Friday Night Plights

I'm not sure when I became a person who gets really excited about staying home Friday nights and having the house all to herself... maybe shortly after I bought a kitchen table and started listening to NPR.

Anyhoo, here it is Friday night and I've been wandering around the house in circles for hours, doing what I love to do, but rarely do: going on a rampage of cleaning, straightening, recycling, Goodwill-ing, and generally feeling like I have some small measure of control over my space. I called a few friends who both had plans tonight (OK, so they were both sick, one from being pregnant and one going insane from having a crazy boyfriend 3000 miles away who puts off making plans for weeks and then announces he's coming 10 hours before his plane lands), so I've actually been relishing the chance to spring clean. While listening to Neil Diamond.

I saw the old boy this week, too. We got a beer, and chatted on our own (i.e. not in front of hordes of mutual friends) for the first time since break-up therapy. When people ask how it went, I have to classify it as good/hard/good. Good to catch up, hard to remember all the things I love about a person who was my best friend for most of my time in LA (and who I did so much growing up with, in many senses of the word), and good to remind myself that no matter how wonderful someone is, it would be masochistic to be with someone who isn't ready to jump into change with you. Perhaps the best part of it, strangely, was being able to talk about things that were hard and sad, and not to feel responsible for each other's feelings, or for making each other feel better. It was hard to tell him about the new boy, though, and to hear him say that it was hard to hear it.

Despite crying all the way home, I still felt like moving foward is moving in the right direction. The only way I can describe it is to say that it has started to feel like my sadness is about something lost in the past, no longer something lost for the future. I have had very few plans for my life, but I thought I was going to marry him; it was the first time my ideas of the future ever had a common thread. And when we broke up, my entire picture of the future disintegrated, as if I had been hiking up a mountain and the trail had suddenly ended in a jagged, barren chasm. But it doesn't feel that way anymore. I can see options and trails again, and I don't know where any of them go to, but I'm cool with the fact that I'm wandering through the woods again. I'm OK that the common thread right now is just me.