prologue: How To Stay Alive (With A Broken Heart)

 

Chapter 10, part 2
Moon Flower

 

My attraction for her were sort of weird, and I find it hard to explain how. I guess this is why nobody of my friends seems to understand it, so everybody just tries to talk me out of it. A stupid thing for me, but I can hardly blame them, can I? So, for you to understand, I am well aware of all her flaws and issues, and how bad it actually affects me and such, but I don’t care about any of that stuff. I like her for the good things about her, and the flaws kinda come along with it. I mean, seriously, the only reason people have good character trades is because you can compare them with bad ones, and nobody is perfect. Plus, most of her bad trades are actually kinda attractive to me, too… how do I explain this. Well, I kinda love her for her bad trades, too. Those are all minor things to me which I can live with. She generally does not think the same way, plus she seems to see some flaws in me that she sure believes in not being able to live with. But hers are kinda adorable to me. I don’t expect anyone to understand this, but please just accept that I do. Her fear of things in general is cute. Her secret selfishness, hidden behind a wall of untouchability, is something that fascinates me. Her detachment from things and attempts to keep me distant are a welcomed challenge for my love for her. Her loner lifestyle reminds me a lot of my own. But even tho, all those things don’t matter to me, seeing her positive trades. Like, she is extremely intelligent, even tho I think she isn’t even aware of how much. Her beauty is astonishing, and I feel REALLY BAD that I personally believe I will never ever again be with someone who is more beautiful than her (then again, I can say I have been in bed with the most beautiful girl in the world, which is a thought that satisfies me a lot, of course). Her humor is exquisite and her laugh is so charming. Her interests unique, and by the way: she is a full blood nerd. She is generous and shy and cute as hell, a great kisser and as friendly as possible, no matter how angry she actually should be.

So, I guess those are all those things I already knew of, back then. I adored her, but did I love her? Well, yet, not really. Things were bad, but they got slightly better with every week. We met very, very rarely, but kept a tight online friendship – she also was my new Red Wood in many regards. We played co-op online games and started to watch TV series together, which was awesome. The few times we met were still a bit awkward, as she still was afraid of going the next step, I guess, and I had to do every decision for her, and she would let me. I guess I could have done a lot with her, she wouldn’t have minded it… but well, how could I. I was in a constant fear of doing something by accident that would detach her from me, so having to decide about what to do with her was a very great deal for me, that I did not take lightly. In a retrospective, maybe I should have, but I was so insecure when she was around, that I felt as fragile as she is by nature.

Very challenging has always been the fact that she hardly gave away things about herself. I guess it is some sort of self protection, and I am pretty sure of it because by now she should already trust me enough to tell me pretty much everything. I never did betray her trust and never lied to her. Even tho she sometimes believed I did, which I can hardly blame her for, because I can get very stupid when I am around her. Friends know me as a very forgetful and clumsy person, hence I occasionally say pretty stupid things without noticing it, or even worse, I tell something that could easily be interpreted in quite the opposite of what I meant. And she is the kind that ALWAYS tries to read between the lines – most people do, but she is like hyper-senstitive about things like that. Which may be the greatest issue between us, causing a hell of a lot of problems, because this barely works with me. I have no concept of transporting meta-data in conversations. Most of my friends know this. She does, too, but still… I am NOT able to “read between the lines”, so I get an awful lot “I said it!” from her, and it seems like I forgot about it (which also happens way too often), but the fact is I simply did not understand it the way it was meant to, because she did not state it directly, but kept the message hidden in meta form. And this is the point I am very fragile with, because I have to deal with this for all my life, with all the people I know, and by now this is my weakest spot. Seriously, act like you said something, no matter if you did or not, and if I did not know about it I make myself responsible for not getting it, like at a hundred percent. I feel worst when this happens and I never hate myself more than when somebody shows me that I am just too stupid to communicate. And Moon Flower does this a lot with me. I mean, I don’t blame her, obviously, but this is just something that makes me feel very bad and insecure about myself, often and harsh.

