you can't go back

who says time travel isn't possible?

i did something tonight that i'm not sure i should have done, but i'm kinda glad for it anyway. and kinda very much wish i hadn't.

i realized recently that i've been writing this diary (gonna call it a diary because diaries are private and blogs have readers and except for some spam comments several months ago, this is pretty much a diary) for over a year. fifteen months, in fact.

woohoo. a milestone.

i went back and reread the first month or so worth of postings.

not sure that was a really good idea.

for one thing, a year ago B and i were, in some ways, much closer. it was just a few months after he first found out about me (in her email), just 4 or 5 weeks after he found her phone and just a couple of weeks since i'd sent an email to her old email account which he'd been checking. because of all that, she was consciously putting any feeling for me aside. i was worried at the time that putting those aside would become the norm for her, that she'd come to accept -less- as what she felt. in some ways, i was right.

a year ago, she was trying to decide whether to stay with him or not. (i'm sure it's actually been for a couple of years, but ...) she still is, although i think her mind's pretty made up. last december, when she said she wanted to take a few months to look at her life and decide if what she had was enough for her i warned her that she'd grow used to things, however they were, and that he'd ease up a little and she'd feel that as an improvement and then she'd be able to say "oh things have gotten better", when in fact they were still worse than ever before. in some ways, i was right.

a year ago, i was scared that i was losing her and that that was imminent. a year later, i have lost her. she's still in my life but anything beyond phone or email or im is unlikely, at best. a year ago i was terrified that i'd never get to see her, never hold her, never kiss her. now it's true. and no less terrifying.

a year ago i was sure, SURE, absolutely fucking positive that we'd have met, if not actually -be together- by the end of '05. i was wrong. so fucking wrong. i should have remembered what she wrote in her adult ad that she was looking for - "men for erotic email/chat/phone..". actual meeting was NOT something she was seeking. so why the fuck did i think she'd want to ever meet -me-? so many times during the year i was sure she was going to ask me to come see her, or that she'd stop hiding from me, or even just send me that just-for-me picture that i've asked her for for over two years. i was wrong, on all counts.

i have to stop looking backwards, hoping to find hope because i only find pain. there's enough of that coming with the loneliness and emptiness of the rest of my life without her. so many years to come of wondering if she's happy, if she's still with him, if she's living her life as fully as she should. so many years of not knowing.

so many years of knowing what could have been.