Today, I've been single for one month

I haven’t cried since I talked to you.

I talked to you again. I made you laugh.

I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I feel like there’s so much to say and no way for me to say it.

I tried to feel better by talking to a friend. It didn’t work. I tried so hard and then when it was over and time to go back inside and back to work—that isn’t just something I do as a student, but is my life now—I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t walk back in there to the people I respect so much and who respect me so much and face them. I don’t know why. I’m not hiding anymore. I still don’t out her, but now I’m not afraid to say that I’m going through a really tough time because I just got out of a three and a half year closeted relationship.

I finally told Katie Blair today. Finally, after so many lies looking her straight in the eye, after running away from her, after sharing things with her that others still know nothing about, I lied to her about this. But, today, I didn’t. She knew, of course. Of course she knew. I was surprised at how long she had known. I wonder if maybe I got better at lying as the years went on.

I remember working in the bookstore and training myself to not smile as big as I wanted to, or take in that deep excited breath when she came to visit me. I remember checking my email there and smiling so big because she had written; but I didn’t know of the truth playing out on my face, and Robert from supplies walked by in his always flirty manner asking how a computer screen could make me smile so big. For her, I trained myself not to smile.

Katie asked again today, like she always did, forcing me to lie, forcing me to remember what’s wrong with the relationship, forcing me to push down the ubiquitous questions of why I wasn’t loved out-loud. But today, I told her. I told her it was over without ever telling her it had begun and that I was dying inside. She asked what happened.

How am I qualified to answer that question? How can I say what’s wrong with love and why my heart may never trust again? How can I say why I called Marla when I should have been setting up for the Take Back the Night March because I didn’t know how to believe I had existed before She came into my life? How can I say what heartache feels like, and try to pinpoint a tangible fucking reason that my love wasn’t good enough? How can I try to put it so people can understand that I did all the things I did in that relationship because I did believe it was forever? Of course, I lied. We all do things for love. I course I forgave and got over and shut up my emotions even as she told me to let them out.

How the fuck am I EVER going to be able to let my emotions out? How am I going to tell a friend I need help and I need to be hugged and held and loved and allowed to cry? How am I ever going to do something different than sitting in a crowded room on a borrowed computer asking questions to a machine in front of me?

But I tried to tell Katie what had happened. How She wouldn’t give me even one weekend a month, and how I begged and pleaded with her to just let me come and be around her. I told her I didn’t want anything in return. I just wanted to cook her dinner and see her in her clothes and calm her down about her tests and “we don’t even have to make out, just a peck on the way out the door.” I told Katie about how that was too much for Her to give.

(That’s only one side of the story and I love her and I just want to make it my fault. I want to believe again that I’m not worthy of love—like I did so well before Her, before she tricked me into this—so that I don’t have to hate her so much. So that this hole inside of me goes away and I can continue to go on being a person I know and am proud of. I want this to be my fault. She played a larger role than anyone can ever know, even her, in teaching me how to accept love and that I deserve it and that I can have it as much as the next person. I wouldn’t be a stranger to myself, desiring fond touches and long embraces, pining to be held as I sleep and kissed as soon as I wake up in the morning if She hadn’t have fucking tricked me into it. I told myself I didn’t deserve love for a reason. At least then I know what to do. I hate myself and I move on because that’s something I understand. How does my world work when the person who I hate is Her? How does this world work?)

Katie and I kept talking and the end result was one useless and constantly running word: why? Why? Why was she so scared to come out? Why could she come out to her parents, but not the dance floor at Soco? Why couldn’t she tell the Women’s Center? Why couldn’t she tell the LGBT Center? Why couldn’t she tell our friends who love us? Why couldn’t she give one weekend a month? Why didn’t she ever want to have sex with me? Why so many fucking things that my I’m so angry about my hands curl into fists rather than put them down here for the world to see?

Do you see how useless it is? Do you see what I go through? I can’t get why out of my fucking head.

And if it’s not why, then it’s something else.

I know I have a lot of issues and bullshit and past and emotion and trouble. I know I’m confusing and cryptic and fucking shitty to be around when I’m sad because I don’t know how to let you help me.

You all help me anyway. You find a way to explain what’s going on to me, or to listen, or to just be there to keep loving me and not let me forget and fall back into the pain I’ve once been in.

Last night, one of you got rid of “sometimes brother.”

How come I can be calmed by the explanation of a degree modifier, but will never believe in love again?

How the fuck can She be bigger than “sometimes brother”? What’s wrong with this world?

What’s wrong with me?

I give up.