loves him, she was talking all about him on the phone last night.  There's no escaping it. Clearly, she's conspiring with my friends.

I am tired and whiny and full of self pity tonight.  FF has been really sick for a few days, coughing, 100 degree fever, general yuck. I've been doing my best to take care of her, getting stuff she needs from the store, making soup, being sympathetic etc. but I really needed this weekend to regroup from the past couple weeks and while I did get a bunch done this weekend, it was as productive or as relaxing as I would have hoped. And now, additionally I feel guilty for not doing more for FF, though I really don't know what I could have done.  Hopefully I've dodged the bullet on getting sick myself as well, unless this virus has a particularly long incubation period, I should be okay.

HB just called me to tell about something going on tonight that I really should be at.  I'm too tired to go out.  To full of self pity to put on make-up.  Too PMS-y to want to be seen in public.  Yet I hate myself a little for not going too.  Vicious, vicious cycle.  Plus I so just can't deal with HB right now. Not that it isn't completely between us, it is, just sometimes I get so much pleasure out of being friends and hanging out with him and other times it feels awkward and awful.  I don't think I could deal with it going either way tonight.

Anyway my real problem is CK.  He's distant, not really returning calls and such and he's evasive and defensive when I do manage two minutes of his time. Yes, I have addressed this head on, asking if he's avoiding breaking up with me, if he's feeling the pressure of the distance and conflicting schedules or or what. I just can't get an answer from him.  I've pretty much given up at this point and have moved on to trying to actively avoid mourning what appears to be over. Yeah, I'd give him a second chance with a decent explanation, but I'm not particularly optimistic at this point. And yeah, I'm upset, but mostly I'm just horribly disappointed in that way it is when your hopes are dashed to the ground and stomped on. Plus I have the bonus hormonal face punch of feeling unattractive, bloated, blotchy and unloveable.  YAY!  It's good to be me today.  And most of it will pass soon, I know.  And I knew long distance would be hard and have it's own horrible communications complications.  Perhaps I was just too optimistic about my ability to manage it.

I swear to god, even this pathetic and miserable, that I would make someone an awesome, awesome girlfriend.  I just worry about my ability to find the person that's going to recognize that.

Okay, enough pity party for me. Back to house cleaning, chores and real life.

I haven't done a single interesting thing in the last tens days.  Day job is for shit right now, taking up way too much of my time and requiring too much thought and not rewarding me in an acceptable manner. Sucktastic. CK has been similarly busy and we've been barely able to talk, and when we can it's not more than counting down the days until we see each other and complaining about how busy we are.

So yesterday was DD's birthday and we threw a party for her.  As one of her gifts she got this book that you're supposed to hold closed, then ask it a question and open it to a random page to get your answer.  Like some really lame fortune telling thing.  Several people through out the night try it, asking the questions silently to themselves and every one puts the book down, disgusted, totally unhappy with the answers they got.  At some point I'm sitting with FF and HB and I pick it up and ask it several questions about HB and CK.  The gist of the answers I got was basically that HB is obviously in love with me, I should examine my feelings about him and we are destined to be together.  CK, the book informed me, wasn't my one true love, but that I'd be supported if I was with him and I didn't know  how it would be with until I tried.

Now I don't believe in fortune-telling.  I mean, there's no predestination or anything.  But I do believe in self-fulfilling prophecies.  I mean, all last week was I thinking of anything other than my giddiness over spending a few days with CK? No. A few randomly choses pages from a book and suddenly I doubt and I wonder if in fact I should hold out for HB, for however long it take him to come around (years for sure).  If perhaps I'm going to invest too much in CK and get burned, or make the wrong choice choose the wrong guy.  If I carry on thinking like that, I've made the cheezy book's fortune-telling come true.

But I'm aware of all that, so I already went through those worries a few hours after the question asking.  Now I've moved on to the deeper implications.  And really, the answers it gave me were true, depending on my interpretation.  If CK is the guy for me, it will take some work.  It might be worth the effort, but there is going to be a price to pay for that happiness.  Whether it's just the long distance thing and the drama it brings or a harder row to how of our personalities clashing.  It could be a Herculean effort, but I expect it would, in the end, pay off.  I'm only wildly speculating here, but I also think the harder it is, the better it will turn out to be.  I"m not sure why.  This could be rationalization or fantasizing on my part.

HB on the other hand, probably is love with me.  Yes, it's obvious. I'm sure we are destined to be together forever, though probably not as lover or romantic parters or married or whatever.  The idea of that seems like massive disaster waiting to happen. So, I can only hope we'll both live through the painful part of this and go on to some calmer, less angst-ridden relationship, where we are solidly there for watch other forever, mostly likely as friends and some sort of collaborative partners.  Again, I imagine it's me that ends up managing his career, though that too is clearly fantasy, albeit not impossible.

