when it comes to being haunted

Parker Manor

I used to live in a haunted house.  

That's what you've come here for, yes?  To hear about it?  To see if I, purveyor of all things true and not one to fabricate a story (less they be in my novels, natch), could maybe make you believe?  The lovely thing is that you don't necessarily have to take my word for it, either.  You can ask a handful of my friends what their own experiences were like, all three of them quite similar, none of the three ever having spoken to the others.  And if you don't believe in ghosts, or spirits, or anything from "beyond," well, I can't force you to.  I will say that had you experienced any of this, you'd be hard pressed not believe.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  

It is Halloween today, after all, and you want some stories.  Let's begin.

The first time I entered the Manor, it was mid April and snowy.  My realtor, Kieran, let me in the building and took a phone call outside as I entered.  In hindsight, knowing what I know now, I feel like the house itself had something to do with that.  Maybe it could sense me coming and wanted to feel me out on its own?  Maybe it was a mutual understanding between the two of us.  What I do know is that I was flooded with memories from my childhood the instant I stepped inside.  Ask my mom and sister, who I later shared these memories with, if that's true.

As I moved through the foyer of the silent house, my mind raced back to being five or so years old and visiting the extended Parker family in Indiana for Thanksgiving.  It was the smell of the Manor... it was the feeling of these distant echoes of memory I had forgotten over time rushing through my ears.  As my solo tour continued and I moved outside to the backyard, a different set of senses were flooded.  This time, by memories of my grandmother on my mom's side.  Two great familial connections within minutes of eachother?  I took it as a sign and decided this was the house for me.  It had to be.

And it was; a little over a month later and I was moved in.

Now, the weird shit didn't start happening right away.  There was the leaking bathtub and the weird wiring in the basement ceiling that I took down.  The janky green walls and mismatched outlets and switches, not to mention the faceplates for all these providing a veritable pupu platter of designs.  It was about two weeks in, mid June, when things started.

I went to bed one night around 11 and got snuggled under the sheets.  After messing around on my phone for a while, I turned out the light and closed my eyes; within seconds there was a knocking on the front door.  Three quick, concise, knocks.  My blood froze, because I still had not installed the security system and I was pretty consistently panicked someone was going to break in.  I got up and went to my office at the front of the house, trying to look to the porch below to see if there was someone there.  After a minute or so, with no one visibly leaving, I went down the stairs and opened the front door.  No one there.

A couple nights later it happened again, this time around midnight.

A few nights later, it happened again.  This time around 10.

It was never the same time, and it was very infrequent.  Sometimes it would happen a couple days in a row, other times a week would go by.  Always the same three, quick knocks.  Always coming from the front door... never anybody there.  This was also when the box fan I placed in the hallway started rattling after I'd turn the light out at night.  No loose parts... never rattled when I was awake and moving around... only when the lights were out.  

And I ignored a lot of this.

There were things that creeped me out in the house, for sure.  I didn't like going in the guest room at the top of the stairs, and in particular I didn't like being near the closet door inside the room.  It was the only room in the house not outfitted with a ceiling light, and something about that always struck me as odd.  I also avoided the root cellar in the basement.  After two years of living there I never once stepped foot inside of it.  I'd show people that were visiting, but I never went in.

Sometimes when I was outside doing things in the yard, I'd get that prickly feeling on my neck like I was being watched.  A few times I would see the curtains move inside the house, knowing it wasn't the cats because they don't typically play with 'em.  But like I said, I ignored all of this.  I didn't talk about it with people (I mentioned the knocking to a few friends), and I think that was because if I pretended it wasn't a "thing," then it just wasn't a thing.

But those things started accelerating in October.

My very old friend from high school, Sara, came to visit me so we could go and see Florence + the Machine together.  She had arrived the day before, and after an evening catching up, I went to work the next morning while she had free reign of the house.  Sara had gone for a walk, and when she came back went upstairs to lay on the guest bed.  I should say now, the door of the guest bedroom directly faces the stairwell, which itself has a landing halfway down where it then makes a right turn toward the ground level.

Sara was on the guest bed, and from the corner of her eye she saw a man walk past the bedroom door.  Heading from my bedroom hallway, on the left of the stairs, and through the office door on the right.  She called my name out, thinking I had come home during her walk, and when I didn't answer, she got up to look.  Of course no one was there... and of course I was still at work.  She shared this with me when I got home and while it creeped the absolute shit out of me, I tucked it away in my mind.  It was just a silly thing that had happened.

