What was I Thinking?

Even in the dark mood that I’m in right now, I still manage to make myself laugh. The ex and I have been exchanging email the past couple of days tying up loose ends. Every time I see her name in my inbox I am overwhelmed by these feelings. They run the gamut as they have since the sixteenth of February when we decided to call it quits.

I’ve been mostly sad and angry. I wasn’t expecting her to give up on us when I issued an ultimatum that took me a couple of weeks to compose in my head. She was the one who taught me it took more than desire to make something work. It took work and effort and lots of times it wasn’t going to be easy. And there were lots of times when I wondered, what was I thinking?! We got through a lot of those times and I always felt stronger, more able to cope with life.

Now that it’s over, I say those words and hear Christine Lavin's voice saying, "What was I Thinking?!" and it makes me laugh.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about my life. I’m still happy that I am getting a chance to start things over again. I realized that I keep tripping over memories. I think I was avoiding them by keeping busy and distracted by the logistics of moving and job hunting. Today the smell of a grove of eucalyptus trees reminded me of the weekends I spent with her in her grad dorm room when I first moved out here. The green lushness of the Mills campus was the backdrop as I slowly fell in love with her. Later, hearing a song on the radio as I turned onto Gough, reminded me of the time a year and a half ago when I was afraid that she might die, as I drove home from the hospital. I remembered how scared and confused she was earlier that morning. I remember reassuring her that everything would be all right. Within a few hours time, while I went home to try and get some sleep, she slipped into a coma as her body tried to cope with fulminant liver failure. When she got the liver transplant she needed, I was so relieved and thought that if we could get through something like this, everything else would be easy.

I know there will be more memories to deal with. The bad ones make me feel better that this was the right thing to do. The good ones make me feel sad and wonder why there weren’t more of them. I’m still very sad that I’ve lost my best friend. There are so many things that I only shared with her. I’ve been lucky to have other friends step in to help fill that void she left behind and share how they felt when this happened to them. I know this is the part where someone reminds me that time heals all wounds. And maybe they’ll say in their best Christine Lavin impersonation, “What was I Thinking? What was I, Blind?!...” and make me laugh again.