Things I'm Afraid To Tell You - IV

Football!boy got married yesterday.

I'm happy for him. I'm happy for his bride.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not a little sad for myself.

I don't know if it's even right for me to be sad, but I am.

For all my ambition, I really want to be someone's wife, and someone's mommy. That's all I've wanted for a very long time, and it has been ever elusive.

It's not that I'm sad he married her, rather than me. It's more that I seem to be spinning my wheels without really going anywhere. Lots of my friends are getting married and having babies, but this wedding just strikes a deeper chord than most.

When I met football!boy I thought everything was all going to change. I let myself imagine a future with him, and it was a very nice future indeed.

I was eighteen, on my own for the very first time, and he was unlike any boy I had ever met.

He taught me what it was like to be emotionally vulnerable.
He taught me what it was like to trust someone.
He taught me what it was like to feel something so strongly for someone else.

I keep a journal. Basically I write love letters to my future husband. I tell him everything that is going on in my life, all the highlights and triumphs. The idea being that I'll want to tell these stories someday, but they'll be from a different perspective. I wanted him to experience the joy that I was feeling right then. I wanted something tangible and personal to give to this man as my wedding gift. I started it in April of 2007, about a lifetime and a half ago. I haven't written in it since the middle of September, which is right before the drama llama moved into a penthouse suite in my life. Not a whole lot of joy to write about lately.

This is an excerpt from what I wrote not too long after the night I realized I was in love with him, or as much in love as I could be:

I think that I've found you. I truly do. It happened a week and a half ago and it's all I've thought about since. He loves me unconditionally. He knows so much about me, yet, he's still there. He uses this voice with me that he doesn't use with other people. When our talk was over, all I could think of is how I could do that every night for the next sixty years and be okay with that. It was so very wonderful. We talked about our lives, and how we are searching for that someone, how we don't quite know what we want to do for our jobs. I felt genuinely loved.


The really ironic thing about this passage? That summer, just weeks after I wrote this, he met his someone. A beautiful woman who is much better suited for him that I ever could be. I want them to have every single happiness that this world can offer. I wish them a full and long life together. It makes my heart happy to see pictures of them together. Their love is almost palpable.

I should also add that five years later and the both of us aren't doing what we studying to do when this conversation took place. So, at least we figured that part out of it all out.

The night I wrote about served its purpose. It got me through a horrible summer. It gave me hope when there really wasn't a lot of happiness to cling to in the midst of everything that was happening. It put a spring in my step. It had me singing Lovefool as I ran my errands and humming Set Fire to the Third Bar as I was falling asleep. He was there when my parents were fighting it out, my mother screaming horrible things. His words in my memory really were like music drowning out every hurtful word and action.

I'm a stronger woman, a braver woman, than I was when I wrote that.
I've had adventures that I never would have dreamed if I married that boy.
I've found my own two feet and a voice.
I've made friends that I can't imagine not having.
I'm a relatively successful, independent, single woman in her mid-twenties.

But I'm still a little bit sad.