Internal

An Internet space for me to put my writing and the expose the complexes of my mind, tbh

[naps-and-tortillas]

I miss talking to you

[naps-and-tortillas]

It’s hard to be a therapist in a small town. I haven’t really thought about it until now. I’ve been acutely aware of the emptiness and the loneliness, but I’ve been quick to fill those empty spaces with other things. More work, more research, more writing, more classes, more clients. More of anything that makes there be less of me.

It’s a weird field. Nobody talks about how weird it is. Nobody talks about how small your world becomes, and yet how expansive you need to be. I am a container. I am a witness to acute human suffering. I am the one person who knows so many people best in this life, yet I am not known by them. Really, not by anybody here.

Understandable to not be able to share even casual details of my day with clients, but it’s strange to feel the boundaries elsewhere. My friends in this program are all just as busy as I am, and sworn to secrecy just the same. There’s no time to speak much beyond work. Then there are mentors. At times they feel like the closest thing to a deep and honest friend, until you step back and recognize they aren’t sharing about themselves either. They’re psychologists, after all. And this particular relationship guarantees no confidentiality. This relationship is equally mired in ethical quandaries, they just look different. Even if we both desperately wanted to be friends, we could not. We dance around the social etiquette of trying not to therapize one another, and keep our emotional distance at arm’s length.

The world is so small, it becomes relegated to just the program. Clients, colleagues, mentors, collaborators. All demanding the same obligation of distance. What’s left? A stranger? In a town so small, there is no comfort in a conversation at a bar. How many degrees of separation do we have? How many will we have in 2 years? Do I know how to do anything but contain for others anymore? Am I anything more than a callous?

[naps-and-tortillas]

[naps-and-tortillas]

[naps-and-tortillas]

[naps-and-tortillas]

I don’t know what to say. I haven’t known what to say. Gave me opportunities? You were engaged for all but one. You should know me well enough to know I wouldn’t intentionally wreck your home.

You say I chose, and maybe I did. What you don’t seem to recognize is that what you describe as “the first time I chose” was the first time in 5 years I forced myself to choose anything else. I had been choosing you every moment of every day until then. Since we met in campus grounds, I had been choosing you over even myself. I don’t regret that, so don’t read it with a tone of disdain. I told you that night and I reiterate now that I wasn’t choosing someone else, I was trying to see if I could even choose “not you” for the first time in my adult life since we met. You didn’t see me choose and didn’t recognize my agency until it was not choosing you. But let me tell you, I chose you every moment, even when you weren’t in my life. I chose you after, oh gosh what was her name, Becca? Bianca? I chose you after it happened again. I chose you through distance. I chose you when I still took that job in New York, knowing you were with her. Every time I set my shoes parallel. Every time I added milk to my coffee. Quitting smoking. Every journal entry nobody will ever see. Even choosing to live on Wall Street was intentional. What you don’t or can’t understand (because I simply don’t know how to explain it) is that I didn’t know I was CAPABLE of choosing anything else. Even that night I didn’t know. My life didn’t have meaning until you appeared. I took what your mom said to heart, “you should be the meat and potatoes, your partner should be the gravy”. I needed to know I could be meat and potatoes. That you could ever just be gravy. So I chose, not S, I chose me.

You say I chose again and again. I did. You say I chose. What did I choose? Somebody else? Myself? Every moment you thought I was choosing somebody else I chose you. And that’s something I can live with. You were with other people. Then with a real serious partner in the apartment I thought I would be sharing with you. I sat in that apartment with you, full of another woman’s belongings. In her home. That is not an opportunity to be “honest”. Yes I chose in every single moment. And I doubled down every moment after I saw that ring. And what you can’t possibly see is that I was choosing you. Only in writing this am I choosing myself and being selfish. I chose your happiness and your comfort and your future.

I kept my hands to myself. I kept my words to myself. I kept my thoughts to myself. I kept every burning hot emotion to myself. That doesn’t make me some hero. But it makes me who I am. Viciously principled, as somebody recently described, as in my mind it was the only remaining act of a very deep love which I could demonstrate.

