What might have been...(and thank the Gods it never was!)

I swore I was going to stop doing this. Years and years ago I swore I was going to stop doing this. Because you can't change the past, and regrets- regrets aren't going to save you. In the end all they seem to do is hurt you.

But sometimes... sometimes I miss Adam so much. And I want to erase that, strike it out, pretend that I had never ever wrote it, never thought it- but that wouldn't make it any less true. And I miss him not so much the way he was- the way I couldn't live with him even though I loved him, the way I finally had to turn away- but I miss him the way he could have been, if he'd just gotten it together- if he'd believed me, trusted me even once. If I had meant more to him than his pride and his mother and the lies and all of the crap and nonsense...

I miss Adam for his potential and his intelligence and his humor. I miss what we could have had, because we may have been a couple of fucked-up high school kids too smart for our little towns and our circles of not-really-friends, but there was a time, my senior year in high school, and I remember this so clearly; I was seventeen, he was a whisper on the phone, so far away, and I loved him, and he loved me. And there was not a doubt in my mind that I was going to marry him.

I read my Tarot cards that summer, when Mom and I went to Monterey, the old childhood summer stomping ground, and there was so much hope in the air without Dad. I was young and free, and a part of me thought that maybe I might be beautiful. And the cards read that trend, happiness and hope and a future that was as bright as my world had ever been dark.

It didn't last. I've lost track of it in my mind, in my memory- I'll have to check the old journals, remember the old pain, to get this right, to remind myself of how it went, but in the end it always went wrong.

I remember the beginning, how we lasted- I think it was almost a year, that first time? And he had an affair with Lindsay (my dear little sister, bohemienne) and we weren't such good friends back then, she and I, only vaguely aware of each other, in the same orbit but not really close, and I forgave her long ago, because she didn't know. I never really did forgive him. He used to get mad at me about that, but what could I say? That I couldn't trust him as much as I wanted to because he told me he loved me, the same time he was telling Lindsay he loved her?

Mom would say- has said, in fact- that I made the smart choice here. Kept the friend, and got rid of the boy. But still he haunts me. Damn him.

He broke up with me to find himself. Yeah. I know. Six months later, we got back together. Probably a mistake, but he was the only one I'd ever really loved. I'd dated somebody in between, but he was too young, and he didn't... he didn't really compare, you know?

Bloody damned first loves. They can stab your heart out, and you still think about them, years later, when you ought to know better.

Long story short. Got back together with him; he broke up with me again a few months later because his mother didn't like the idea of me. No lie. Got him back, though the Goddess only knows why I bothered. We drifted apart; I broke up with him in 2000. We stopped speaking even awkwardly when I yelled at him for not doing something he said he would (something little, too) and he told me his stepfather had died, then went postal on me for not knowing it had happened.

Um...hello? Not psychic.

Asshole

I thought we could be friends. I was wrong. And it's his loss- all of it is his loss. I know this.

But sometimes I regret the road not taken. The one he couldn't get it together enough to take.

It used to be, every year around October, November, December- the major months of upheaval in my relationship with Adam, most years- I would dream about him, about the way it was and how it might have gone on if things had stayed good. This year I only dreamed about him once, and it wasn't like that at all.

He was older, not the way I am older, but weighted down by years and all of the problems he never solved. He was old and weary and dragging around all this baggage, and I didn't want to help him. Even in my dream I didn't want to help him- I didn't want to do that thing I sometimes still do, though I shouldn't, where I pretend that I can heal things, and I try to take on everyone else's shit atop my own. I didn't want to go near him, didn't want him at all-

He was fat and ugly and alone, and I just shook my head. That's who? Gods, he looks like hell. *shrug* I loved him a couple of lifetimes ago.

And that was that. Haven't had one of those damned dreams since.

I got over him a long time ago- or mostly I did. Now all I have is a few regrets that crop up now and then, and a little anger that flares up whenever I read the old journals.

He did what? To me? Nobody treats me like that- nobody.

And they don't anymore, that's the thing, or they only do it once. I may have done stupid things in my past, but at least I learn from them.

Okay. Maybe more than a little anger. But, you know... it's better than apathy. It's better than not learning anything, and taking crap like that ever again. I'd rather have the anger, I think.