Introspection, Part Two

One of the good things about having a blog that nobody reads is that I can basically write whatever I want here. It really is my online journal.

Boyfriend’s renovation project encountered some unexpected difficulty yesterday. One of his most trusted and most talented workers suddenly decided to quit, and this throws off the entire renovation schedule, and might affect our summer/fall moving schedule as well. Not to mention, this adds enormously to his workload.

This is really unfortunate.

Part of the reason I have been feeling so much anxiety about law school (and there are many reasons, which I will perhaps enumerate in a later post) is because of Boyfriend.

Asking him to uproot his whole life and just move to another place is a huge, scary, momentous step. What if things don’t work out between us? What if we end up breaking up? Then he will have taken this huge costly risk for nothing, and I will bear the responsibility for it all.

Boyfriend is at a stage in his life where moving is a much bigger deal than if he were, well, my age. A year lost when you are 25 or 26 is not too big a deal, especially if you are a man. A year lost when you are older is much more costly, and I am scared about being the primary reason for messing up his life.

…And yet, a long distance relationship is out of the question. Every day apart would be so excruciating.

These are the thoughts that go through my mind again and again, every single day. I think about it until my head hurts, but I make no progress.

Realistically speaking, I don’t think I am built for a long distance relationship. I need cuddling. I need physical presence. When someone is far apart from me he seems less real, almost like an abstraction, an idea, just a figment of my imagination. I become detached, unemotional. I fall out of love because I cannot physically feel the intimacy. I also fall out of love because the separation is unbearable and my emotional defense mechanism kicks in.

I cannot have relationship with a phone (or in our case, most likely IM) anymore. Over time I would surely begin to feel resentful that he is not there for me when I need him, even if intellectually I understand the reasons. Even if I myself participated in making those decisions.

The last time (and the only time, hopefully) I had a long-distance relationship was with E. When I was in Germany on my fellowship and he was in the States, we talked over the decision over and over again before I left, and we agreed that we would try to make a long-distance relationship work.

Still, whenever I encountered any difficulty in Germany, whether it was the stupid Deutsche Telekom (the phone company) not showing up when they said they would (three times in a row), or some German kids yelling obscenities at me because I’m Asian, or just the sheer frustration and exhaustion from having to speak another language all day every day, I couldn’t help feeling resentful that he was not there for me, when I needed his help and guidance the most.

That year took a lot out of me emotionally. We talked on the phone at least 2 hours per night. Sometimes much more. I would still up ‘til 5 or even 6 to talk to him 5 hours at a time. We spent literally thousands of dollars on cheap phone cards. Sometimes I would use 2 or 3 cards in the same night.

Those were not happy memories. There were weeks when we would have fights over the phone every night, violently. I would hang up on him, cry until my pillows were soaked through, and then call him back. In those moments, not being able to physically be with him was terrible.

Or he would call me back. We would get into a fight again and hang up on each other. And then call each other again. I would cry into the phone for 40 minutes straight. I would spend entire nights doing this and spend my days sleeping. My life was completely out of balance and spiraling out of control.

And then there were weeks, months even, that I felt fine. Didn’t even miss him that much. But then something happens and the cycle would start again.

By the end of that year, our stack of used phone cards was several inches tall, and I was emotionally exhausted. Out of that exhaustion I thought we would at last be calm.

We traveled through Eastern Europe together at the end of the summer and fought all the way through, invariably for some stupid reasons. We fought in Budapest and made up in the city square. I was angry one afternoon and left him in the hotel room and climbed this mountain in the city weeping. I loved him but I felt constantly wounded by him and constantly wounded by the imperfections in our relationship.

… and then came back to the States, where we were supposed to live happily ever after, after having weathered through so much. We thought we knew each other through and through.

I feel a lot of sadness as I type this.

There are a lot of things I would like to sort through about E eventually.

One of the things that keeps churning and churning in my mind in the past few years is whether I did the right thing with him. I think about him often, not in a passionate, loving way, but almost as if I am thinking about myself, my childhood, my youth, my innocence. Leaving him is like growing up and leaving your childhood self behind. You know you have to and there is no other way, and yet…

Since I am very fatalistic, I sometimes think that whether I did the right thing with E (in retrospect) is going to be a test and a symbol for whether I have made the right choices for my entire adult life. I abandoned one path for another; I cast off a part of myself to have the possibility of other parts. Was this the right thing to do? I will only know much later.

I have never felt regret for anything in my life (other than regrets about the human condition in general). But I do feel longing for every piece of myself that I lost by having to make choices, and I have lost so many pieces. It haunts me that those are pieces of me that I would never regain, or worse yet, possibilities of me that would never be realized because I have chosen one life and not another. I feel a lot of sadness as I go through life having to cast off one possibility after another, all irrevocably, like my leaving E.

It’s like throwing a part of myself away in pursuit of a new self. I didn’t know at the time that I would always feel that loss. I know that now.