And on the other hand I cannot use meta information with what I say. I only mean exactly what I say and nothing more. People find it hard not to seek the message between the lines. Social codes and rules for correct behavior and such – I can barely imitate them a bit, not as I have no concept of understanding them, I do not act by them. Hence people, and of course Moon Flower too, always try to make me responsible for what I said, which I actually did not SAY, but only suggested – by accident of course! And how can I even counter notions like that, when people actually believe I said this or that and somehow have a “proof” that, which I don’t understand. This has the same effect on me than the other way around. And this also happens an awful lot with Moon Flower. So she not only has a slightly outdated view of me in my mind (I am like the opposite of what I was three years ago. I know it’s hard for people who know me to accept this), but I also gave her the impression of a few things about myself that simply are not true. And for some reason she seems to not trusting me enough to believe me with it. I guess in some cases she is too often right with me and knows some aspects of me better than I do for myself, but in so many important arguments this is simply not the case. Plus, the things I actually say are often so extremely bad received in the first place, which makes most of my statements obsolete. (“Nothing is true.”)

Also, I bet you have noticed the pattern here. It’s sort of alike with Brown Sugar. Moon Flower also has a slightly askew view of myself, based on misconceptions about my own personality, which are a direct result of my incapability of communicate like a normal person, and also of their own subconscious trying to ignore positive trades about myself, because on the inside she is too afraid of embracing me, in case everything COULD go wrong. Plus a lack of acceptance for change of my personality. And I have so no idea how to overcome this problems. I mean I have some, but those are all just of theoretical nature. To try out these solutions, she has have to overcome her own fear of herself, of me and of possible bad things to happen. But how do you do that? Brown Sugar could not, and Moon Flower also doesn’t have the energy to do so. At least she has the will, and that is worth something, or isn’t it?

So, at the beginning of 2010 I kinda finally started to understand what was going on there. We already talked about those undisclosed feelings we both feel and how we don’t know what they mean, but I for once wanted to explore them, but she always said she would not be ready to. And once she said something that made me think. Regarding those feelings, she once said that if you do not know what you should feel, just do what you think may be right, and IF it feels RIGHT, then this is the way it is. And this of course made be think seriously… Remembering all the times we met, it has always been this way: Despite being absolutely awesome meet-ups, which I enjoyed a lot, there has always been this small fear underneath, a tense feeling of discomfort. But still it FELT right! I enjoyed it, no matter the negative thing floating around in midair and I would never have wanted to change things then. It just felt like this is how things should be for me. So, could it have been love? It had to be! I was pretty sure about that in early 2010. But you guessed it, I was too afraid of acknowledging it to her.

And then April happened. My brother committed suicide and I was about to go through the most extreme change in my life. I changed fast and into a pretty obvious direction. It may sound macabre, but from a view of personal developing this was a good thing to happen to me. I became such a positive person afterward, because I learned how extremely unimportant things can be, seeing them universally. ESPECIALLY with bad things and all negative in the world. I lost a lot of fear about things and regained my trust in myself, also self esteem and a sense for trying out risky things. And one of them was of course embracing Moon Flower with my love. Being completely honest. I felt not strong enough to do so, especially because things were evolving so fast, and by my believes then, I could not be for sure about my feelings about her, unless I told her and it felt exactly right. But hey, I wanted at least have her be part of my new approach on life, and show her how positive things can be. I became more romantic again and wanted to express this. So I grabbed all my money and surprised her with a sort of romantic weekend, just for the two of us. Again, she did not do anything against it and let me decide about everything, but I didn’t give a fuck about that anymore. I just wanted to make her feel great about things. What I did NOT plan for this weekend was my sudden outburst of truth, telling her about my feelings. I guess it appeared to be planned, but it was not. So we were sitting there in the hotel, with fake roses all over the place and so on, and I just told her that I love her. A wonder I did not collapse or anything, but the sole fact that I said it and it felt PERFECTLY RIGHT has hit me very, very hard. I was never so sure about things in my life. I love her and I want to be with her, grow old and all this cliché things. It felt like the way it should be and I felt great for finally acknowledging this truth about me and her.

So, this was the last time I saw her in person.

