Total 'Train'wreck of Thought

I too have to begin this entry with a little story. I expect that several of you readers have been asking yourselves why I haven't been writing lately, especially given the depth of Quyen's recent entries. Let me assure you, there are many reasons. When Quyen came over to take care of me last week, I was sick, and not just pretend sick or somewhat sick; I was sick all around. My temperature would bounce up and down like some sort of twisted yo-yo. On top of that, I continued to go to work, which, as many of you have read, has been a highly charged stressful environment. By the time I got home, there ws really nothing left for me to give. But, I'm all better now, or at least I can tell myself that and believe it a reasonable amount of the time =P I haven't been writing because of what was said over the weekend, and what was exposed.

It all started Friday morning when Quyen decided to look through the folder I set aside for her on my computer. It has scanned pictures, webcam pics, papers, outlines of her work on becoming a better viola tutor, and old yahoo and instant messenger conversations I used to save. One of those old conversations even tops out at sixty-seven pages! Well, you guess which one Quyen just had to finish reading. And, it's not that I saved it because it contains bad memories or because I thought it would be useful against her if ever I needed to get back at her for something. No, I saved that specific set of conversations because it contained so much of the good that had attracted me to her in the first place. It was her and I at our best.

Let me tell you the story of how Quyen and I met. When I first met Quyen, May of 2003, she was involved with another man, Jay - an ex-navy man, in his thirties I suppose. Not only was she involved with this man, she was set to marry him in little less than a few weeks. From hearing about it, you'd have thought she was living the dream. Yes, wouldn't we all like to think the dream is coming true? But it wasn't. Below the surface, problems persisted from the moment Quyen moved in with him. Jay was against her working, having academic aspirations, did not believe in her (to succeed and more), persistently insulted her family, and did some things that took Quyen's self-confidence and worth away. I've often wondered myself if he loved her, or just loved the idea of being in a relationship. I'd like to say he loved her if only to pretend to myself that Quyen was being treated how a woman of her caliber deserves, but he's now married to another woman he immediately ran to after being left by Quyen.

The groundwork behind my relationship with Quyen is the internet. I found her picture online, during one of my many bored or stressed out moments, and clicked on her. "Yes, I would be interested." She clicked back, and I wrote her an email. lol, she's still unsure whether I wrote her a stock email, but I swear to you it was different, which is not to say I didn't have a stock email prepared and ready to send out to most people- just that I felt like writing something different that day - for what reason, I don't know. When I heard back from her, I almost didn't even didn't respond because I thought she might be a religious, social, political conservative. Now tar me and call me a crow, but having received my education from UC Berkeley, unilateral conservatism wasn't my idea of attractive friend material. However, again, I just felt like responding, and so started a messenger (yahoo and aim) based friendship.

We spent the better part of the next few months building a friendship. Every day, we'd get together on yahoo. She'd be my escape from the stressful reality of trying to finish my teacher credentialing program in a year and a half (while fighting the financial aid offices, and the new retroactive mandates being passed on down by the state), and I'd be her escape from an unhappy relationship, I'd be that safe place where she could feel free to be herself without biting criticism. These were happy times for me, and I pasted my messenger conversations into microsoft word so that I could keep them to look over in the future. Of course, I was falling head over heels for this woman, but I wouldn't, and more importantly, couldn't admit this, to myself, or to her. She was engaged to be married. All I could hope for was the chance to maintain and strengthen my friendship with her. At the same time, she had been confessing to me a fierce crush on someone close to her, and I all the more knew there would never be the kind of place I was dreaming of, for me, in her life. It was a crush I heard about on a daily basis, ironically a crush which crushed me with each elaboration and telling of it.

With the end of June coming on, Quyen and I had begun to make a few short calls to each other, and this too, seemed to oddly work out well. Odd I say because the transition from the net to phone to in person tends to be very hard, and almost always leads to disappointment. Unfortunately, Quyen was planning to leave Jay, and this meant she was preparing to move into a new apartment, where she would be without internet access for some time, access that was central to my friendship with her. The threat of losing her gave a sense of urgency to things and made me realize how much she meant to me. However, I was still not audacious enough to approach her with my feelings. This would be solved by a bad day and too much stress, resulting in a date between I and my good friend: bottle of vodka.

