On being nearsighted, and closure.

I have terrible vision. I don't know if it's hereditary, or a result of not enough carrots as a child, or too many nights attempting to read the Boxcar Children in dimly lit rooms and hoping my parents didn't notice that I was up past my bedtime. Whatever the cause, without my glasses, I can hardly see anything past two feet in front of me clearly.

This is probably a good life metaphor for me.

I am TERRIBLE at thinking about the future. The question "Where do you want to be in five years?" incites no real reaction from me, because my first thought is always, "Well, I'll either be alive or dead" and that's about as specific as I manage to get on a good day. I'm sure this is stressful for the rest of my family -- they are planners of the highest order. My dad has had his retirement planned out for at least the last decade, my sister and her husband are probably planning theirs...I don't even know what I'm having for lunch in a few hours.

This is a mighty flaw of mine -- a belief that things will either work out (or they won't), and I'll either have to deal with it (or I won't).

This morning, I was stumbling around my bathroom, bleary-eyed and without my glasses, because sometimes I do that, and I looked up at the ceiling and noticed a dark blur. Because the ceiling is tall and I am not, it was just a fuzzy black spot to me. I had no idea what it was, and so I speculated that it might be a random paint stain, dirt, a bug -- A SPIDER? No idea, and because I had no idea, my mind came up with increasingly terrible things it could be, quickly spiraling into the irrational (seriously, there's no way it could actually be a tiny portal to another dimension, right?).

The end of my last relationship was like that.

I didn't get concrete reasons on why it ended. Something just CHANGED, and then all of a sudden the man I thought I loved was no longer in my life. There were mumbles about how I deserved better, about how I needed different things than he could give me, that distance was too far, and all I could think was that I was not enough. He never said that, but that's what it felt like -- that I was not enough of whatever, or that I was too much of something else, and that's why he couldn't promise to love me anymore.

Nothing made sense, and when things don't make sense, my creative brain attempts to fill in the blanks.

Here are the things that I've considered could be the reason why we didn't work out:
- I am too fat
- His family hated me and he didn't want to deal with a schism between myself and them
- I've never had a dog before
- He looked up my credit score
- I am too fat
- He realized he'd made a terrible terrible mistake in agreeing to be my boyfriend
- He spoke to an ex of mine and decided it wasn't worth it
- He was using me for my money and then realized I had none
- I am too fat
- He found out I read the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy in its entirety (I WANTED TO BE ABLE TO MAKE FUN OF IT WITH INFORMED DECISIONS)
- He loves camping too much and couldn't deal with the fact that I can't sleep without my CPAP and a source of electricity
- He was never actually real and I was being catfished the entire time
- He saw how pretty my sister is and decided he didn't want to be with the lesser sister and so he had to ditch me altogether
- I like carbs too much
- His dogs might not like me
- He was kidnapped and forced to break up with me but he didn't actually want to but now he is IN DANGER and I can't just give up on him because what if he's in TROUBLE?!

I think anyone that has had a relationship end can relate. Your insecurities come out in FULL FORCE when you have to confront them because of rejection. You wonder WHY, and then when they tell you, you don't believe them anyway. Your brain becomes your worst enemy, and the creativity that you've always enjoyed becomes a burden because you're able to come up with increasingly terrible things about yourself to try and rationalize away the hurt. You've never resented your imagination like this.

At the end of it, though, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter WHY he left, because the reality you're faced with is that he DID. He left. He gave up, and walked away, and even if he did it to save you from ninja kidnappers that were going to assassinate you and your entire family, you were somehow not worth the fight anymore in your head. That's how you understand it.

My last relationship ended, and my feelings are valid. I am allowed to feel hurt and abandoned and sad, because I had expectations and hopes for it, and now I'm having to reform them. Change is hard, no matter how welcome or expected it may be. I keep telling myself that I shouldn't be upset, that it wasn't that long anyway. I shouldn't be upset because my day-to-day life doesn't change much with his absence, no matter how much my brain tells me otherwise. I shouldn't be upset, because my friends and family want better things for me and are seemingly relieved that it didn't work out. I shouldn't be upset, because so many things were keeping us apart anyway.

But fuck that. I am allowed to be upset because I thought I was in love, and it was a wonderful feeling that I hadn't experienced in actual YEARS. I am allowed to be upset because I thought he was my friend, and now he is a ghost, and I have to wonder if I imagined everything. I am allowed to be upset because I am a person with emotions, and because my heart is broken, and my heart doesn't understand time in the same way my brain does.

With my glasses back on, I returned to my bathroom to try and figure out what I had been speculating about. There was a brown stain on the ceiling that I'd never noticed before. And right next to it, there was a spider. I have no idea which I'd been wondering about.

There will always be questions. Sometimes we have to learn to shrug and accept that we won't always have answers.