My wedding is in 19 days. Nineteen. Fucking. Days. (Eighteen now. This took two days to write)
I've now spent three months without Derek. We've had a few weekends in between where we've been together, either where he lives, where I live, or in between the two (seriously, Amarillo fucking sucks. It sucks my dick. But their Indian place is FANTASTIC). He just went home from a long weekend here two weeks ago, and I've missed him terribly. But I've spent a lot of my alone time thinking about things. Wedding things, mostly. I think this is all normal. Hear me out.
I've had five proposals in my life. One was a ridiculously overblown gesture from a ridiculously overblown idiot when I was 16. I said yes, because I was also a ridiculously overblown idiot that was obsessed with romance. It wasn't romantic, it was stupid, and I don't think it counts, but it's on the list. Thanks, John, for not marrying me, because I had no business at 16 marrying a 23 year old, and also, you were gross. Did I mention my taste has almost ALWAYS been questionable? No? I think that's because it goes without saying.
The second proposal of marriage is one of three that I remember in perfect, unbroken detail. My daughter's father and I were fucking done. It was 4 in the morning, we had been arguing all night, I was 19 years old. I told Chris that I was leaving him, he responded by asking me if I'd marry him, instead. Bold. I told him that he was far too childish and insecure, and I was still too young to deal with his insecurities. And I left a few weeks after. I hope Chris is happy with Shila. I think they're well suited to each other, in that they're both awful people that are as intelligent as rotten watermelon.
Allen is next on the list, and I almost wanted to marry him. Almost. The proposal was forced, though. By my mother. Of all the orchestrators in all the world. I knew it wasn't really real, he knew it wasn't really real, and thankfully, we got no farther into the process than me putting together a few slapdash websites for a wedding we both knew was never going to happen. It didn't feel right when he asked me, even though I had talked myself into wanting him to ask. We had been together for five years, it felt appropriate. But it wasn't. Allen is one of my best friends now, and we didn't make that monumental mistake of getting married because society thought we should. We're better for it.
Dan is next on the list. I remember this one, too. And it fucking hurts. Dan had just gotten back from Afghanistan, which is, like, the fucking WORST cliche. I had taken a week off just to be with him. A few months in to Dan's deployment, I got some medical news. Bad medical news. I hadn't mentioned it to Dan, because I didn't want to cause alarm or panic or worry, and despite the things I say about Dan, I think he did care about me. So, on an outing to Castle Rock, he made some comment about being old or something, I was in a funk and responded with some passive remark about knowing you're going to die sooner than everybody else, and then Dan got all bent out of shape, I spilled the medical beans, and we were pretty fucking silent the rest of the day until Dan wanted to talk about my options later that night. As Dan saw it, option one was he'd pay for me to have my shit taken care of. I said no. Option two was to marry him. And every single "FUCK YOU" alarm bell went off in my head. To set the record straight, I had daydreamed about that the entire fucking time he was deployed. I thought maybe, all of that time apart would pull his head out of his ass, he'd tell me he loved me, and everything would be perfect and happy and amazing and he'd want to marry me. Except that's not how the story goes. At all. Clearly. I thought about it. I asked Dan to tell me if he was asking for him, or asking because I was sick. He didn't even answer. No yes, no no, just silence. And I resented him mightily for that. I still do, even though I got my answer about why he asked after we broke up. He swears he asked because he legitimately wanted to marry me, and because he loved me, but he didn't know how to say it, and he was scared. I've called Dan a coward a lot over the last four years, but in fairness, I was a coward, too. I had a billion opportunities to get out, when I wanted to get out. And I dealt with a lot of blowback from my friends for saying I was done, and then sticking around for more bullshit. Ultimately, I almost said yes, making jokes about being in a loveless marriage, and Dan got one REALLY good dig in at me about saying no, and I think it was legitimately the most hurtful, manipulative, crap-dick thing he ever, ever said to me. And there were SO many things I wanted to say to him about it. But mostly, I just bitched about it to my friends and stuck around, which was a bad move.
I've been thinking about Dan a LOT in the last few weeks. As the days tick down to my wedding date, I think it's only natural to think about where I've failed as far as relationships go. And I'm concerned about a great many things. I think about what it would have been like to marry Dan, and it's not pretty. I painted our entire life picture, and I had done it before so it's not the benefit of retrospect making it an ugly picture, it's just reality. For Dan, I was a concept, not a person. He didn't treat me like a person, and that would have carried through if we had gotten married. I made a joke once to Dan about us getting married and how we would have been divorced, and he told me that if we had gotten married, I still would have been his wife. Which broke my heart, in a very real way. But it also made everything perfectly fucking clear to me, and incidentally, it's when I knew I wanted to marry Derek. Despite my telling Dan that he should do something about the fact that he loved me, of course he loved me, and of course he still did. I was confused and fucked up and hurt, and I felt cheated. But I shouldn't have, because any life with Dan would have been sterile and awful and only one of us would have been happy, and it wouldn't have been me. I don't think it would have been Dan for very long, to be fair. I think my luster would have worn off after maybe five years. Concepts are only as real as you let them be, and to the best of my knowledge, Dan never made me real. I was always an outside thing. Kind of like the Velveteen Rabbit, but without the happy ending.
I would have been ANYBODY Dan wanted me to be. Anybody in the whole wide world. Anybody but me, anyway, because that person wasn't good enough. Which was made clear every damn day. I say a lot of shitty things about my relationship with Dan, and I realize it's not terribly fair of me. Because I was a fucking wretch. Legitimately. Dan deserved better than me, and I hope he's found it in his girlfriend. I sincerely hope they're happy as fuck together, and she's everything he wants, and vice versa. That whole being anybody Dan wanted thing, though...it taught me a LOT. I've spent the last two years with Derek being unabashedly myself. I am fucking crazy, and selfish, and angry, and loud, and stubborn, and neurotic. Unapologetically so. I told myself after Dan that I would never, ever again compromise who I was or how I am just to keep someone happy, and I haven't, and Derek loves me for me. There's no pretense or disguising my bad attitude, or my depression, or the fact that I get irrationally jealous over the dumbest things. He even understands that I STILL, and probably always will, have hang ups about Dan. We've talked about them at great length. But ultimately, I'm where I want to be. Derek and I have a messy, crazy, lazy, adventurous, boring life together. We include each other, we fight all the time, we have sex all the time, and I love him. So very much.
I wouldn't be marrying Derek if I hadn't gone through all of this. I wouldn't be ok with being with Derek if it weren't for Dan, I don't think, and I have nothing but gratitude and appreciation to Dan for that. Dan really did give me exactly what I wanted, just with somebody else. I needed that relationship to fail so this one...the one that's marrying me in 18 days...could work. It may not work forever. Lying about that is stupid. We may burn out and die, too. But I'm SO much more comfortable in myself than I was two years ago.
This is where thinking about my failures has gotten me. I'm not depressed, I'm happy. And that's a weird place to be when you reflect on things you've fucked up. Weird, but so, so good.
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