Saturday, October 17, 2009

Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City

It's 12:40 a.m. on a Friday night, and the text messages start coming through, one after another and four in a minute, one worse than the other. They show all of the reasons I hate her; the other girl has taken over as soon as some semblance of insecurity strikes, and my girl is gone.

She is a great girl, one that I care about deeply... but I don't deal well with being told what to do or who to report to. Whether this works or not is in the air, but one thing I learned long ago was never trade yourself or your spirit for any woman.

I end up leaving the bar, and arguing for an hour over nothing... and I hate her, but I know if she leaves, I will miss her terribly. For all the trouble she gives me, there is something about this girl that keeps me there with her. I think it's her smile, her sense of humor, that makes me forget about all the rest of the world for a minute, and just focus on now. It's her optimism, her cheerfulness that I could never emulate myself.

But the ugliness has started, the "you don't open up to me" and the "we don't go out to dinner enough." The things that make men all over the world cringe and shake their heads. I don't want it to go that way; I've never had a relationship like that and I don't plan on it. There are many paths here, only some of them pleasant... and even then, I wonder if they will be only pleasant for her.

I've been reading a lot lately about physics and string theory, the possibility of multiverses. They say that there might be a universe that has you after every decision you didn't make, after every event that didn't happen, and shows all the roads you didn't take. Somewhere, I wonder if there's one where I am with Alex and Ryer's still alive. We would have been dating for over three years now, and who knows how things would be. And Ryer... he wouldn't haunt my dreams as he has so recently.

Sometimes I wish I was in that universe, instead of this faltering world of constant letdowns and perennial heartbreak.