The saved instant messenger conversations Quyen looked through last week included the late night conversation where I finally told her how I felt and had been feeling for so long. It was an honest conversation on my part; I had been drinking, for perhaps the first time in years, because everyone, including some doctor buddies, suggested that I needed to take the edge off and relax. The stress I was going through at the time was grinding me down, and I found myself busy nearly every day, not knowing if I would get my license before California instituted some new requirements, or if I would have a job for the coming year. In that conversation, I thought I had finally discovered that it was okay for me to feel the way I did about Quyen. She had been with someone else when I first met her, and I did my best to hide and to diminish my feelings for her. But, she had decided to leave her then boyfriend of several years, who cheated on her with six people, and still continues to stay in touch with other women. With her boyfriend out of the picture I thought there may have been a chance, but even then, I didn't want to be the guy that preys on vulnerable newly single girls. I wanted to be the guy that she chose to be with because she wanted me, because with a clear frame of mind, she thought I was best for her out of everyone else out there who had been trying to court her. None of this mattered that night as I slipped and let her know how I felt. Even though I felt like a fool for having let it slip. She returned my feelings, and let me know, or so I thought, how much I meant to her. She told me how special I was to her, and that it wasn't just me, she really had been flirting with me this whole time. She told me how excited and free she felt to finally be able to express her feelings for me. The odd thing about that conversation is that it started just as I was getting ready to go to sleep. I had been mulling for more than a few minutes already about going to sleep, but there she was. As soon as I had made my mind to head off for the night, she came online, and we talked for hours.

I spent the next day freaking out, worried that maybe she would take back what she had said, that maybe she would realize that it was all a mistake, or worried that she was only trying to be nice to me because I had started off slightly drunk and I was her good friend. And I waited, and I waited, and I waited some more. Usually, I would hear from her online several times a day, but it I wouldn't hear from her today, and I wouldn't hear from her the next day.

When I finally did hear from her, we didn't talk about us, we didn't talk about our last conversation, or my feelings for her. It was as if, she was so ashamed of having told me she had feelings for me, or of having me develop any feelings for her that she would rather avoid it altogether. And yet, yet she was brighter and sweeter than ever before. She flirted without restraint, and she called me her love, her sweetie. But none of this could make up for the truth. The truth wa she was just toying with my emotions and that really I was just the nice-guy patsy who had set her free so that she could run off with another bad-match. One of the first things she told me was that she had met a new guy. Her excitement, even over the computer, was obvious, and she went into great detail explaining how wonderful this new man of hers, Jack, was. The next day, she laid yet another blow with a single line of text. She told me she had had a wonderful time the night before with Jack, and her best friend at the time, Dan at her party. This was a party she had spent two months trying to get me to attend, and now when I had finally agreed to come over, she completely "forgot" to inform me of when it was happening, and didn't feel one bit bad about it. Instead of feeling at least somewhat bad about not inviting me, she went on to tell me how fun the night had been and made it clear that not inviting me was not an oversight but a calculated decision. The point was made. This new man she had just met over the weekend was already more important to her than I. This man she met just one day after pretending she had any feelings for me, this man was her choice, and I could never be anything to her. I meant so little that I could be replaced by a random man in less than twenty-four hours.

After this, contact between her and I started to die off quickly. It was not the kind of thing I looked forward to, and I resigned myself to never being anything more than a chump to her. I was nothing more than the guy that had to be there for her to have enough strength to leave her unhappy relationship. I was a sacrifice, a martyr for her greater happiness. The next time I heard from her was on the phone. She called me up, and I knew I shouldn't have been excited but I was; I was stupidly excited because I thought that maybe somewhere I still meant something to her. No such luck. She wa calling me because she wanted me to know what a long night of sex she had just had with Jack. She wanted to bask in the glory of his sex, and describe to me in meticulous detail how much she enjoyed his body and the night. She wanted me to know that even her ex-boyfriend knew she was going out that night to get laid. She was proud of it, of hurting him back. She was proud that she could rebound so quickly and find such a prize example of a man. And she wanted to share that with me. I listened, like a captive audience, looking forward to the time she could get off the phone so I could go call up a friend and tell him or her how I felt. To share my pain with them. It wasn't enough that I never meant anything to her, that she didn't want to discuss our conversation, that she found a new man the day after I admitted my feelings, that they had done things, that she invited him to her party and expressly left me out of the invitations, but it was too much to hear how content she was having sex with this new man all night and day. If there had ever been a time I felt special with her, it was gone, and I was left with nothing save the mirages of my imagination, which had once made me feel that there was something between us. That night, I lost all faith in myself. I could no longer count on myself to know when someone was telling the truth or lying, I could no longer depend on myself to read someone's emotions, and despite my good looks, I could no longer believe that my personality and the essence of who I was attracted others.

