Fifteen

everytime i close my eyes

all i see is you and her

her and you

hands held

looking at each other

laughing

talking

do you dream together

the same dreams we had?

do you hope together

the same hopes we had?

are you scared of pain with her?

or only with me?

because what we had was too real

you had to run away

or were you a coward

too scared to tell me how you really felt

if you didn’t want me then you should have just fucking said so.

i’m not that precious

i’m not that fragile

i am me

i have always been me

and i will always be me

without you

my life will keep rolling on

i will find love again

but better this time

with someone who isn’t scared

with someone who is committed to me

with someone who will make me laugh

with someone who will hold me when i cry

with someone who will make me a better person

with someone who will stay

Fourteen

Today I saw him holding hands with another girl. I think he saw me too because they were about to cross the road but then changed directions.

There are no words for it. I feel sad and rejected and inadequate and small and lonely. But those just scratch the surface. My insides feel so contracted and I feel like I need to let it out somehow but I’m just completely paralysed too.

I really thought that if he was coming back here, that he would come back to me. But he hasn’t come back to me.

I feel so stupid and such an idiot for thinking that I was someone different, someone special to him.

But I need to remind myself that even if I was just another number to him, I’m not dispensable.

I am different.

I am special.

Fuck him for being selfish and running away from commitment.

Fuck him for telling me he had a dream about me and then asking to catch up.

Fuck him for being a coward and not being upfront in his communication.

I’ve unfriended him on Facebook and unfollowed him on Instagram, and removed his following on my Instagram. I need to cut him out of my life.

I’m thankful for friends who I can cry with, who will join me in screaming into the wind at the beach, who will remind me that I will have someone better than him in my future. I will. I will. I will.

Thirteen

Rejection is hard to stomach. It’s amazing how a long string of goodness can be so easily unravelled by a few seconds of an Instagram story.

This week has been good, really good. Each day I feel more hopeful and more joyful but then today I saw on Instagram that he was still here, just choosing to not be here, with me.

you’re everywhere except right here and it hurts – rupi kaur

I want to make excuses for him – for why he chose to not do long distance, for why he didn’t reply to my last message. But these aren’t excuses for him, they’re for me. I’m desperately clinging on to this whisper of the past, wanting to believe a better version of him. I’ve got my hands covering my eyes, and even when I force myself to take them away, my eyes are stubbornly shut, refusing to see things as they are. Sometimes I wonder if my eyelids open, if there will be anything there or if I will have gauged my eyes out. Sometimes reality is so painful that I would rather be blind.

Rejection is hard to stomach. Especially when it’s not communicated. If he doesn’t want to see me, then why didn’t he just reply saying so? Surely I deserve the time for a reply?

Fuck him.

Twelve

Tonight I caught up with a good friend who’s been with her boyfriend for almost 2 years now. She told me tonight that she’s not sure if she wants to be with him anymore but is caught in that hard place of having too much history to want to let it go, even though she feels like she needs to.

In my singleness, I always feel like relationships are bliss, and forget that they have their own struggles. I do think that my situation is different though – that it was the wrong time, rather than the wrong person. But even so, it reminded me that relationships aren’t the magical salve for loneliness or pain. There is loneliness and pain in relationships too. It might look different than the loneliness and pain in singleness, but it’s still there.

Having said that, I really miss the intimacy of being in a relationship. And sex stuff. I really miss the sex stuff. I miss sleeping next to someone. I miss waking up with someone. I miss doing the every day mundane stuff like walking down to get a coffee in the morning, or getting groceries together. But maybe I just miss it because we were good together. There are definitely exes in my life that I don’t miss doing that stuff with.

I guess tonight’s conversation with E just reminded me that there are blessings and burdens in each stage of life. It’s so easy to be blind to the good in your current state.

Eleven

My lappy’s running low on battery so let’s see how fast I can articulate my thoughts before it dies.

