can you just be over Rosewood?
Working on it. Doesn't help that when I spend time with Aspen, he wants to talk about how to help Rosewood and how none of this was his fault, really, and won't I help him communicate with Rosewood and make everything better. The logical thing would be "don't spend time with Aspen," but that hasn't been a very good choice of late.
I'll be back at school in 10 days and hopefully tutoring in 5, so that should fix a lot of the issue. I haven't had many people to think about.
You make him sound like an ass who fills some personal ideal role that you'd be helpless without.
Very astute of you. I don't know why I keep talking about my issues here. It seems kind of stupid. Well, whatever... onwards.
I learned of him on one of the first days of high school--in an article on noteworthy graduating seniors from the year before. He seemed like what I had always wanted to become. Brilliant, handsome, well-liked and creative. I had never felt like I was any of those. Then I met him, three years later, and he really did seem like that person--on top of being gentle, generous, and kind in a sort of universal way. He was unfailingly, unerringly polite. I like nice guys. Unfortunate that I couldn't figure out what he was and what he really wasn't.
So I dated him, doing everything I could to appease this wonderful, surprising person, and no matter what I did it was never enough. The minute I started sharing my points of view, he had to contradict me, admonish me, tell me that I was wrong. Every time! Nothing I said was good enough, insightful enough, or even
right, and so I--fool that I was--thought I just hadn't managed to live up to the ideal. He's four years older than I am, after all. It made sense that I wasn't as good as he was in any area. At one point, he ended up telling me he thought I was evil. I'd always feared this was true, and so I believed him. In the end, I was a deconstructed mess, a victim of my own manipulated insecurities.
He was a direction, fundamentally. Some part of me is still waiting for someone to come tell me I'm a decent human being, and for me to believe it. The best I can do, right now, is to figure out how he did what he did so that I never treat somebody else that way. I don't want to turn around and make someone else suffer like this.
And so, when you ask: "Will you just fixate on someone else?" I have to say "goodness, I hope not." It's my duty to be the good I want to see in the world. Can I truly be good if I'm just writhing in my own mess? Doesn't seem like it.