"Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.”

-Victor Hugo


I can't say that the last few years have been easy.  Maybe that's why I have been gone for so long.  There have been so many time that I have wanted to come back on here and update this and write down my thoughts, but I couldn't.  There was nothing to say.  I was being suffocated.  My emotions, my intellectualism, all were being smothered by the people in my life.

How did I get here?  Well... I believe that's a long story, meant for rainy-day writing.

But the delightful news is that I'm free.  It's an incredible feeling with a plethora of words that don't even begin to cage it in.  And even better, I'm happy.  I think that for the first time in my life... in my 21 years of breathing and feeling and loving, I am experiencing what the word "happy" is meant to describe. 

Free:

Part of Speech:	adjective
Definition:	unrestrained personally
Synonyms:	able, allowed, at large, at liberty, casual, clear, disengaged, easy, escaped, familiar, fancy-free, footloose, forward, frank, free-spirited, free-wheeling, independent, informal, lax, liberal, liberated, loose, off the hook, on one's own, on the loose, open, permitted, relaxed, unattached, uncommitted, unconfined, unconstrained, unengaged, unfettered, unhampered, unimpeded, unobstructed, unregulated, unrestricted, untrammeled
Antonyms:	bound, confined, hindered, limited, restrained

  

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend, They shall never be broken.”
-Albert Camus

I'm out of it!  Thank goodness.  I was in the weirdest mood the last few days, a sort of funk that I couldn't shake.  I'm used to being surrounded by friends and fun and responsibility and now it's just so quiet here on campus that I have been lonely and depressed.  I mean I haven't been depressed in so long, not since high school... but it was that same hopeless sinking feeling.  Wanting to get up and get out of it but not having the motivation to.  I hate that feeling.  I literally just moped around Steve's room yesterday (that's where I'm living over break since I got kicked out of my dorm during break.) I tried to sleep, but couldn't, I just kept replaying my miserable life over and over in my head wishing that I had a good friend I could talk to...

Funny thing about being depressed is that my life is not bad at all.  It has it's struggles... But for the most part I'm not starving and I have a roof and running water and there are not rebels outside trying to kill my loved ones.  It's really quite silly how one can feel so sorry for oneself.
For the most part I'm happy and I'm soooo glad that I am no longer in a Funk.. 

I promised someone special I would write... update my life on xanga.  It's weird how sometimes I feel like I NEED xanga as an outlet for my emotions, but then sometimes, I just have no desire to journal the hopelessness of my life for the world to see.
It's been a whole semester since I last wrote here, and now the semester is coming to an end.  The ten inches of snow on the ground up here in the beautiful mountains of Northern Arizona is a comforting reminder that no matter how bleak the fall is, no matter how ugly the world gets, their is still the promise of winter... the blanket that comes in silence, kills the bad, and makes way for new life in the spring.

I'm not going to dwell on the happinings of the semester too much... I'm just going to state them as fact with as little personal commentary as possible (which may be hard because I am the type that has strong opinions about everything.)  The less the commentary the less painful for me to relive it all.

Before the semester began I flew to Seattle to visit my sister.  It was amazing, the first time I had been there in decent weather so I was ables to experience everything.  We walked everywhere, went to old movies in Freemont, the little shops down the street from my sister's house, I got to climb all over the Freemont Troll, the Famer's Market where we bought all the ingredients to make squash stew... which turned out absolutely awful so we got Thai food instead.  I got to go to Pike's Place Market and all over downtown, University of  Washington where I spent a whole day talking to a guitar player on the street while my sister was in an interview.  (This is something I may write a whole entry about later because I had quite the conversation with guitar guy.)  Needless to say, Seattle was an amazing and relaxing end to my summer.