I’m glad you’re not hurt. I’m glad you’re not sad. I recognize I’m not acting within my values even by writing this. I don’t want to be the woman who prevents you from closing a door if you need it closed. And I think you do. I’ll put my writing elsewhere. I accept your resignation that it was the idea of me and the idea of us. I accept that there’s no such thing as closure. I wish with all my heart that you’re happy. I think of your mom every day, and I wish I could write to her and tell her what she continues to mean to me. I wouldn’t let your mom view me as a home wrecker either. But, from where I stand, my door is always open if you need or if you want. My loyalty to somebody I care for deeply will not erode. I respect whatever you choose, whenever you choose it.

[linxspiration]

[roua-poemului]

[naps-and-tortillas]

I do believe in the idea of “the love of one’s life” because I had one. Well, have one. And I had her, and maybe always have her in my heart. And I had a chance to have her back, to have myself back. I let it pass. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I often think it was my greatest mistake to assume I was saving you from myself and letting you have a better life by letting you go. I knew I could never forget you, nor stop loving you, but I knew you would move on stronger. Maybe it was the best decision of my life to let you go because it gave you the life you wanted and deserve. I think of this every day. That I will never know nor feel love like this again. It could never come close, and it never has. But if you have everything you ever dreamed of, then I can concede it was well worth it.

[naps-and-tortillas]

I had one of those dreams I rarely have anymore. In fact, I really only have these kinds of dreams about either of you. In this dream, you combined into one person. Your father had passed and you were preparing yourself to get in the car and go, and I knew I would be arrested for something I had not done the next morning. I intended to turn myself in. In this dream I could smell you, feel you, hear your voice(s) so clearly. I walked with you to your car, clinging to you as I knew I would never see you, feel you, hear you, or smell you again. You didn’t reciprocate, but I knew there was care. Millie was there, waiting at your car to help you with your bags. Some lifted, tricked out, super duty white truck. I called you what I used to call you as I apologized for touching you so much. I explained it was fear, but I didn’t share what I was scared of. You looked at me softly, as you had so long ago. I wasn’t scared, in that moment, of being imprisoned for the rest of my life. Rather, I knew that putting you in that car and watching you drive away would be the end of my life in another way. A way that mattered more to me, because loving you, touching you, hearing you, smelling you, I felt more like me than I had in years. As Millie got in the car and as you climbed up and followed her, she put her hand on your thigh and said “I’ll take good care of your girl”. I only said, defeated and earnestly, “I wish”. Through some strange form of luck only a dream could conjure, you recognized you had forgotten a bag. Another moment with you! And then you were off, and I was awake.

I only realize in writing this now, as I’ve just woken up from this dream, that these moments in sleep that I get from time to time are forgotten bags. These are the moments in which I can be with you again, for a moment. These are moments I feel the most alive, and the most like myself. And in them, I always let you go. I do not beg you to stay. I do not tell you that without you I am not myself, I am not whole. Instead, I let you go. In my head this is noble. In my head this is the right thing to do. I resigned myself to living in the prison of never having you nor myself fully again.

[naps-and-tortillas]

What I wouldn’t give to be your friend again. To talk to you like a friend. To hear you as a friend.

[hairstylesbeauty]

[corrodedparadox]

Fig. 1

[xdrop-deactivated20260807]

[naps-and-tortillas]

You were in my dream last night.

[naps-and-tortillas]

It makes me sick how you can come back so quickly.

Dredged up from so deep, from so long ago.

I keep losing my place because I so clearly see the shape of your lips

Your lips

And I’m struck with this pang of something.

Something.

It leaves me a vibrating vessel.

This something reverberates around the empty space which I’d never notice again if it weren’t for this realization.

My mind drifted away in class again and I caught myself staring at the hand of this woman. More specifically, the ring on the hand of this woman. This woman I see every week, whom I have resented for no good reason. But in that moment I saw her ring, and I didn’t see anything else but her mouth as she spoke. Her mouth and her ring and back.

These were not your lips, this was not your ring, but I was throttled anyway. To shared moments I’ve relived a thousand times in my head, to moments which have never happened, but have played out in my mind just the same. The things I never said or confessed or allowed because this is life, and I love you too much to pretend it’s a movie.

[remanence-of-love]