She did not so much react to it at all, and I guess it is a logical thing and I should have expected that. She was insecure as hell, and even tho she SAID everything is okay, I just knew that this creeped her out a bit, justifying her keeping distance to me even more. And what did I do? The only thing I could to. Accept her decision and doing what I could do best: being myself. In that matter it meant expressing my love to her. The following months were ups and downs, but mostly ups. I kept doing stuff to proof my love for her, and parallel to this we kept our friendship basis thing, like playing video games and watching series. So I did things to proof myself to her. Romantic things. Things I don’t actually regret, even tho I knew I would freak her out with some of them, but well, to be honest, I had to do this. I didn’t made it by choice, but because I had no essence of defending myself to this notions, because they seemed so natural and logical to me. Plus, it was she who taught me about this in the first place. Most of the crazy stuff I did for her I could not finish, because I am not Jesus or something. Like, I remember trying to learn a specific dance choreography from our favorite series, I created videos and even music, but I could not finish any of those. One of the few thing I could finish was for example a whole book full of poems about her. I knew she thought I was joking, but I worked on it in secret for months and months, spending a lot of time tinkering out every single line and perfect a way to make it into a real physical book. With the help of co-workers and photographer friend Vesa, and a few failed prototypes of the book, I finished a pretty good result there. I mean I did not care about how good the actually poems would be, because this whole thing was nothing more than a gesture to proof my feelings. But the result was pretty good, I guess (I still haven’t published it). Also, I did these things as an artist. She was my muse and inspired me to do such things. It felt great to do something like this for those reasons. Still, she refused to meet me in person again, and can I blame her? Probably not.

Secretly in the background I tried to build up the thought that we did not have a future, and even tho I knew that I can live without her, and probably love someone else somewhen in the future, this was hard to accomplish. It required me hell of a lot of mind work to process the thought of loosing her. And in autumn finally something happened that helped me out with it. It was a bad thing to happen, tho.

I wrote a short story which was inspired by me and her. It was some sort of free-flow writing involved and while writing I quickly started to make it the story more and more abstract and detached from our actual personalities and situation. But that did not matter as much, because this was merely a gesture. And artistic outlet, inspired by my favorite muse. I should have thought about the possibilities to get this story wrong, but as always, I did not. I gave the story a kinda better ending than I intended it to have, and it hasn’t had a lot to do with us anymore at this point. But anyway, on a subconscious level it was about me dealing with the fact that we both will not work out our issues and I have to deal with loosing her. My intention was to tell her with this story, “see, I CAN live without you, so please be not afraid of me, you will not be able to crush me, but I am very positive about that us being together would be the best ting that could happen to us”. She clearly did get this message wrong, making it all a thing which I used to judge about her. From my perspective it was pretty obvious that I did not do that, but that was never a reason for her (seriously, she still did not trust me??). And than she broke up the contact to me. Unable to have seen this coming, it DID crush me. It was just too cruel.

So, the next week was the second worst week I had last year. Depression caught me good, I – again – lost my job due to her (duh), I stopped eating (I have not eaten for 7 days straight, and only drank. On day seven my spine started to hurt, so I had to eat again) and I did not know what to do. I have been there before and I usually needed months to come over it. And didn’t I learn something that should have prevented it? But well, of course! And after only one week life went on. It came to my mind that grief even longer did not make much sense at all. I should and COULD be happy, and things went on pretty quickly. I rarely felt so great about myself. Being able to live without the person you love may sound like a very bad thing to happen, and I guess it is, but the sheer capability of being able to was just an amazing experience. I can go on now.

So, I started dating again, meeting people and enjoying myself. It was the time I started to date Black Dahlia. I worked, and I was glad, even tho I missed her a lot and still thought about her every day. But my headaches were gone and I could sleep again, which generally was a good sign, right? I still wrote her an email every now and then, just to inform her what was going on in my life, never even expecting her to react or even to read it. But I only did this because I cared.

And then something strange happened, I never thought possible. After all the times I was the one crawling back to her again and again, I never expect her to come back to me this time, wanting to get our friendship back. She even finally acknowledged that she had undisclosed feelings and those probably meant more than what she always thought of feeling about me (DON’T YOU SAY! No surprise. That’s love, I tell you!). My self esteem was pretty high, compared to early times, so I was about to keep her more distant, in fear she would break me again. I seem to fall for her all the time, this should not be healthy, but I certainly never regret any of this. I would rather be tortured by her for the rest of my life than missing her completely. So I welcomed the thing, sort of. Of course the situation was seriously fucked up for me, because what should I do about all of this? I liked Black Dahlia a lot and felt like we too could have a future together, and at this point I sure wanted to! But on the other hand it was the love of my life and the most perfect girl I ever met, telling me she got more feelings for me and missed me. This was fucked up.

