A Letter to Myself.

Present.

Probably within the next three weeks, Chi will be back and I will have to finish this job.

I really have no choice. I can't let this person back into my life and get treated the way I KNOW I will be.

I know, in general, what I have to do. Exactly how to phrase it, I don't know. I don't have that part yet. I don't know exactly where his head will be or what he'll say.

I do have some pretty good guesses.

By mid-March, this job should be over. I can't change my mind. I absolutely can't, I just can't. That way lies tragedy, and this I know.

So, by mid-March, Chi will have left my life--or I will have left his--quite possibly forever, and this will be my life. Just as it is now. I see nothing different, nothing new, nothing better, in my future. Not for many, many, many years. I'll be a senior citizen by then!

But, you know, that's the way it has to be. If I got anything wonderful and new before I learned how to accept my life the way it is, and be perfectly happy and satisfied with only what there is now, I'd just mess everything up again. Simon was the one person that wouldn't have happened with.

He was the happy childhood I deserved and should have had. Now I've moved out of the house and for the first time in my life, I am both all alone and an adult,  instead of a child.

Before, I could be happy because I had this starry-eyed belief in myself, sort of like he had. I believed in a much, much, MUCH better world than the one we actually live in. I can't do that anymore, so there's no more flying up on the wings of anticipation of being the next J.K. Rowling. I'm just going to go along doing my work, and that will be it. There's no one close to me but myself, and  no life but the one there is.

After the life I had, this isn't much of a life at all. I wake up and ask myself, What am I even doing all this for? What is the point? And, Why do I care?

Most days, I don't. I've been really sleepy all this week. I'm beginning to suspect I'm just depressed.

And no wonder. Who wants to spend the rest of their life like this?

But, it's unacceptable to run back to Chi, although I suspect I WILL have that opportunity over the next month. 

Once I was so happy because I knew I'd see him again. Now I know exactly what I'm looking at, and I've already skipped ahead emotionally to the time when I've said goodbye and now I have no life at all. I feel like Bella Swan in that horrible second Twilight movie, where all she does is mope and moon.

I need to remember that those movies were HUGE hits. And that, while J.K. Rowling was divorcing an abusive husband and ended up fired, jobless, and on welfare while alone raising a newborn baby,  feeling awful about life and herself, she did her best work.

I guess some people can do something good with a time like this. But, I sure won't be happy doing it.

I don't think, most of the time, that I will ever be happy again. My life just fell all to pieces--twice--and oh, well. 

Last time this happened, Simon asked me out within two weeks. Not gonna happen now, not with anyone emotionally well enough to be in any relationship, at least. This time, I really do have to tough it all out alone.

But that's no excuse for helping someone else perpetuate his own illness. If I do that, everyone pays, pays big, and pays bad.

In theory, if I learn my lesson, I push Chi to learn his...which, in theory, he has a decent chance of doing. If I DON'T learn my lesson, well, he has to keep teaching me my lesson, and those are painful lessons I don't want to undergo. I keep getting this transit, and he does too, that a teacher is coming into our lives that doesn't look like a teacher. 

I need to test out of that course.

Codependency 101 was bad enough.

In theory, Chi has the stuff and is capable of doing much better.

In reality...well, look at his track record. It's bad.

I have to figure out how to go on living this way for the rest of my life without being so miserable. I haven't solved that riddle.

One thing's for sure: If I don't solve that riddle, and I end up brokenhearted forever, for the rest of my life, I can at least know that I stuck up for what was right, insisted he GET THE FUCK WELL, and refused to support him in staying sick.

At least I did that.

How can I live this life and not be so sad anymore?