choosing the wrong ending

Little did I know when I named this guy Mr. Choose Your Own Adventure that I'd inadvertently pick the door that ends the entire book 20 pages early without even so much as a dark tunnel or a pit of snakes or a sub-dermal hematoma.

There was, unfortunately, yelling. But as I recall I don't think yelling was ever involved in those books, at least not this kind of yelling. Unless the "adventure" you were forced to think your way out of was being extremely uncomfortable.

What was really difficult about this particular yelling is that like most all yelling it contained some things in it that I didn't want to hear. And even after a night of drinking with my girlfriends to try to self-medicate (an idea so very fraught with irony since it almost always ends with self-medicating one's hangover), and then just a touch more yelling, I realized that some of those things were true.

It's not easy hearing someone point out things about yourself that you don't like. And in this case the specific thing feels like the worst kind of thing.

Selfish. The world revolves around you. You don't consider others.

It's perhaps especially hard to hear because all I could see for the two months or so that Mr. CYOA and I were dating were the things I gave up to spend time with him. The ways that I put him first. And while I don't necessarily want to absolve anyone of anything, I'm starting to see that all that time I thought I was the one who had everything figured out, I still had a hell of a lot to learn.

Still have a hell of a lot to learn.

So in the end all the yelling feels a lot like sound and fury, signifying nothing. Hindsight is ever the haughty bitch in all her 20-20 vision, but she's yet to invent me a flux capacitor and a souped-up DeLorean so right now all we got is a bucket of sour-tasting mixed emotions, with a solitary straw.

The strangest one of them all? I'm feeling embarrassed. Embarrassed that I said a lot of the things I did. But mostly, embarrassed -- completely mortified, actually -- that he was right.

I'm a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and if the adventure with Mr. CYOA is meant to go on another 10 or 15 pages, then it will. Eventually, in good time, whenever it's supposed to happen. I'm also a believer that each relationship, each date, each successful interaction with a man is teaching me something that will at some point be the reason I'm able to make that one right relationship really work.

But all that good sturdy logical thought doesn't make it suck any less right at this exact moment.


cheers,
elizabeth