Diary of a Blood Ray - February 12th, 2005

So much of my life occurs only within my mind that I often confuse what happens in real life with what happens there. It’s as if the line between fantasy and reality isn’t so much blurred as it is inverted. As events in both planes become the distant past, it’s nearly impossible to sort out what happened and what didn’t. There’s fact in fiction and fiction in fact.

I’m trying to pinpoint the exact moment when the edges of my life started to blur. Was it a week ago? Two? December? Or was it earlier?

Maybe it was Tommy. When we broke up, everything around me spiraled out of control.

I switched jobs, my roommate situation resulted in me moving in with my mother and brother, and life as I knew it came to an end. I was twenty-eight years old and I had lost the love of my life. I took to my bed for two days. I drank so much I was blacking out. I began to make myself claustrophobic.

If you’ve ever loved someone and then had them excised from your life, practically without a trace, you may have noticed that can unleash a little bit of insanity in you. This has happened with almost all my relationships. Croat. The Reaper. Seb. Tommy. Asher. Gone. In some cases, the insanity causes you to doubt that they even existed. So clandestine were these relationships that no one who reads this blog, no one I know anywhere, has met all of those men. Some relationships have been mended (Seb). Some have repeated themselves verbatim (Croat). Some I get news of in passing, but will never, ever see again (The Reaper). I have made my peace with most of them. One has become my friend, the best male friend I have ever had.

Back in the sleepy little hamlet we called Rock Bottom, I saw my twenty-ninth birthday approaching, and I took one last look behind me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to exorcise the demon that had plagued me for almost three decades. I was no longer going to loathe myself. I was no longer going let others be the chief appraisers of my value as a person. I was going to forgive myself for the wrongs I had committed, both real and fabricated.

I hit the gym, I lost all that weight, I started dressing better. I gave up meat. I stopped second-guessing my talents. I got a new car. I moved back to the city. I quit smoking. Many times. Though I haven’t completely dialed down the crazy, I have become someone I like to be around.

The internal become external, as I started getting cast in roles that finally gave me a chance to prove myself. I played the two most demanding roles I’ve ever had in the same summer. I battled Albinos and Imposters.

I began to date more. I learned I didn’t have to accept any less than exactly what I wanted, even as I knew that those standards might be impossible.

When you resume contact with someone you thought you’d lost forever, you tread lightly. You wonder if you still love him. Does he love you? More importantly, did he ever love you? You heard the wrong chords being stuck and you get out again. The rage returns, but subsides almost immediately. You’ve finally seen its futility. You try again. It feels all weird, yet you keep returning to each other, and each visit you pay is a little less suspicious. You don’t have to forget the past, but you don’t have to defer to it either. The answers you thought you needed don’t seem to matter anymore.

Shania understands me in a way no other friend ever has, and I realized that now Tommy does, too.

You’d think there was a point to all this rambling, right? I’ve tried to edit this properly, to give it some sort of chronology or coherence, but I’ve had such a rough time trying to blog this week that I’m going to just leave this as it is.