So I guess the lame book made me think more about the answers I already knew.  Which perhaps means it worked or whatever.  I still maintain that fortune-telling is stupid.  But I did get answers I found distasteful until I really thought about them.  I wonder if it worked for anyone else at the party?

Countdown to CK: 12 days.  I'm doing my best not to have any expectations at all about the trip.  I'm just going to visit with one of my girlfriends I haven't seen in a while and spend time with a cute and interesting boy.  If something more happens then bonus, right?

Also a random bit of flitty girliness: CK called me last night, he was busy, out to dinner with friends but the song in the restaurant made him think of me so he called, just for a second. SWOON.

And I saw CMB over the weekend.  So completely over him. Utterly done.

I can't even fully recount my weekend.  Had 5 houseguests for the last 4 days.  Girl bonding insanity.  Long roadtrips.  A couple gallons of bourbon consumed.

Friday night when we were all hanging out the house HB came by and we talked.  We're good.  Or Status Quo, which is to say filled with longing and not doing anything about it.  I'm fine with it now.  Maybe.  It could go forever, but right now, it's fine as it is.  At least I know where he stands.

Over the weekend I talked to CK a few times the phone while we were on our roadtrip.  Last night he told me he wrote a song about me but wouldn't tell me anything about it.  This morning I got badly recorded version of it in my email.  It's an amazing song.  I mean, my personal investment in it aside, it's a really great song.  Like from my job as music critic I would give it say 4 of 5 stars.

I'm pretty floored.  I mean, to my knowledge, despite all the time I spend with musicians, no one's ever written a song about me. And this one seems to recognize me in a way I don't often feel acknowledged by my romantic interests. This does kind of change everything about CK and our relationship.  I mean, he's clearly the front runner again.  But I'm not exactly sure what it means for us, since he's still 800 miles away.

The last day has been a roller coaster.  Seriously.  I need a break like you wouldn't believe.  Work is killing me. Just too much stress from trying to solve problems for people who have no idea what they are doing.  Plus impending house guests.  Lots of of them.  For several days.  I love my friends.  I am glad they are coming.  I just don't do well with multiple people in my space for very long. I anticipate being a complete mess by the end of the weekend.

On top of that the Heartbreaker saga goes on.  Last night my roommate, UN, came home drunk and chatty.  Now, I call her Unreliable Narrator because she is. It's not that she lies.  I believe she believes everything she says, she just is often misinformed or misunderstands a situation and the relays it incorrectly.  She very often believes things about people that aren't true and I have no idea where she gets her information from. Like she has several times pronounced that I hate (or love) some specific food or band or something.  When I tell her that she totally wrong, or got it backwards or what ever she acts surprised and wonders why she thought that why in the first place. Thus her narrative is unreliable.  But not always, she can be very insightful and in very knowledgable about some things.  It makes it very hard to navigate conversations with her sometimes.  I love her dearly, she's generally a good friend, but often not very helpful.

So last night she launches into this whole thing about HB, telling FF "our" history with him.  Which went something like this:  We were all very good friends, UN spent a lot of time hanging out with him.  And then he was in love with me.  And he tried and tried to make something happen (??? this part was very vague) and then because I was "cold" he gave up and started dating someone else and now he doesn't come around as much anymore.  This was followed by anecdote about how she found out from a mutual friend the story of when HB's best friend committed suicide.  She tried to talk to HB about it and he was reticent. UN finished this off with a comment on how HB never talks about his feelings and so you never know what's really going on with him.

There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to begin.  First and foremost is that one of the main reasons I stayed away from seriously trying to pursue anything with HB was UN's insane jealousy about the whole thing, her repeated admonitions that he was not for me and her insistence that I couldn't date him because he was our friend and she didn't want that destroyed by he and I dating and potentially not working out. I had told him that I didn't want to sneak around behind her back anymore and I didn't trust her reaction enough for us to be public about what we were doing. (This, I'm guessing, is the me being "cold" part of her story? I'm not sure exactly.)

Secondly, I have no idea how much of anything she said is fact and how much is her (mostly likely incorrect) perception of the situation.  She said that she didn't want any drama in her life, although oddly every time she says this, the drama in question is always caused by her (though often unwittingly I think).

So I spent some time crying over the whole thing again.  And then stupidly send HB an email saying that we missed him and wished he'd come around more and that I felt there was a whole thing going on that I hadn't understood, or that I hadn't had necessary information at the time and that he should come hang out more.  It was vague, pathetic and ridiculous. And hour later I thought better of it and sent him a text message that said that the email was dumb that I just really needed to talk to him but wouldn't be around much until at least Sunday.  Which also was stupid.  And I've had no response to either.