Does free will exist? I used to think so, but the more I think about it, the more I talk about it with people, the more I read about it, the less convinced I am. Every time we start studying a new text in class, there is a context lecture on the author and the social and political climate of the time. This is so we have a foundation to build a meaningful analysis of the text. Every time, we find things in the text which reflect the author’s background or common views and values of the time that they’re writing in.

I don’t think this is intentional on the author’s part, I think it just comes out naturally. So if we can find reasons for why the author writes what they write, does this mean that they’re just a product of their society, that they’ve been conditioned to be the way that they are? If free will truly existed, then theoretically, writers would be able to write for an infinite number of different topics and these would have no reason attributable to it.

Or is it a matter of defining what free will means? Is free will, infinite choice? Can you have free will if your choices are limited?

Ten

Double digits! Woohoo! I was telling my counsellor last week about how this blog was helping me sift through and process my feelings. I’m not sure why it feels different to writing for myself, because I still do that, on a daily basis. Maybe it’s the validation from strangers reading it that makes me feel less alone in my feelings? Anyway, you – reader – are making a difference in my life and I thank you for that.

Today I’ve been thinking about the words we consume. In my Children’s Literature paper, we spend a lot of time discussing what it is that makes children’s literature, literature for children. The books that sit in the children’s section of bookshops – why have they been put there? What are the characteristics of a story that make them for children and not adults? Why do we distinguish children’s literature from literature in general?

Something that keeps cropping up is the idea that children’s literature, in general, is more didactic than adult literature – there’s usually some lesson to be learned, a moral to be discovered. And we see this all the time – children’s literature is rife with stories of good and evil, of winners and losers.

So if children are supposed to learn something from these books they’re reading, what is it saying when the majority of happy endings involve a male and a female, that the females are usually helpless and need rescuing? What are the books teaching children if the majority of the ones we read still have white male protagonists?

Eight

Today, I’m writing this from a cafe on the pier. J and I walked this pier on our second date where we joked about stealing life rings from the boats for a dress up party my flat was having. It was overcast that day, like today is, and I can’t stop my mind from going back and reliving the happiness and excitement that I felt from being with him.

There’s a thin line between love and hate. I hate that there’s so much in this city that reminds me of him but at the same time, I love those memories we built here.

I’ve been trying to implement the strategies my counsellor suggested, thinking of those memories objectively and prying them apart to separate the things that I miss, from him. So instead of thinking right now that I miss him and those times, instead thinking that I miss dating and the excitement of new relationships, and of the discovery of someone new.

But it’s so much easier said than done.

I just want to sit and reminisce on those times, feel that happiness again, even if it’s only in my mind. That is my default and it’s so much more effort to push myself to curb my thoughts into healthier patterns. I know that it’s necessary though, and I have to remind myself of the truth that one day it won’t feel like this anymore, even if I don’t believe it right now.

Six

One of the worst things after a break up is having to tell people about it. After J and I broke up, I sent out texts to my closest friends – just copied and pasted into different conversations. I wanted to rip that bandaid off in one go. But there are still conversations you have to have face to face and each time I tell the story of us, I’m pounded again by the reality of those words.

I felt this today at my counselling session. We talked about the breakup and effective strategies to move out of this hole I feel I’m in.

At the moment, I’m skeptical that I’ll find someone like him again, someone that I’ll connect with so instantly and deeply. My counsellor suggested swapping out definitive terms to more time restricted words. So instead of “I’ll never connect with someone else like that again”, to change to “Right now, I feel like I’ll never connect with someone else like that again”.

A couple of years ago, I did a mental health course and they talked about cognitive theories and how you had to train your brain to go down certain thought paths – that our brains were like rivers and the more you carved out the same thought patterns, the easier it was for your brain to think those thoughts. I like that.

I’ve been feeling so disempowered the last few months, have resigned myself to these feelings. It’s nice to think that I can take back some control, that bit by bit, I can train my thoughts to become more hopeful for the future again.