Some surreal stuff that I think I’ve glossed over because of the intensity of the last week. I’ve been so caught up in the anticipation of missing him, then missing him, that I haven’t had a chance to just live, you know?
Anyway, on to the randomness. Last Tuesday I closed at Aroma. I was out on the patio locking up the furniture and happened to look over into the Barfly patio. Sitting in the patio, to my great surprise , was Rachel Link! We met in third grade and graduated from the same high school. I hadn’t seen her since graduation seven years ago – so it was a big and random surprise.
Speaking of surprises, the boy sent me an e-card this morning promising a surprise when I get home from work. I’m hella intrigued. I did have a nice surprise at work this morning – Michelle got me Hello Kitty PJ pants, some caramel kisses, and jasmine incense. Yay for random last day pressies.
But even more random was the email I got last Friday. For a number of years I was desperately in love with a guy named Scott. We met when I was 8 and he was 12 – his grandparents live next door to mine, and we would see each other every summer and on the breaks. As I got older, going to Davenport meant going to see Scott, though I nominally was with my grandparents. When I was 17 we started keeping in touch through letters and email – I had a letter from him nearly every Friday my freshman year of college. By that time, though, I was with someone, and he had a girlfriend as well. I didn’t know the full extent of his feelings for me until the following summer, when everything reached a fever pitch and my relationship nearly ended over it. Six months later my relationship did end (over someone else), and Scott wrote to me to propose. His girlfriend found the letter, and I didn’t hear about it until six months later, when my relationship had repaired itself and Scott was with someone new, a girl who was expecting their child. Since then we’ve fallen back into the old routine, seeing each other at holidays and such. Somewhere along the lines I got over him, but I always knew that I was the one for him – the Big One – the one he’d never get over. His grandmother told me that they always hoped the two of us would get together – and his stepmother said they never worried about him getting married because “[they] would wait for Elizabeth.”
So this week I got an email from him, the first time I’d heard from him since last summer. He said his life is shit – that the only thing keeping him going is his son – that he wishes he had the nerve to do what I did [leaving]. He then alluded to the earlier proposal, ending with “just wondering.”
So what do you say to that? I was totally taken aback. I thought about it all weekend, then replied as tactfully as I could. I told him about my new life, about Shawn, about how happy I am. I told him that I did remember his proposal and that while it’s sweet to think about how we once felt about each other, I’m a very different person now. I will always care about him, but that relationship never could work – never would work. Oh, and Shawn and Sarah said I couldn’t marry him because he has terrible grammar.
This week has been relatively uneventful, those weird things aside. Wednesday night I was supposed to have curry with Sarah and Hannah but was called in to work instead. Sarah came in to see me, and left a food surprise in my fridge at home. On my walk home I passed a couple of coworkers at Monkey, so I stopped and had a drink with them. Yesterday was mainly quiet – work, then the doctor’s office and new birth control. I talked to Shawn for a long time, did some dishes, watched tv, and read in bed. I finished Ghost World and thought about calling Shawn before sleep, but the line was busy and I fell asleep with the phone in my hand. I miss him terribly, but I’m surviving.