Still In the Box

In my apartment there is a box.

What's inside the box on Monday was very special but was rendered meaningless on Wednesday.

It's a teddy bear I made at the Build-a-Bear Workshop that was meant to be a Valentines Day gift for SuitMan. A cute "Bearamy" bear outfitted with a set of denim overalls, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat. The woman behind the counter showed it to the manager as "one of the cutest [she] had seen". I even named it after SuitMan's nickname and on the bear's "birth certificate" it even says it was "Lovingly stuffed by Brian."

I didn't buy this for no reason. For the past week or so, we had been making headway towards getting back together one more time and for all intents and purposes, it looked like it was going to be a more long term, let's really try this time, kind of effort. He decided he wanted to try once more as well.

But not with me.

SuitMan begged off on Monday night and we made plans to spend the weekend over at his place when I would present him with the gift. Tuesday, I was out of the office taking care of a few personal things (doctor's appointment, passport, etc), and when I got into the office on Wednesday there was an email from him that he had good and bad news. Apparently, Monday night when he begged off spending some time that evening with me, he had a phone call with the guy he was recently seeing but decided that the two of them weren't compatible for a variety of reasons. That must have been some phone call because he's going to give it a second go with this guy and he abruptly ended our third attempt at whatever you want to call the soap opera of our relationship.

What I thought was a great opportunity for us to finally...FINALLY...get somewhere blew up in my face and not because of anything I did. In hindsight, what really gets to me more than anything else is that he wrote via email that he wants me to be happy for him and his decision to try something again with this guy, who quite incidentally happens to work for the same company that I do.

My emotions, I wrote back (yes, he did all this via email), have been played with and it hurt very much. His response was that I was warned (actually he said "WARNED" in all caps) not to get too emotionally involved with him (which yes, he did say) but as I said to him, saying those words and trying to remain impersonal when you're speaking of things such as exploring a relationship, telling him that, yeah, being his boyfriend would be a great thing, and actually looking forward to spending some serious time with him this coming weekend (not to mention a few sexual conversations) and getting my hopes up for the potential that we're finally getting somewhere...well...I hate to say it, after over a year and everything that has been said and done and hinted at during that entire time, it's hard to NOT have some emotional stake.

Finally, I wrote that I hope it does work out for him because it's never ever going to work for us now. Whatever feelings I had are now, pretty much gone. I've been walking around in this odd funk for the past two days and not really wanting to be around anyone (sorry, guys but that's part of why I didn't show up for the fest at XES). I've been so out of whack since Wednesday morning that I don't even know if I want a friendship with him. I don't really know what I want anymore.

Three times.

Three strikes

He's out.

On the good side of it all (because yes, I'm trying to make something good come out of this), I've decided to start therapy for the first time in about eight years or so. Coming from a strurdy Southern stock, we're really good about masking feelings and emotions and putting on the strong brave face. We're not good with telling people how we feel and when we do it comes more out of anger than anything else. Considering that the tears I shed earlier this week was the first good cry I've had since my grandmother's passing and I have no idea how long it was before that. Maybe the Great Apartment Fire of 2003.

On the smaller scale, I did a redesign of my template and yes, I'll be changing those pics of the London Tube to something a bit more NYC-ish Update: I already changed the pix). I also removed a lot of links so if I took you off by accident or don't know that I should be linking to you...well...let me know and I'll blogroll you in. Yep...I'm blogrolling now. I consider that to be mildly impressive since I resisted the urge to do it for ages...

So...we'll see how this goes.

The bear, however, is still in the box. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I can't think about re-gifting it and I don't know that I want it. There's always eBay but that does seem a little impersonal as well. I'll figure out something. As cute as it is, I don't want it in my apartment anymore.