After that I flew to Denver to see my boyfriend who had an internship their this summer.  I flew in a so that he didn't have to make the 12 hour drive back to Phoenix alone.  We went to a Rockies game and hung out with his aunt and uncle and went shopping... It was so much fun and great to see him after 2 months away from eachother.  We drove to Phoenix the Thursday before school was to start and then drove to Flagstaff on Friday... all was going well.  That weekend I had to work a large wedding at the resort I had worked at all summer because they needed extra help.  Steve didn't answer his phone or return my calls the entire weekend which obviously made me worry since we had left things on good terms.  I was in the hospital Saturday night getting stitches in my face due to a shattered beer bottle that an enraged drunk woman had thrown at her husband, but which hit me instead.  Apparently Steve didn't care.
When I got home on Sunday he needed to borrow my car to go back to Phoenix because he had forgotten his fraternity stuff and "I" week was starting that night.  He wanted me to come with so I could drive back up so he could study.  (I hadn't gotten any sleep since Friday night because of the wedding running late and the hospital and the wedding banquet Sunday morning.)  So off we went to make the 4 hour journey, when we got to his aunt's house we had sex because it had been awhile and apparently he was horny.   Never had Steve been rough with me in bed... therefor I wasn't really expecting it went he threw me down told me to "shut the fuck up and take it like a good little slut".  Now if this is more info than you wanted then I apologize, but I don't think you would understand how ... how... belittled I felt unless I tell you everything, so here goes.  It's not like he raped me, not at all, I never said no, when he started undressing me I undressed him, I wanted it.  I just wasn't expecting him to get rough...  but here's the problem, there was hradly any foreplay, I wasn't ready for him and he is just downright huge.  He has the biggest penis I have ever seen in person and I can't just take it like it's nothing if there's no foreplay, I mean it hurts! So when I uttered a bit of pain and he told me to shut up and take it, I was offended, I was shocked, and I had flash backs of being raped when I was 13.
After that we left, I was quite, I didn't have anything to say, and I knew if I did I would make the situation worse.  Finally he asked me what was wrong and I told him it wasn't worth the argument, it made him mad that I assumed he would argue so I finally told him after a bit more prodding.  I was tired and I was driving him back up from a trip to Phoenix that I didn't want to take in the first place and he ended up calling me a slut, told me that I had been with so many guys that he didn't think it would bother me that he got a little rough in bed, thought that I would have gotten some of that from other guys I had been with or something... I was furious.  Not only had he been with more girls than I with guys, but I am not a slut, and I have never slept with anyone I didn't know well enough that they would slap me around.  I was driving 90 miles per hour up a mountain crying histerically trying to get the car ride over as soon as possible, and I broke up with him.

He was my best friend and not being with him, not seeing him as much as I would have liked killed me.  There is something about him that I love with all my heart, even if he is a jackass sometimes.  My best friend and roommate told me that I was going to end up like my mother if I stayed with him, in an abusive relationship that I was only staying in because I didn't think I was good enough to be loved by anyone else and because I thought so highly of him that I felt special that he would even look at me, let alone be with me. At times I thought she might be right... but Steve wasn't actually abusive to me, he never hit me, and while he said some things that made me feel like shit sometimes, if I told him, he would apologize, he didn't even realize how he sounded sometimes.

After a month of desperate sadness and not really talking to him, we decided we were going to try to be friends again.  This turned out to be friends with benifits which I didn't really want, but he said he couldn't resist me.  That turned me on... My best friend didn't understand how I could have any self-respect or dignity by seeing Steve again.  She got mad, stopped talking to me and moved out.  She didn't even know we were doing more than hanging out... I felt it was a bit impulsive and incredibly unreasonable on her part.

But, it was going well with Steve and I, we weren't in a relationship but we were both seeing (not having sex with) other people.  This just brought out the ugly horns of jealousy... and they were ugly.  He didn't like the people I was seeing, he knew all of them.  I didn't like the people he was seeing, none of whom I had met which made it worse for me.  This went on for a long time.  We eventually decided to stop seeing other people, date, test the waters again, but not be in a relationship.  After 3 months of doing that, and meeting Steve's parents for the first time when they came out to visit from Maine, I was ready to be in a relationship again... apparently I was the only one.  I hinted a lot, and then finally just came out and asked him.  He said he wasn't ready, he couldn't commit, and that he didn't trust me.  *Mouth dropped*  I knew right then and there that he had had sex with someone else while we were dating after we had both promised each other that we wouldn't.  I pushed the feeling aside, I mean I couldn't just flat out accuse hime.  It is a common belief in psychology that if someone in a relationsip doesn't trust the other person despite that person never having shown signs of cheating, the untrusting person is probably the one cheating because they figure if they can get away with it, their partner could just as easily.  This I knew, this I chose to ignore.

After Steve came home with me for Thanksgiving and wooed my parents and had a blast, he was finally ready for a commitment.  And it was official, we were together.  I was happy.  We were good. 

