well...

Well. Breaking up sucks. There you have it. A tumult of emotion, a mind distanced from reality. The anti-living-in-the-moment. That's breaking up. And that has been my life (if it hasn't been a bit obvious from the previous blog posts) for the past two and half months or so. Breaking up in all sorts of ways. I suppose the reasons for my decision to end my relationship with Michael are mute and don't really need to be discussed here (mostly due to some latent respect for him). But this is my forum to triumph and also to bitch, right? Right.

I am back in Germany now, with Maria and the girls. I feel like I haven't been a very attentive friend while I have been here, as distracted as I am about my emotions surrounding Michael. It is ironic actually, because when I was here before Paris, I felt high as a kite, and unencumbered by break up shittiness. I suppose I was in an extended phase of denial for awhile after breaking it off. It wasn't until the last ten days or so in Paris that I began to enter the "oh shit, have I ruined my life" phase, which is a horrible place to be mentally. I unloaded on my friends, pumped myself up, wrote and reflected and ate an obscene amount of nutella crepes, cheese sandwiches and falafels, but I felt just empty every day. My only moments of solace were drifting off to sunlit naps in the manicured parks of Paris. Other than that, I felt not quite anxiety, but more like confusion and unrest.

Today I felt a different phase. The I am f-ing pissed phase, where I am just angry about all the things that went wrong in our relationship and all the time spent trying to repair damage. It all feels like a giant waste, and it is heightened by the sense that I am alone because I don't know what he is feeling. Another strange thing of breaking up, I shared so much with this one person, the person I would talk to about all my woes, but instead our suffering is separate but together. Well, actually, I think he is feeling okay about the whole thing based off his response to my somewhat desperate e-mail I sent him last week. Breaking up sucks.

I am trying to be positive, to stick to my guns, to remind myself the reasons why I ended things. But right now it just feels like there are so many things left unsaid, so many emotions left unexplored, and instead I need to come to terms on my own for myself. How hard is that? The entire time I have been in a relationship, I have given myself to someone else, and now it is time to remove myself from that feeling and be completely for me, to only see my own opportunity. It's hard. I continually find myself slipping into the what ifs, and those are gut wrenching. Even, "what if he reads this". But I don't think he will.

My relief is coming in external waves: encouragement from friends, reading break up quotes and articles online, trying to regain order by making mundane lists of life's chores. I need to get my head back in my own game, which of course, is easier said than done. I am exalting in the moments of clarity and peace that I have when I think of our relationship, and counting all of those little feelings among the more aggressive negative feelings as progress. Every day is progress.

I'm sending these thoughts out into the void without the expectation of a response, more to relieve my own relentless mind. To remember that this year has been about incredible highs, but life is life and it can be hard sometimes. I wouldn't give up the things I have learned and the romance of this year for anything. We love, we fight, we are happy, and we are sad. Michael loves kaleidoscopes, which is how I am seeing life. Sometimes, we can only see a tiny slice of life and it is a mishmosh of colors and angles. Twist our view a little bit, and it can still be the same colors but ordered entirely differently. Take your focus away from the chaos of the colors, pull your eye away from the narrow view and we can see the grander life all around as the entire world envelops us. Today I am looking into the glass of our relationship.