I have no idea what I'm supposed to do here.  Just drop it and move on?  Wait and talk to him and try and rescue our friendship?  Beat UN over the head with a shovel?  Beat my own head against a wall until I don't remember who HB is?

Lonely Girl -Todd Snider

I really haven't stopped beating myself up over Heartbreaker.  I am over it, for a few hours here and there.  And then something happens and I get upset again. The worst part is that I'm not letting myself just fall apart for a little while, or even being entirely honest with myself about how I feel.

When I try and look at the whole thing it just feels like I've been in denial or looking at the whole thing peripherally for far too long.  I've said to DD a million times, "oh, it's just not meant to be" or "clearly he isn't for me,"  or "This is isn't the time, maybe in the future." And each time she looked at me so sympathetically and said, "But are you in love with him?" Every single time I just looked away and said, "It doesn't matter," and went on seeing him every day, being his pal, hanging out and waiting, perhaps a little too desperately, for the midnight phone calls where he'd whisper, "can I come sleep with you?" I'd say yes and in the mornings we'd kiss good-bye as the sun came up and go right back to acting like everything was normal and we were fine friends. It couldn't matter because it was never going to be more than that anyway.

But I guess it does matter if I'm this destroyed that he's chosen someone over me.  I suppose not having him was okay as long as he didn't have anyone else?  Worse yet he doesn't come over to hang out as much.  Not as much means I see him once a week instead 4 or 5 days a week, so the girlfriend means I feel like I'm losing him as a friend too.  Maybe it's harder because no one but DD and couple other friends in far away cities knew about the midnight assignations, or how I really felt about him, so I go on acting to all our friends like everything is perfectly normal.

I stand by all my reasons that it wouldn't work out between us: He's too young, we're at different places in our lives, the confluence of rivalry and jealousy among our friends would make it too hard.  It really doesn't matter if I'm in love with him, as now isn't the time or the place. Life isn't fair and you don't always get what you want.  I feel sort of like I do when someone dies: there's nothing to be done but push through, live each day and try and try and try to be happy despite the loss and hurt.  I realize though that I've been feeling that way about HB for months, even before there was his girlfriend for me to frame it all around.

Of course I started my period right while I was writing this.  Now I have to work even harder not to devalue how I feel and just write it off as hormonal emotionalism.  It is okay to be upset over him.  It is okay to feel hurt by all of it just being the worst timing since the day we met.  I can move on.  It's okay to cry.  It's okay not to cry and just be angry instead.

And now I'm done with the slightly negative positive affirmation part of the day.  It's raining here and this makes me very, very happy.  I'm pretty sure the drought is spiraling out from the hellmouth (Alabama, also where HB is from--coincidence? Heh) and has been sucking my soul away with the lack of water.  I'm going to go stand outside and let it fall on my face until I'm not thinking about anything at all.

-- While I'm in here editing this to add the song, I'd like to say that the HB thing isn't one sided.  When he came over for the party last Sunday, I didn't see him when he came in but found him later in the kitchen.  He hugged me for a very long time, tightly, pressing his face down into my hair and not saying anything at all.  He was very affectionate when he left as well, though several people were present.  Our closeness isn't in question, and as friends it's acknowledged by all our peers.  Just the possibility of romance that will never be is a stumbling block of sorts for us.

Promise - Violent Femmes

Neither CMB nor HSG showed up for the party last night.  Not unexpected.  Heartbreaker brought his new girlfriend whom he is apparently "serious" about now.  I was indifferent to her until they left and all our other friends started tearing her apart.  Apparently no one really hates her, but no one wants her with HB.  In the end the whole evening left me feeling bored, lonely, a little heartbroken and pretty miserable.

Oleander

2 comments

Seriously, I should go back to obsessing over shoes and more shallow things, rather than boys.  Much less heartbreak involved all around.  I don't know if it's the impending full moon, PMS or what, but today I swear I'd be happier never leaving my house again or interacting with other  people.  It all seems like too much work.

I do feel like every possibility romantically for the future has slipped away like sand through my fingers.  It's irrelevant I guess, plenty of fish in the sea and all that.  But Dazzle Doll brought her new boy last night and he was amazing (not my type but perfect for her) and just seeing HB made me feel awful.  I'm really sure this is PMS induced misery and I'll be fine tomorrow.  At least hopefully I won't be sitting at my desk, nearly in tears, worrying that no one will ever love me.  I mean really, what kind of craziness is that?  Also it sucks to be hyper self-aware.  I mean, can't I just wallow in my hormonal misery? Do I have to even try and put that in perspective? 

If I didn't have so damn much to do, I'd spend the day surfing Zappos.com, in some insane shoe shopping binge.