I hinted at Steve that I wanted him to change his profile on facebook.  I mean it's not a big deal, who gives a shit, it's facebook.  But at the same time, I wanted all those other girls who he had been talking to, to know that he had found happiness in me and to back the fuck off.  He didn't change it and I was being stubborn and wanted him to be the one to do it first.  It was a test sort of, it was a need for him to want people to know.  Maybe that sounds stupid but there's a Rascall Flatts song that I listened to when I was younger and that's what I wanted from him.

Love You Out Loud Lyrics
by Rascal Flatts

I’m gonna stand on a rooftop, climb up a mountaintop
Baby, scream and shout
I wanna sing it on the radio, show it on a video
Baby, leave no doubt
I want the whole world to know just what I’m all about
I love to love you out loud


I wanted, and felt like I deserved, for him to want people to know that he loved me and that he was ok with and happy about that.  He got so mad at me, he said I was being ridiculous, that we should be enough and that it shouldn't matter what other people knew or saw or thought.  That's when I knew for the second time that he was hiding something.  Why did he not want people to see that he was in a relationship, why the fuck was it such a big deal for him to put it on his facebook profile, why did he care.  It was obviously because he didn't want some girl to find out that he had been playing her.  But I didn't say anything.  Once again, if I was wrong, how could I just accuse him of something like that.
The day after we argued about that, he changed his status to "in a relationship" because he knew that it would make me happy and because if he didn't, he would look even more guilty. 
Four days later he got the stomach flu.  First I have to say that boys are babies when they get sick, second he was pretty sick.  After two days of taking care of him he said he needed to tell me something. 

And then there it was, the week before finals, the most stressful time of the semester, he tells me he slept with his friend Jamie.  He slept with her before we were in a relationship, but while we were dating and having sex which is what grosses me out the most... This was a point when he was spending every night at my house and most days and I knew where he was most of the time, not because I had him on a leash but because we shared everything with each other.  Basically, he went to her place, had sex with her, and came back to my place and spent the night.  Gross. 
I was speechless when he told me, silent tears.  He told me right before my next class where I had a review session for finals.  We talked, he was crying, he was so sorry, said it was a huge mistake and he would do anything to keep me.  He handed me my house key and said he would go back to his dorm.  I handed it back to him, told him I wanted to talk to him when I get out of class, kissed him and told him that no matters what happens we would be ok as friends or together. 
After class I went home and we talked.  I asked a lot of questions hoping there would be an explanation.  He said it was twice.  She was a virgin before that.  That bothered me the most.  Poor girl, you know?  Lost her virginity to this guy who she has always liked because she thought that's what he wanted from her, because she thought he would want her too if she stopped acting like such a prude.  By the way Steve and Jamie and I sort of have a past and it's not secret that she wanted him and that she was a devout Christian who would never do "that".  I mean I feel really bad for the girl.  If she wanted to wait til marraige she should have, she shouldn't have let some asshole in college pressure her to do that.  And this is why Steve didn't want it on facebook, he knew it would tear her apart if she found out... she thought she was finally getting somewhere with him. 

I didn't tell my friends, I didn't tell anyone.  I shed a few tears, pushed aside the fact that I felt like a failure because obviously there was something that Steve wasn't getting from me that he had to look for somewhere else and kept my mouth shut.  This was hard, not being able to talk about it.  I didn't want anyone to know because I still loved him and if we decided to stay together or get back together I didn't want the pressure from my friends saying not to.  It was my decision and he left it up to me to decide where we should go from there. 

We are still in a relationship and while I still have to push away a wave of anger or sadness every now and then, it was only a week ago that he told me and I figure eventually I won't feel that way about it, I mean I won, I got the guy, and I'm happy.

Relationships of all kinds are like sand held in your hand.  Held loosely, with an open hand, the sand remains where it is. The minute you close your hand and squeeze tightly to hold on, the sand trickles through your fingers. You may hold on to some of it, but most will be spilled. A relationship is like that. Held loosely, with respect and freedom for the other person, it is likely to remain intact. But hold too tightly, too possessively, and the relationship slips away and is lost.
                -- Chicken Soup for the Soul

 

Jealousy, the dragon that slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

 

Envy can be a positive motivator. Let it inspire you to work harder for what you want.