I know this whole blog feels like patchwork without strong sentence or paragraphs structure, but I needed just to get it out. I haven't been writing in this blog because I've spent the past few days dealing with the past, and wondering what place I do have in Quyen's life. I had to ask myself if she's just lying to herself about how she feels about me, just as she did about the 1st boyfriend I mentioned here. I have to wonder if maybe she's just settling because she doesn't think she can find better. Did she settle on me because things with Jack just never worked out? Did she need someone and I seemed the obvious and convenient choice? Why did she choose me? She rejected me once, meaning whatever I had to offer just wasn't good enough for her. Was I just meant to be with her until she could get back on her feet, and she stays with me because she would feel guilty about leaving me twice? And with what I've been hearing this week on the phone and with the reading, I had to ask myself what it means for her to love me. She says she once loved Allen and Kevin, and yet things fell apart for whatever reason. Does that mean things could fall apart with us too, that what we have maybe is not so special and she's been through it several times with other guys? What does it mean that the night she went off to see Allen at the hospital, she didn't care enough to call me to let me know where she was, and that she was okay, or just to say goodnight? How is it she can say she cried selfishly that night, and yet I was really nowhere in her mind? How is it she can tell me she misses me so badly this week, yet she didn't miss me then. And, I refuse to take the excuse that it's because she was mourning. I've seen many people in my life die and I still have the frame of mind to call others to let them know what's going on. It's important to me that she would have called because we call each other every night, at around the same time, if just to say hello and goodnight. It's become our tradition, and now when I'm knee deep in remembering the past and what I mean to her, this tradition just falls out from under me. It just seemed to me that maybe I wasn't as important to her as I wanted to be, or as much as she had led me to believe.

And then there was last night. I was truly happy for Quyen because she finally achieved some sense of closure, closure that will immediately help make our relationship stronger. The closure she had longed for had hurt her for as long as I remember, and many of the obstacles in our relationship stem directly from Kevin. I can't say there haven't been times when I wish he never existed, if only to free Quyen of so much pain. But, then I get on the phone with her last night, and I listen to her, and it turns out that because Kevin is now a good person, that she can see herself loving the man he is, that she can see a future with him in an alternate reality, that he's her Mr. Right given a different reality and meeting him at different points in their lives. It turns out that just because he's now in a position to fall in love with her for the first time and to act like a real man, he's now the Mr. Right she's always longed for, and now she "knows" he was a good choice from the start. It leaves me feeling useless, the whole thing. First Allen, and then more insultingly, there's Kevin. I just felt like this whole week I was taking a back seat to her ex's, and it hurts me to know that in alternate realities she would have chosen to be with these men, that she feels comfortable forgiving them of everything and identifying them as possible Mr. Rights. If she can so easily envision idyllic scenarios and futures with either of these men as her Mr. Right, then where do I fit in? Why am I here? Why is she with me? Is there a purpose? I want to be more than just a random cog in the wheel of happiness. If I'm interchangeable with her ex's as a Mr. Right, then am I really a Mr. Right, does she really love me, or does she love being in a relationship. I want to be more than just some random piece that can be inserted and replaced at any time. So you can see how this all brings me back to the beginning. In the beginning there was Jay, the boyfriend she left when I first met her, and then there was Jack, the man she decided to hook up with instead of me, and then Allen who she never gave me a good reason for leaving, and then Kevin, who cheated on her. Where do I fit in? Why is it I can always be replaced? I was replaced by Jack, and now I'm seemingly just one possible Mr. Right.