October 26th, 2018

Two nights later, my best friend Tina came to stay for a few nights, bringing her little ones with her.  They arrived late, past midnight, and I sat with the kids while Tina got the guest room ready for bed.  Snapping selfies with the kids, obviously.  Eventually she got them settled and tucked in, I myself doing the same because I had work the following day.  In the morning, barely light outside (and my alarm hadn't gone off yet), I was awake.  Tina knocked on my door and asked if I was up, to which I said yes.

"I am never going to sleep again," she said dryly.  She proceeded to tell me how Devlyn, who was not quite three, had woken her up in the middle of the night crying.  When Tina asked her what was wrong, Devlyn cried that "the man" was smiling at her in the corner.  Tina looked and saw that no one was there and assured Devlyn it was fine.  Dev then lay back and looked up at the ceiling, and Tina watched as she mimed a knocking motion at the ceiling.

I finally admitted what Sara had told me about seeing the figure walk past the guest room door, of a man, and also about the knocking I had heard from the front door of the house over the few months I had lived there.  Nothing else happened during her trip, but by this point I had decided I would talk to the house on Halloween.  Even though I felt like an idiot... even though I felt like it was maybe pointless.

But then something else happened.

An old friend, Mike, was visiting his parents here Minnesota for a few weeks, but he lives in Los Angeles.  Mike is a clairvoyant, which you can say is a little "woo-woo," and he would accept that.  But he does readings for people out in LA and cleanses houses with sage and crystals and all that good stuff.  We had tried connecting earlier in his trip to no avail, but he was able to come by the house later in the day after Tina had gone and before he had to fly back to California.

We watched a movie and chatted for a few hours, and it was nearing 1am when he said he should get going.  "But show me the rest of the house!  I want to see upstairs."  So I took him upstairs and showed him the rooms, his eyes squinting a bit at the guest room but moving on with me.  We chatted in the office for a while, but by then it was nearing 2am and he really had to go.  We started going down the stairs, me in the lead, and when I got to the bottom I turned to look back at him.  Mike was standing on the landing, looking up the second half of stairs and toward the guest room.  He looked down at me, then back up, then back down.

"Do you see things here?" He asked.  I froze.  

I'm not fucking kidding, every hair on my body was standing up.

"No," I said, because it was true.  I had not seen the figure.  Mike nodded and looked back up the stairs.

"But you hear things," he said quietly, and I nodded.  "You hear knocking."  It suddenly felt like the house was so much smaller than it had been before... the walls felt like they had closed in around me.  Mike came down the stairs slowly, looking slightly shaken.  At the bottom of the stairs he was glancing up them again and then finally looked me in the eyes.  "There is a lot of energy on this stairwell," he said gently, "and they want you to know they are here.  They aren't dangerous... they..." and he trailed off and seemed to stand up on his tiptoes, gently gesturing behind him.  "Jesus they're right here."

I had my arms crossed very tightly across my chest and just nodded.  Stiffly.  

He explained that all of the dark wood in my house (floor boards and trim) was sort of like a conduit for this energy.  He said they are happy with me but curious, and that I should introduce myself to them better.  Mike didn't seem to think any of the spirits had lived in the house, but he wasn't sure.  And then he left to go home and I was alone, and I don't think I've ever hit the lights and flown upstairs to my bed so fast in my life.

Two days later it was Halloween.  Now, you should all know by now that I take Halloween very seriously.  I take the day off from work, I have chili simmering in the crockpot all day, treats in the oven, and movies on TV.  I carve my pumpkins and decorate outside, always ready for the trick-or-treater's if and when they show up.  I woke up that day and got dressed, and on my way down the stairs, I stopped on the landing and just stood there.  

After a few moments of silence, I started to talk to the Manor.

I told it who I was.  Why I had purchased the house, what had happened in my past that led me there, and what my intent was with the building.  How I wanted to respectfully repair it, transforming it back into something of glory.  I found myself talking about my heartbreak... I even cried at one point.  It was such a strange and surreal experience but ultimately it was an uplifting one.  I felt different throughout the day, almost like I had reached a weird sort of understanding with the Manor.  And maybe it had reached it with me as well.  I literally asked the house not to scare me, and that if it was doing something that scared me, I would have to ask it to stop.

The traditional face

From that, I followed the rules of Halloween.  I didn't blow out my candles early, I left them glowing until they extinguished themselves by their own accord.  I handed out candy, I watched movies, and I kept it spooky.  And the next day was the first day that the house stopped messing with me.