So, we pretty much instantly fell back into normal routine, playing games, chatting a lot, and so on. And when the thing with Black Dahlia found it’s end to me, I was certain that Moon Flower would be glad about it, because now there was no moral boundaries anymore between us for embracing our feelings for one another. But no, she hesitated. I understood this wrong – why would she NOW bail out on me? It crushed me for only one day (yay, record!). But she later stated out to me that she wanted all this, but still wasn’t ready for it (I heard that so often from her and still did not know what this even meant…). On Valentine’s day she even got me a present (wow, I never received something on that day!), and I felt bad that I got nothing. You know, I am supposed to be the romantic one, flooding her with presents all the time, and even tho I tried to order something for her, the thing did not arrive in time, which would not have been a bad thing, if she wouldn’t have gotten something for me! And well, my love for her has never been as big as back then. It was in mid February, only one and half a month from me writing about it now. We sort of agreed to finally meet, she needed at least two~three weeks of planning ahead, wow. But well, we argued again for minor reasons, I don’t even remember well. It was the same old bullshit of she saying something I did not get, but she thought I would or should, then me trying to figure out why the fuck she was angry at all and she getting pissed at me for not letting go. This was a well known pattern for us, I guess. I mean I just want to sort shit out between us. Our problems are so tiny, it would only need us one or two deep conversations and it’ll all go. But well, can’t force her to. And yet, I cannot even blame her for my own stupidity. If I don’t get the obvious stuff, this is my problem, right? I mean I have pretty much changed every aspect of myself, but all this stuff we fight about… not so much.

Anyway, I refused to meet. What, what you just said?, you might think. Well, yes, I couldn’t deal with it that way and this point and I wanted to proof that I can keep distance for no good reason, too. I totally regret this now, but I had good reasons, right? I mean ALL the people I could talk to said I should act like this. And I did, and the fact that I COULD is something I am sort of very proud of. But still, you know what? Fuck the logic of my friends, this was highly stupid of me. I regret that choice. Also, I so figured out the pattern behind all our arguments lie behind that fact that we depend on the same level of communication, and based on the long story that was behind us, this wasn’t the way to go anymore. Like I said in an earlier chapter, friends HAVE to meet, there is no way around. We simply reached a level in which the forms of communication we were so common with were not enough for us anymore. We HAD to speak in person, having normal discussion and talks, it was way over the time to lift our relationship to the next level. We were beyond all this and ready for more, and the tension between us is all because of this. We were merely angry about ourself and reflected that on one another. Such a bullshit thing to do. But now I knew what the problem was, we simply had to change our patterns, living on another level. It wasn’t too late, and it still isn’t. But I guess my decision pissed her off too much, since now she still doesn’t want to speak with me. This is hell of a loss for both of us, even tho she may not realize that.

I was still planning to visit my parents, but due to current events I was forced to take my trip to one week ahead of plans. It was a pretty spontaneous thing to do, but well, I had not that much of a choice. And like I already said, Hamburg was on the way to my parents, and while already driving to there I had the idea to just drive by her apartment and try to talk to her about stuff, apologizing and discussing what I found out about our problems, tying to solve the mess. What I did not think about, due to the mess of shit I had to keep thinking about, was – once again – how things I did could be interpreted by her, so what I was about to do should have scared her a lot. What SHE of course had to make out of it was the idea that I drove all the way to Hamburg especially because of her, so she would be forced to talk to me. Obviously that wasn’t the case at all, but how would she know? Of course this had to remind her of the shit Red Wood did with her – all this crazy stalker-ish behavior and such. Even tho I never ever gave her a reason to feel threatened by me, she still did. And I cannot start to describe the immense pain that this gave me to realize that. To even compare me with such a behavior was and is so obscure to me… because, seriously, I cannot harm ANYONE, especially not the one I love, in any way. I may did this unintentionally on a psychological level once in a while, but it is another thing to accuse me of that. And what I did then was something I found hard to do, but I took all my strength to do so by her wish alone. The wish I would just drive off. And so I did. With my heart shrunken to pinhead size.

I later wrote her a letter in which I explained the situation, but what can I do. She doesn’t trust my words, she thinks bad of me, even tho all those things happened the way they did. I am simply out of ways to show her my attraction, that she has no reason to ever believe I would try to force her to do anything, make her responsible for MY actions and anything alike. It is all in her head, I am the only one who can know this for sure. And it is all my fault.

I simply wish her to let go of her fears and just try to explore her own feelings, not paying attention to what would happen to me. I want her to know that I am the master of my own decisions, and I would rather try to be with her and NOT succeed, than live in constant grief about loosing her without giving it a shot. Also I simply want her to live a great life and I would do anything to accomplish that for her. And if she does not want me to, it is her loss, not mine. The only thing I would miss would be her presence. And personality. Her smile. Her soft body. Her weird unique habits. And giving us a good chance of living together in happiness for the rest of our lives.

 

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