Thank you all. I have enormous respect for the people here who have been through so much and show such compassion, dignity, composure, and patience.
I've never ridden a motorcycle but I bought one on craigslist this weekend. Hoping it will be a good project and a way to GAL. My goal is to take it on a 3k mile trip to see where my grandmother was born this summer. Seemed like it was meant to be... I got a check in the mail for almost the exact asking price a few days after finding it.
In the meantime, I've been feeling really miserable. This whole experience has been such torture and our last meeting felt so final. I had to rent a truck and drive 2 hours each way to get the motorbike, which gave me a lot of time to think. I'd almost gotten to the seller's house and after spending a couple of hours in my head, I was feeling really worn down and ready to throw in the towel. Not a minute later, driving through a tidy suburban New England neighborhood I see something scrawled in black spray paint on a brick wall... in a place where you would NEVER see graffiti... it said:
"DON'T GIVE UP"
It felt like getting a direct phone call from God. I guess I am not ready to give up and needed to be told directly. So here I am, not giving up.
An hour later, out of the blue, W emailed me, told me that she "absolutely loves me" to which I replied I don't think I understand what she means. She said that she "never wanted to hurt me" and "didn't want to cause me pain". I have a feeling those are probably pretty common things for people in MLC to say (words, not backed up by actions). I told her that I didn't understand how she could imagine I wouldn't be hurt. But the next thing I wrote surprised me when it came out of my brain - I said that I needed space to understand what I was feeling.
When I wrote that, something clicked for me. I haven't heard back from her (giving me space, I suppose) but when we have our final MC session on Thurs, I'm going to ask for no contact for a month or six weeks - and then we can get dinner and talk. I think this is the right thing for me, rather than keep opening these wounds time after time. It wasn't until I saw the graffiti that I realized that suggesting no contact isn't giving up. And maybe it is, in some ways, the opposite of giving up.
____________________________ "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." -- Albert Camus
Me:39 WAW:38 M:9 T:19, No Kids EA/PA with co-worker:9/24, ILYBINILWY, S:9/25 EA/PA on hold? (probably not), MC 9/30-now