There was no more knocking... no more weird noises from my box fan.  It was quiet.  I didn't see the drapes move anymore, and I didn't feel like I was being watched.  The Manor had become my home and I its keeper.  There were a couple random nights every few weeks where the fan would rattle, and I would literally call out "please don't do that," and within moments it would stop.  I promise you this is true.  A year later in the following fall when Andrew was essentially living with me, I told him about the ghost stories.  He didn't guffaw... I think he was polite and entertained it all because he knew I believed in it, even if he didn't.

He believed more when that night, after however many nights he had been staying with me, the box fan started to rattle once more.  

But then there was nothing.  Nothing when he left me... nothing in the following months of quarantine and isolation.  In the summer I got busy fixing the yard up, and in early July decided I was ready to sell the Manor and move on.  There weren't any events in July, nothing worth noting at least, but then the house sold on August 3rd... and then things started happening again.

I would come home from work and the TV would be on.  I would go to bed and in the morning, lights in the kitchen would be on.  A few times I assumed that it was just me forgetting them, but the frequency was too often.  The fan started rattling every couple nights.  The dryer was running one afternoon after I got home from the grocery store, with nothing in it.  As I was packing up the house I was constantly feeling ill.  Dizzy, like a car sickness.  If I left the Manor for a while, say to go be at the pool with Jonathan?  I felt fine, and I was always fine at work.  

But then I'd go home and just be tired, and angry, and sick.

It didn't take long to start believing it was the house; I assume the Manor knew what was going on in that I, its "person," had decided to flee the coop.  I've said before that houses are living things... and if you're a living thing, why would you want to let go of something that was good for you?

On my last night in the Manor (which itself felt incredibly creepy because there was nothing on the walls anymore and any sound I made echoed throughout the place), I was trying to get to sleep.  It should be noted, I had not been sleeping well.  At all.  For weeks.

Blame the house.

I was lying on the mattress that was resting on the floor, staring at the ceiling, when this weird sort of soft but still somehow rattling boom echoed throughout the house.  Both cats came tearing into the bedroom, fully puffed out, and freaked.  Sophia leapt onto the mattress, circled around up near my head and Paolo stayed on the floor right beside me, both of them turned to face the door and motionless.  This is 100% not something they have ever done in my 10 years of raising them, and you could have heard a pin drop in that place it was so silent.

Bam.  Bam.  Bam.  Three knocks from the front door.

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my ears.  I waited, with quite literally bated breath, for some horrifying monster to come slithering around the door frame.  There was a quick snap in the hallway as the office light turned on.  I immediately got up, angrily moving through my bedroom and rounding the corner into the hall.

"Stop it," I said loudly, snapping the office light off and turning back to my bedroom.  

The office door slammed itself shut behind me, and I about flew down the hallway.  The boogeyman was real that night and it proved childhood is never really over.

My ceiling fan clicked and clacked all night, other lights turned on in the house, at one point the ceiling light in the bedroom was turned on.  Keep in mind it's a light that needs the chain pulled to turn it on... but it was on, around 4:15am.  I think I eventually fell asleep because I was just plain exhausted.  Whether it was from the stress of the move or because I was living in the house from Poltergeist, I dunno.

When morning came and the moving truck with it, I sequestered the cats to the guest room (and I felt bad because like I said before... fuck the guest room), and spent the entire day in the backyard.  I didn't want to go back inside the house, I wanted to leave.  I wanted to get the hell out and start my life somewhere else, because what had once been a good relationship had certainly turned sour.  Later in the day, Jonathan came by to help me load up the car and get to the apartment I'd be living in for a couple weeks.  We were standing in the living room, talking quietly, when there was suddenly a strange, unexplainable sound that came from somewhere inside the building.

"The house is mad at me," I said quietly.  And while anyone would and should laugh at that, even I myself, Jonathan seemed to understand.  He had heard it too.  So we left.

The final blog

A couple days later I returned to the Manor to write my goodbye blog, sitting in the silence of the living room of an empty house, and I took this picture.  Above my feet you can see a light.  Some of you will call it a sun-flare, and that's fine.  You have every right to do so.  But I call it an orb, because as I wrote that blog, I felt like I was being watched again.  The Manor was reading my words as I wrote them, and maybe it felt like my goodbye was justified?  Maybe it was ready to let go of me, and I it.  We'd both certainly changed a lot from when we first met, and in the end, not much in life lasts forever.  Or the afterlife, for that matter.

But that's the story, and now I've shared it with you.  And maybe some of you have your own stories, and maybe you don't.  This was mine as I experienced it, and some of those facts are pretty incontrovertible.  I never found proof that anyone had died on the property or in the house.  I've also got to say that writing this wasn't therapeutic, it just scared the piss out of me as I wrote it in the near dark of my new house with a bunch of Halloween decorations around me.

