There’s an entry I want to write here. There is stuff I want to tell you. It’s very hard to know how personal to get here, and what to write about. Now that I have, on a regular basis, more than three or four readers a day, I’m more than little scared to write about stuff that I would normally write about (in an even more haphazard fashion than I do here) in my paper journal. I have always admired journallers that got into it, that laid everything out about the things that really matter to them (and to me!), even if I was thinking to myself, the whole time I was reading insatiably, that it was going to end badly, that it was going to be a trainwreck and that you should only use your journal to write about silly and lighthearted things. You should keep private stuff private, especially if you don’t use a pseudonym. Although I have recently discovered that there are other Chiaras in the world (even online)…I’m pretty sure that if you are looking for me, and think that this is the Chiara you used to know, then it is. Note to self: in next life, either refer to self as “GlytterFaery2993” or be named Jennifer.
But anyway. I’m not going to give you all the boring details, especially since there’s a good chance that you are someone who has listened to me cry and whine about this in the past couple of weeks. I will say this: my heart hurts, a lot. You can maybe imagine how much. Imagine, for example, that you loved someone for many years, for a decade, and that you were not sure if that person loved you back. Maybe you had never been really sure, although most of your time together you’d been pretty sure. Imagine that this person was intimately involved in every single aspect of your life, and that you couldn’t even think ahead to the end of the week without thinking of this person, and that the idea of this person not being in your life at all was pretty much inconceivable. And then imagine that you began to conceive it. Imagine that you broke down into tears whenever you did.
We haven’t broken up yet as such. Maybe we won’t. I hope we don’t, but I don’t know what will happen, what we will decide. Maybe there won’t be a ‘we’ deciding anything, maybe there will be just one person saying “Enough.” Maybe it will be me. We’re being as kind to each other as we can, which on my side, frankly? Is not too much. I’m ashamed to tell you I have a very mean and awful and vindictive side to me, if you don’t already know it, and that I will lash out at you if you hurt me. I’m good at it. The better I know you, the worse it will be. If you happen to be a quiet and shy person, and a little awkward when expressing your feelings, and I think you are ignoring me? It will be even worse. Remember those times that I listened to you and empathized and asked sensitive questions and you felt better afterward and joked I should be a therapist? This is the flip side of that, this mean side of me. I was paying attention and I know where a lot of your weak spots are. So I am not being as kind and understanding as I should be, as I want to be. I’m not trying very hard. I don’t have an excuse for that, even, except to say that the things you have to do to stay with someone you love, and the things you have to do to save yourself for yourself, when you believe that no one will take care of you but you, are sometimes very different.
I’m also aware that I’m being melodramatic and pathetic and that I’m feeling more sorry for myself that anyone with her health and her family and a paycheck and built-in bookshelves should ever be. I know this is maudlin, and that probably I’m making a big deal out of nothing, and I also know that I’m doing that horrible thing that journallers all do, eventually, where they hint there’s something that’s going on in their lives that they want to talk about and can’t. I guess I’ve also reached that point where the journal has become important enough to me that I want to document here that I’m going through this, that it’s not all silliness with me, that I have this horrible mean side to me, that this relationship with someone I love so much and have written about here is very difficult and that I think I’m going to lose it soon. I don’t know if writing about it here is going to make the worst come true, or change things for the better somehow, or have no effect on anything, or what, but there you have it. Welcome to my life.