I am not too much

The LDC doesn’t want me to move to Seattle. He said it. It doesn’t matter how he said it, or his reasons, or how I reacted to it. It is a basic fact that I should’ve seen coming from 3,000 miles away. This is a fantasy. It always was. When the reality of me actually being in his city stared him in the face, he ran scared. Fantasy is easier than reality. Texts are easier than visits. We will never cuddle on his couch in Seattle and make fun of reality television, or go to dinner at the dozens of restaurants in the Pacific Northwest that I’ve told him about. I won’t meet his mom and he won’t meet my dad. I’ll never have to lie to him about eating fast food or smoking a cigarette because he’ll never be able to smell it on me. And at the most basic level, he won’t care.

I’m disappointed. I’m frustrated that this thing I’ve been laboring over for a long time was all for naught. But in a sick, sad, twisted way, I’m relieved. This is what I’ve been expecting. This is the thing I’ve been trying to pull out of him for a year now. “Tell me that this is important to you,” I begged, but I might as well have asked him to tell me exactly how it wasn’t important to him. I was digging for affirmations because I expected that he wouldn’t deliver. It’s like being led blindfolded through a garbage dump but being told you’re in a rose garden. The blindfold comes off, and ah ha! I didn’t want to be right, but deep down I always felt I was.

Seattle will be strange without him. I’ll walk by his office building, and his parents’ store, and the restaurant he took me to on our first and only real date, and I’ll think of him. We’ll probably see each other every once in awhile. I’d feel sadder about this if I wasn’t so hopeful about the other great things going on in my life. Someday I’ll peer out of a TV screen at him from behind the counter of my cooking show, and maybe he’ll feel a little pang of regret that I turned out so great and he missed the boat. Even now I feel that way, that he’s the one missing out, and I guess I should be grateful for that. I’m still reminded of JRenee’s quote, and the more misguided relationships I have the more I actually believe it.

“Be you. You are enough and you are not too much.”