Why do I do this to myself?  Who fuckin' knows.

Anyway!  I am off now to start the crockpot of chili, to get a movie going, and to decide which pumpkin I want to carve first.  Even though Halloween looks very different this year than those in the past, I hope you take advantage of the full moon on this one night where the realms between the living and the dead are at their thinnest.  It's a wonderful time to connect with yourself in whatever way makes sense, and maybe get a couple scares in at the same time.  Also, say hi to your house.  It might do ya some good.

Happy Halloween gang (c:

the tenth iteration

Sometimes it takes a long time for things in life to come full circle, and sometimes it takes very little.  Pretty frequently I find myself looking for the signs that point toward healing... healing in whatever manner you want.  I think in 2020 "healing" is a pretty open ended sentiment.  Physical health, mental health, emotional health; they all sort of drop into the same bucket.  I've been looking so hard for signs of my own healing, rather proof that it is occurring at all, that I ended up sort of keeping my eyes shut to reality as a result.  And then the other day I had a long phone call and it all snapped back into place for me.

It's amazing, really, feeling that.  A year ago I wrote about how in love I was, and yet as I write this now, I'm decidedly not.  Consequentially not.  

Sadly not.  

But things have come full circle in a year, and with that phone call, I realized I had been waiting for a sign like that to happen before I sat down to write one of my favorite series of the blog. 

The Nine Year Anniversary For

Musings of a 

Self-Proclaimed Author

I kept thinking "Wow! The tenth iteration? That means TEN YEARS OF BLOGS!" but then I, an intellectual with a high school education, realized we are indeed a full year from that.  This is just the tenth one I've written.  It should also be noted how I once thought naming my book series "The Originality" was cool because I had made up the word... so that's the sort of hard-workin' science going on behind my blue eyes and it shouldn't surprise you.

So where was I... ah yes, love.  LOVE!  A love story like no other for me, your favorite(?) author! AKA a whirlwind romance that ultimately collapsed under the weight of itself, turning out to not be the love story for our generation but really just a long fart in the dark.  At this point I've resigned myself to realizing it just is what it is.

That was helped by the aforementioned phone call the other day.

I'd been watching the debate this past Thursday night with a friend and I got a text message from Andrew.  It had been just over five months since we last texted, when I took out my proverbial earrings and (later in his words) ripped him a new asshole.  In an awkward way of phrasing it through text, he wanted to talk.  So I said I would call him the next day and then pushed it out of my mind.  Because politics were on tv and we all know how much I love 'em.  Re: I don't.

I started a FaceTime with him around 11 the next morning.  A friend of mine asked me if I was nervous and I weirdly wasn't... I wanted this.  I wanted to see him and hear him and ultimately understand him, but I wasn't nervous about any of that.  It had been 8 months since he walked out of my life, there wasn't much to lose here.  He launched into a semi-prepared speech right away, himself quite nervous (admittedly, and evidenced by a shaking camera).  And though I doubted I would feel empathy toward him, I did.

I'm not going to dive into the details of the conversation we had, that's for Andrew and I.  As I said in the big 'ol breakup post back in February, this one didn't end in cheating so I don't feel privy to sharing all of the minute details.  Suffice to say it was a great conversation and it shed light on damn near everything.

You see... I don't usually get closure from relationships ending.  I don't get a reason why things happened the way they did or why certain choices were made the way they were.  So it shouldn't have surprised me that this relationship, so different from the others, would also be different in this regard.  Andrew had done the work and taken the time to understand why he did what he did.  Why he walked away.  And though he still has questions of his own that he's trying to process, he's at least trying.  Part of his own healing journey was to explain this all to me.

By the end of the two hour conversation, having touched on all of the issues we had while we were together, I felt the need to tell him "it was always good for me."  He nodded, and I started to tear up.

"Most of it was great," he answered.  So after nine months together, eight months apart, and ultimately a two hour phone call... I understood it was over.

I was suddenly sad in an entirely new way.  You see, if you talked to me about him just a day before this conversation, the wounds still felt fresh.  All this time later and they still bled.  I could (can) cry at the drop of a hat (or a $5 bill) with the memory of what happened.  But after talking to him, I realized exactly how long ago all of this was.  My heart was hurting anew only because I finally understood what he had been going through on his end.   It was hurting because he answered every single one of my questions with complete honesty, some of them with certain "oh, really" repercussions that come with the truth.  But by doing that, he proved to me that I wasn't crazy.  That I hadn't been imagining things.  

