Things I've learned from this breakup:

• I am stronger than I thought, or much more capable to repress and deny. The jury isn't really in on this, but I am living my life as best I can because I have no other option. The world hasn't stopped for anyone else's pain, I don't see why it should stop for mine.
• Heartbreak is good for one free watch resizing at participating retailers in the mall. Technically, this might be because Keilaina's sister Kaitlynn was the one I asked and I was so desolate as to inspire her disbelief and hugs.
• The woman at the tux store may be sympathetic, but she won't expedite the process of cancelling the wedding reservation for anyone short of Jesus.
• No one on OkCupid believes me when I tell them that I don't want to date right now. But they might have a point. When does a meeting with an attractive stranger become a date? How do I tell someone who thinks it is a date that I am not emotionally ready for something as simple as a kiss?
• I am really concerned about becoming an emotional burden on friends and family. After Kate dumped me, I got back in touch with a girl who had been my friend (and certainly never anything more). As she had gone through a sticky breakup in the recent past, mine became a topic of conversation between us as she tried to right in my breakup what went wrong in hers to little success. Years later, after she vanished from my life again, she told me curtly that I was like a leech to her and she had no positive emotions in her chest for me. I left her alone, but this altered my psychological coding. In my grief, in my inability to take their greeting card advice because they don't know what else to give me, I can suck the energy from the room and eclipse the light. I love them too well to do this to them, though they persist in assure me that this is just one of the services they provide and I should just suck it up and let them support me.
• Boys' Town crisis hotline will hang up on you after fifteen minutes if you tell them you are not suicidal. They will compliment your vocabulary, too, and tell you to keep in touch as though they have become your friend while listening to you kvetch in the last fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. Suicide is their volunteer bread and butter, angst over an uncertain future as a result of abandonment much less so.
• If you tell any crisis hotline that you are suicidal, they will track you down and send the cops. This is what Sarah tells me, at least, citing her friend's experience. I am more than willing to trust this third hand information.
• The appeal of a rebound crush is not so much that you have found some other lovely soul to desire as that it gives you something good and exciting to focus on instead of licking your emotional wounds. And sometimes, a rebound becomes someone amazing in your life, like Keilaina. And sometimes, the rebound becomes the sun around which you orbit until you've made a life together of detritus floating in the void, as with Emily. A rebound doesn't have to be destructive or a signal of avoidance of other issues. I certainly have no inclination to ignore my process.
• My love for Katie was possessive. My love for M was giving. Comparing the pain of losing either is like comparing burning to exsanguination.
• People don't understand how profoundly bad an idea it is to sexually proposition the newly dumped. I'm pretty sure for most people that kissing me right now would not be unlike licking a live wire. I suppose they mean well, in their selfish, horny way, but I don't take it well. I find it disrespectful, as if they want to rob me of my closure and as if they were just waiting to pounce while I planned my coming marriage.
• I want to and am trying to remain Emily's friend, because I feel she needs them and I have spent seven years loving her. I can't and won't turn that off overnight and my life would be less if she were not in it at all. To cut her off would be to slice away a galaxy in my universe.
• It is okay to leave the door open to someone who is hurting you as long as they truly don't mean to. Leaving the door open does not suggest that you don't redecorate and have guests over, however.
• If you aren't going to die, there is no reason to lay in bed feeling sorry for yourself and you only get so many New Years Eves in your life.
• Losing Emily now, so close to our wedding, is a pain I cannot convey. Losing her after the wedding, after she gave birth to Shanti, after another seven and a half years together, would have hurt infinitely worse and been that much harder from which to recuperate. Our bond, though deeply spiritual, exists in paper only under a stack of comic books in my desk. Legal divorce because she was going through this would be inconceivable and would be less likely to be as amicable.
• I've told many people that there is a dearth of girls of Emily's caliber in this world, but caliber can also refer to the size of the hole something leaves in you.

last watched: Juno
reading: Portable Darkness
listening: The Moldy Peaches

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