New Year

It's a new year.  It's off to an auspicious start.  I feel that I have come full circle.  I started this blog in 2006, 9 years ago.  I started this blog dating a woman my friends called Allie 2, because I had only dated and only fucked one person before her, Ali.  I was with Ali for 5 years, from 17 to 22, from orange county to san francisco to hawaii and back again to so cal.  I loved her, I wanted to marry her, I wanted kids with her, I was a different person then. 

I just looked at my first blog and noticed Allie 2 had commented on it, and I looked at the post she wrote about me.   This was it.

"He told me yesterday, as the sun winked below the horizon, that
"if you weren't leaving, i'd fall for you."
and all I can't really say anything about that, because it seems like a reoccurring theme, though I don't discredit or trivialize it. I could taste seasalt on my lips, on his lips, staining our words with their acrid dryness. And when those calendar days peel away and we're left bereft with this sense of "there should have been more....there should have been more..."
...and maybe in a perfect world that would have happened, maybe it will happen (I don't doubt the moments of perfection in this one, eternally optimistic).

this thought should have been finished, i should have let it bloom in its entirety, but already morning is stealing away. sort of a metaphor, right?"

Those are her words.  I don't doubt the moments of perfection either.  These days I rarely think about Allie 2 and only occasionally think of Aly 1, but they were both people I had tremendous affection for.  I remember bringing Allie 2 snacks and flowers when she was pulling all nighters for school, and I remember the letter she wrote me as I dropped her off at the plane that took her to Chile for a year.  I remember coming home in the middle of a warm hawaiian summer and sitting in my living room and crying for hours.  I missed her, I cared for her, we were over. 

So I come to this journal today, writing to myself.   I still have many of the same problems, character flaws, coping mechanisms that I had back then.  Am i better?  I like to think so.  I haven't burned myself in nearly a year, though I want to at least once every other day, and right now it is all I want. 

Yesterday, I emailed Stephanie.  Today, I woke up late, cooked breakfast, and cried over Stephanie while smoking in front of my warehouse.  I miss Stephanie.  I don't doubt the moments of perfection we had, but we could have only had them with all my shit.  Now is as good a time as any to commit to myself.  It is time to commit to caring and loving myself, because I want to be better to those I love, and that will never happen if I keep hurting myself with my words and actions to others and to myself.  I am not one for lists or resolutions, but this year I will be one who makes a real attempt at loving myself.  I will accept the loss of Steph, I will continue to mourn her, continue to cry, and continue to feel waves of sadness as I am reminded of her. 

In front of me is my best friend's computer.  There is trash from yesterdays licorice used to cope.  There is a lighter and there are pills.  But I will sign out of here, shut down my dating profile, leave the pills and lighter in this room where they belong, and walk out and start again.