The original entry

I am not in a position to just be Kate's friend.

You romanticize a flawed, conflicted young woman and a relationship that, while good, was likely better in your brief retrospect.

Friends don't act as you do. Even when she sometimes enables you, that is only her weakness. It is not genuine encouragement.

I wish that she were not worried that she would lose resolve and fall into my arms (that is one of the big things she worries about when I am around. Talking to me is one thing, but when I am around in physical form, she is so happy and in love.)

You are easy. I mean that in the pejorative sense of the term. You will bend over backward for a chance as a renewed (not new) relationship with your ex-girlfriend. However, if she laid it all out on the table, you would balk. "Hey, Thomm. I might want to be your girlfriend, but I have not been for months. I have had sex -- and not with just one person. I have done drugs. I have been cruel because it was the only way to get space from you. So, are we cool?"

You would not have been because you think you can preserve who she was (and I cannot say she was that), not embrace who she is. If you met her right now, I don't think you would pursue a relationship without your history. Maybe I underestimate you, but I suspect that I am right.

She loves you, but she is occasionally infatuated. Kate will never again be in love with you.

One of the reasons I write here is I know I am not going to lie or deceive

You are lying to Heather -- with whom you could have had a better friendship were it not for all this -- and you are lying to yourself.

Just repeat back to me what I've said to you and I'll go "Wow! How true! That's great advice."

That's narcissistic, but it is your process now. I cannot say that I am always wholly aware of what I think until I have it on the page.

Anyway, I am aware of my ulterior motives, namely winning the heart and lips of Miss Katherine. Frankly, I'm not sure how ulterior they can be if I know them and expect she does as well.

How is this not tedious to you both? Ah, but you have the hormone to make this exciting.

You are far too available to the wrong person at the expense of being remotely available to the right ones.

I just need a tattoo on my arm which reads "You are her closest friend and darling companion, Paco, don't fuck it up."

You are (in a sense).

You do. You screw it up more for yourself than Kate, though. Not that the two of you do not get back together. That's irrelevant. You put a severe hitch in your next few months, which complicates the next decade. All because you cling to Kate. If you had resolutely let her go, you would have changed a decade. That one act might put me in a different world entirely.

I think she can respect how I can feel (loving her, wanting to be with her) so long as I do not press her with it.

I don't know that she can because you never last long not pressing her. You lack self-control.

I especially enjoyed this gesture because I fluidly linked the chain behind her neck and she hugged me. At first she tried to refuse the pendant, because she desperately wants me never to take it off (it is a physical manifestation of her love for me and how much she thinks of me, her words) and knows how much I love it.

Nice moment, no doubt. You do have a way of setting these filmic scenes, which might be the best thing to come out of your breakup. Alas, you don't get to splice these together into a montage; just keep them gem-like in your head.

I worry about alienating and annoying those around me because I have been having trouble with the Kate issue since the break up

So, you are more than faintly aware that you are alienating and annoying loved ones with this. It's something. Not an apology or repentance, but something.

Once I had a hamster. It escaped from its cage one night and we were worried we would never find it (the room was quite messy). So we left the cage door open and put the cage on the floor. When we woke up, the hamster was inside, happily drinking from its water bottle. The moral of this story: Hamsters need water. And I am evidently fond of hamsters {happily humming the hamsterdance song}. But the hamster never would have come back if we kept searching for it, that made it hide more. Perhaps a bad and inaccurate analogy, but it's a cute one for the moment.

It's a fine enough analogy (though the song break is twee). If only you could have stopped searching for Kate and found yourself instead.

---

Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled and gifted. He is capable of crossing one eye, raising one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings. He likes when you comment.