The mail today brought one strange thing today, something that I'm still not sure how to take. Apparently my page URL has gotten around to some people who knew me in college at Minnesota, and I got some mail from one of them this afternoon.
I got mail from someone I dated for about six months, and in it he said he was getting married. Yes, I know, you all probably get this sort of thing regularly from people you know. For me, this felt different. We only dated each other for about six months in my sophomore year, but I really thought it was going to lead somewhere. I used to come back to my room after dates with him, even early on, and think what it'd be like to be married. After a few months, I really thought this was it. I used to practice signing my "married name." In a box in my parents' house, I found a diary from that time with easily a page and a half with that signature, over and over and over.
He broke it off in the spring. He didn't leave me for someone else. He just... left.
It's strange now to think of him marrying someone else. Living with someone else, sleeping with someone else. Taking up house with someone I've never met, will never meet, someone no doubt totally different than me. And certainly different than I was in 1988.
I should be happy for him. I'd like to think that after all this time I can be circumspect. I'd like to feel happy, genuinely, as if for a friend who's just achieved something they've worked for a long time.
I'd like to think I can feel those things, but I can't. What I feel is lost. I don't know why. I look at me in the mirror. In March I'll be 30, I haven't had a boyfriend in almost three years. I haven't willingly had sex in over two years. I've had two dates in the last year. I have this apartment, a kitten who loves me, and I have these things that I write. But that's all. I don't feel like I have everything I want and need.
A part of me I can't bury wishes him all the ills of the world. There's no good reason I should have come to know about his impending happiness except as some way to dig into me. I'd have preferred to go on remembering the days I had almost ten years ago, practicing signing that name I would never bear.
The rest of me wishes him and his unknown future wife well, as it wishes everyone well, numbly. Out of habit. Because people expect it.
I've spent a lot of my life doing what people expect of me.