Non Sequiturville

I am absolutely amazed at how great people are. So many friends from all over and even friends I haven’t talked to in a long time have contacted me to give me their condolences and well wishes. I’m truly fortunate.

I don’t think Paul ever even knew what the URL was for my blog: he certainly never read it and I don’t think he ever took note of it even when he was using my computer (it’s my home page, and he used my computer all the time).

My father and my stepmother have been spending a lot of time talking to me and talking amongst themselves about this relationship. It must entertain them somehow. When it first happened, I was surprised to find that their immediate reaction was one of relief, somewhat: that they thought I would be better off without Paul. They really liked him when they met him and my father was always rather defensive of Paul whenever I shared with my dad that I was mad at Paul about something. But they didn’t think he was the right match for me.

The first day after he broke up with me, I told my dad a bunch of things about my relationship with Paul that he didn’t know about and he said that I really should never take Paul back if he ever came back.

And yesterday, my father told me that the night before, he and my stepmother had been discussing the relationship and that my stepmother got mad and went out at night and did some angry gardening. I think that she had a relationship with someone similar to Paul. So now they think he’s a jerk: not for breaking up with me, but for the way he was throughout the relationship.

Almost without exception, every friend of mine or family member who met or knew him has been in concurrence with this. I’ve never been through a breakup before from a real relationship, so I don’t know if this is just something people do and say to make you feel better (“He just wasn’t right for you anyway”) or if they’re being honest. Naturally I am starting to see just how many problems there were. After all, I was unhappy enough that I wondered if I might save myself from even bigger problems in the future if I ended it now, and I even talked to a friend of mine before Paul broke up with me who is married to someone just like him and spends much of her time being frustrated. I guess when it comes down to it, my role was more of being a personal assistant than a girlfriend, even though I very much wanted to be a girlfriend.

I have friends with whom I haven’t spent much time in the past year because I was with Paul who have told me in the past day that they always felt I was too self-sacrificing and was too generous in my efforts for him.

On Tuesday, the first day after it happened, I ate non-solid food in the evening which was the first food I’d eaten in 30 hours. I slept 6 hours on Tuesday night, which was all the sleep I’d had since Sunday night. I just work up from another 6 hours. I can’t seem to sleep longer than that. I have panic attacks from time to time where I think I can’t live without him and that I will not be able to live through to the next minute: that I will somehow just — expire. It is because of these attacks that my neighbor decided on Tuesday I should go to the emergency psych clinic. THAT was an experience. She came with me and sat uncomfortably in the waiting room around all the crazy homeless people and I just assured her it was just like the library. Naturally I was the most sane person they ever saw and they said that what I was going through was perfectly normal. Of course, several men (including Paul, who I was stupid enough to call yesterday–won’t do that again) have told me how silly it is “not to eat,” and that I need to forcefeed myself. Obviously they’ve never experienced an inability to eat and my therapist and the psychiatrists all say it’s QUITE normal.

I do eat some now and again but can only do it around other people for some bizarre reason. You know how sometimes people’s pets develop weird issues about the weirdest things? I feel like one of those pets right now. I can only eat around other people. I am afraid of my kitchen and can’t really deal with it at all (it reminds me too much of Paul). I was afraid of my living room and couch for some reason until last night: we’ll see if that fear comes back. Maybe it’s because that’s where I last sat with him when we were breaking up.

My therapist says that I will be sick for a month. She says that breaking an attachment, or “detaching” from someone has physical as well as emotional symptoms and that my body has to readjust from being away from him. She said I should expect that I won’t eat much and that I won’t sleep well for at least a month, and that anytime I have any contact with him, I have to reset the clock from that date. She suggested I have friends over and start to associate my apartment with something else other than having Paul in it all the time. My therapist also summed up what Paul was thinking when he broke up with me: that he was quite taken with me and really wanted to make it work and tried for almost a year and hit whatever wall he hit and felt he couldn’t do it anymore; that he had to decide to make himself the priority and not have to deal with a relationship anymore. Which is more or less what his best friend’s girlfriend told me when she called Tuesday night. I still have trouble getting my head around it, though. It seems like it would make sense for me to break up with him, but he seems to lose out quite a bit from breaking up with me, since I did a lot for him and was his girl Friday.

