It’s hard to try remember and forget simultaneously. It’s hard when I have everything and nothing to say to him. I don’t feel like I can pick up the phone to call or text. What’s there to say, really? Everything and nothing.

At this very moment, I’m doing ok. About love, I mean. I know I’m doing ok because I feel comfortable enough to write this down, and so far don’t feel like I am going to choke up and cry.

At times last week, I wasn’t doing so great. I can recall two times where I lost my shit. Once during a drinking session which ended very messily. It was over something really trivial. Too obvious to write about here. And the other time after Mel Rafter’s funeral. On TV. Ok, so the collective Packed to the Rafters audience probably lost their shit too, mourning Mel, but I cried because of the love I’ve lost/still feel, and then for feeling guilty about crying more after a TV funeral than some real life funerals I’ve attended.

I wish things could go back to how things were before. When we were comfortable with talking for hours. When I could hear him smile. When my heart beat fast. When I felt like I trusted him with my life. When I felt wanted. When I knew it was ok to love him.

Last week I met a friend who told me she was in the early stages of an internet relationship. Without putting a dampener on her giddy heart, I gave some advice. Try not to leave it too long before you meet him. You develop feelings for someone so quickly when you talk to them online and over the phone that there is risk that those feelings won’t translate into ‘real life’ and you will fall into pieces as quickly as you fell in love.

I didn’t actually meet him online. But the internet facilitated something between us.

It took about seven days for me to develop feelings for him, right after he told me his feelings for me. Fast. It was 31 days from when I started talking to him on the phone to when I booked my flights to meet him (again after many years). Though our phone and text relationship was fraught with mixed emotions, and probably too much persistence on my part, I had to find out what these feelings were about. It was 46 days from when we started talking to when we met again. I am glad I didn’t leave it too long because I would have developed deeper feelings and be more devastated now.

To protect myself, from I don’t know what, really, I have tried not to think about him and I since we met. By not thinking of him too much, I mean, I try not to fall asleep thinking. I hear songs he likes. I get mental image flashbacks of things we did. I feel guilty because he feels guilty. I’ve wanted to think about him so much, but I know that doing so will prolong my feelings for him. I don’t want to remember and I don’t want to forget. I don’t know when I should stop loving him, or even if I should stop. I hate being told that I need to forget about him, or that I need to move on.

I thought it would be hard going to Canberra last Friday. But it wasn’t bad. The only sadness I felt was when I sat in the same seat as before he and I said goodbye, and when I walked past the place where we hugged for the last time. I remembered that I wanted to call out to him as he walked away and tell him I loved him, if it wasn’t for me telling him I loved him the night before and he asked me not to.

There are so many things I love about him, and so many things I don’t. Deep down I know I need to find happiness and love elsewhere. I consider ceasing the little contact that we have. But, as my romantic prophet sings, ‘I shouldn’t be holding on but I’m still holding on for you’.

I read this piece of writing on a blog today:

Some unrequited loves make no sense whatsoever when you think about them, but sadly the heart wants what the heart wants. So often, as young women (and men if there are any reading), we have great capacity to love. And great capacity to forgive someone over and over for their mistakes, for causing us hurt, for their imperfections, and even for not loving us back. They are just human right? So we keep on loving. And yet we have great difficulty forgiving ourselves for being human and loving ourselves in spite of not being perfect.

It sums up parts of the way I feel perfectly. I love him, despite. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. But other times I am glad I do.

He has my heart. He has my love. Even though I don’t know if it’s ok to love still him.