baggage

i feel weird writing so much lately about dylan and things surrounding our relationship because i am over him, i have been for a long time. but i guess i'm not over everything that happened, and doing more artwork about that recently has helped me realize that i might not be for a long time, if ever. the fact that he tried to kill himself hurts me. the fact that i helped put him in the dark place he was in hurts me. it might always be a soft spot for me, because i loved him and he was broken and i hurt him.

right now i'm working on a type project in which we have to use text we write (representing two separate memories) and an outside source of text in two posters on a theme (most people are using an emotion or set of circumstances). i decided to use moments that i look back to as critical periods of growth; moments that made me more Real either because they built me up or stripped me of everything i had known. the first memory i'm using is the night i texted dylan's mom and told her he had tried to kill himself, and the second is a night i spent with ivy and dustin lying on the pavement by the riverwalk, talking deeply for the first time after a year apart at college. when i got up to talk about my theme, i couldn't keep myself from getting red-faced and no matter what i did, my voice shook and stuck in my throat.

when i was at ivy's this weekend, we were drinking and ivy kept telling dustin & i to go dance with boys, that she'd introduce us to the ones we thought were cute. we told her, and she ran off the find them, and i immediately felt scared and nervous and guilty. all of a sudden i didn't want to be there, but more importantly, i didn't want to be in my own skin. i didn't go talk to the guy, so nothing happened, and the feeling went away.

tonight i was thinking about that, wondering why i got worked up like that, and i remembered some stuff that i had forgotten (or maybe blocked out) about the last time dylan and i had sex. and maybe this is too much to be writing about on a blog. but it made me panic for a second that i could have forgotten, and then i felt the tiniest bit better. i probably still need to go have a good cry in the shower about it, but i'm finally dealing with things that i don't think i was able to process when they happened. and i'm hoping that doing so will allow me to move on and to open back up so that when someone good and kind walks into my life, i don't have all this baggage keeping me from making a connection.