One really positive thing about this breakup is that it has finally settled things I felt about the relationship prior to it: the relationship with the Man Who Wasn’t Available. The last man was obsessing over me after I got involved with Paul (no doubt because I wouldn’t relate to him anymore) and I finally had to have a talk with him and explain to him that even if he left his s.o. and even if Paul and I broke up, I still wouldn’t be with him now–that the ship had sailed in a big way. At the time I didn’t think Paul and I would ever break up (I just talked to my best friend who pointed out that in spite of our problems we really were extremely well-matched in so many ways and that if he were older and I was younger it might be a different story). But now that it has actually happened, I am more certain than I’ve ever been about anything in my life that I NEVER want to be with the Man Who Wasn’t Available. Weirdly enough, I keep running into him and it turns my stomach. I guess I finally realized just how sick and twisted my relationship with him was.

OK, off to work now. Amazing, huh?

I am sitting here in bed. I got about two hours of sleep last night. My eyes are so swollen from crying I can barely close them. I haven’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday. Paul broke up with me last night and I am not functioning very well at all.

I don’t think I’ve been this down in about thirteen years. I felt like this, oddly enough, the summer before my junior year of college. I visited my friend here in Philadelphia who drove me to Northampton where I slept on another friend’s floor and then moved into “summer” housing for a week or two before the houses opened up. I was singing in a chorus of an opera. I couldn’t eat or sleep very well at all during that time. It was so agonizing and devastating that I swore I would do everything in my power not to feel that way again.

I was a pretty big wreck three years ago when I got back from Rare Book School. (Ironically, I just got back from Rare Book School two days ago.) I fell insanely in love with a guy there and was destroyed for the rest of the summer. My sleep was affected and everything, but for some reason, my appetite wasn’t affected and I saw that as a good sign. Things were horrible, too, when Mr. Mess decided to stay with his significant other. But somehow I wasn’t so upset that I felt I should commit myself, like I do now.

I feel like I need to be in a hospital where someone monitors my eating and sleeping and makes sure I do both.

Paul has been my lover and my best friend for almost a year. Which is a serious record in my life. I wasn’t always happy and even over the weekend, was wondering if I should break up with *him*. But that came more out of a desire to change aspects of our relationship and maybe to force him to appreciate me more. I didn’t really want him out of my life at all. Breaking up with me was extremely difficult for him and I think that I forced his hand in a way and dragged it out of him. He said he didn’t see himself with me for a lifetime and didn’t feel a “spark.” This is good and honest of him to be straightforward with himself and me about it.

The thing is, if he was the kind of guy who was settled and stable in his professional life and all that, I think that I would trust this decision more. But for whatever reason, I don’t entirely trust it because he sets outrageously high standards for himself and for the people closest to him. Unrealistic standards, all the time, about the tiniest things. And so I think there is a possibility that he has unrealistic expectations about what a relationship should be like and what a relationship with a tangible future should feel like. I am the first serious girlfriend he’s had who lives in the same state since college, I think. I am the first serious girlfriend his friends and parents have liked at all.

Paul’s been gone for almost a month: he came back last Wednesday and I was down in Virginia at Rare Book School. He was bad about emailing and then bad about calling when he got back, which is unlike him. Strangely, I had two sleepless nights last week at RBS: I was very depressed about him and about the men who came before him in my life. I had dreams a couple of nights before those sleepless ones that he didn’t care about me.

After talking to both my parents and a couple of my closest friends last night, I discovered that they didn’t all think that Paul was the right fit for me. Naturally they never told me this before but there were a number of red flags that they saw over the past year that I didn’t. And obviously I was thinking about these things, too, because one of my friends reminded me that she talked to me *two days ago* and that I was wondering if I should break up with him and make life easier for myself. The problem is, Paul is such a part of my daily life that is is absolutely devastatingly lonely and empty without him. I really saw myself spending my life with him, in spite of the problems we had. Eating reminds me of him. Sleeping reminds me of him. My cat reminds me of him. He broke up with me (more or less) in Rittenhouse Square and when I kept crying, he got a cab for us back to my place. He choked and cried when he saw my cat: he adored her. He cried himself throughout this. I finally told him I loved him (which I never did). I actually thought he loved me, too, but I guess I was wrong about that.

I don’t know how I am going to go to work today. I don’t know if I should since I cry at the drop of a hat and I look like a horror movie. I miss him so much. I already missed him after being away from him for a month. And I miss him calling me five times a day, even though we always talked about him.

I can assure you, a person can die from a broken heart.