My sadness now is a sweeter one, if there is such a thing.  I lament for the past rather than mourn the loss of it.  Having my questions answered, the fog around me just seemed to dissipate and left me laying in my new bedroom.  In my new house.  With my new car in the garage.  And with all of the new friends and relationships I forged this summer.  

I look back to where I was when I kicked off the eighth year of this blog and it blows my mind.  I've mentioned my self-fulfilling prophecies before... I tend to write things down and then let them unfold through a year's time.  It is definitely not always how I intend it to go, more often than not it's the complete opposite of where I wanted it to go.  But it does go.  I wrote back then how I only wanted to move forward with intent... to do things with my heart and mind put squarely behind them.  I think I imagined it would be with Andrew right now, but it's not, and that's okay too.

Instead, what ended up happening is that I moved forward with the silent and often calm determination that makes me, Sean Parker, who I am.  Head down and struggling against whatever perceived current washes against me.  I worked my ass off and finished the complete re-set of my yard at the Manor.  I worked hard at rebuilding relationships with my friend Renae and my ex Jonathan.  I committed to weekly video calls with Jill and Katie.  I focused and had my business at Pottery Barn bounce back from quarantine and being closed for two months.  I sold my house and I bought a new one.

And that, my friends, is how you move forward from having your heart broken by a man you didn't think was capable of it.  You put your nose down, you seek out the things that matter, and you apply yourself to them.  You keep moving forward with that calm intensity and you just have to wait. The signs may not appear around you but eventually one of 'em will smack you right in the chin.

Or come as a text on a chilly Thursday night, as it were.

I'm still sad, but that sadness is changed.  I suddenly feel myself as changed.  I look around in this house that I am so much happier in, in a neighborhood that is so much quieter and safer.  There is a weird sort of "lightness" that I can feel inside of me and I don't really know what to attribute it to.  But I think living here at the Ranch helps. 

September 30th, 2020: Day 1

The Manor always had a strange sort of gravity to it.  My first time seeing it drew memories from deep in my past, ones I didn't even know I still had.  The gravity of the place was so strong after Andrew left that it felt like a black-hole, pulling me in and crushing everything inside of me.  From all of the work I did on the house, I never really documented it outside of pictures.  I felt like I was doing it all for the approval of the Manor itself... but that speaks more to the spirits in the place than anything else.  Check out the Halloween blog in a few days for more on that.

So with all that off my chest and out of the way, what would the prophecy be for the ninth year of this blog?  The big thing I've been doing since I bought the Ranch is videoing just about everything.  I think there has been (always will be) an innate desire inside me to share things.  I regret not sharing the progress on the Manor over the years and thought I might as well start here.  The Ranch is not an ugly house, and unlike the Manor had been, the walls inside are all white.  Really it is just a big 'ol blank slate.  

In the next year I want to share more.  More blogs, more stories, another book to release, and of course the videos of what I am doing in my home.  I still want to move with intent, but I also want to move with the lightness that I finally feel like I have in my step.  This year, along with telling me to slow down, I think the universe has taught me to appreciate what I have when I have it, and to just do the best I can.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

To close this out with the customary song, I'm gonna leave you this time with Kylie Minogue.  For... well, for reasons I guess you're not privy too.

Ciao for now (c:

saying goodbye to the manor

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, 

remembers it most obsessively, 

wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, 

loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image." 

- Joan Didion

May 30th, 2018

Two short years ago when I took that picture, I wasn't really thinking about the future or what it had in store for me.  I wasn't really thinking about being excited for the future, either, because truth be told I had just finished crying over the fear I'd made a colossal mistake in signing my name like 800 times and adding $180,000 to my debt.  But the smile doesn't show that, or at least, I hope it doesn't.  

That smile shows pride in one thing only: lookie what I did.

Because I'd done something huge!  I bought a god damn house!  And I did it on my own credit, of my own volition, regardless of fact I had destroyed my life with credit card debt as a teenager and being flippant with money ever since.  I bought a house and I didn't need someone to do it with me for their support or a secondary income or any of that stuff.  Sure it was a Crayola house of colors that looked like a witch had been living inside, but who cares?  I owned it.

Side note: the girl a few houses down stopped by this summer when I was working on the patio in the back yard and had left the gate door open.  She came in and said that she hadn't been in this backyard since she was a little girl (back in like 2003) and SHE said that they always thought a witch lived here.  The lady had a whole bunch of bat houses in the backyard, so there!  Proof is in the pudding and it WAS a witch house! This made me love it all the more, because witches are the shit and I'm down with a spooky vibe.

This also explains why I kept getting bats in the house.

When I moved in, I was still a little bit bitter over how my last relationship had ended (hey! full circle!) but I was so excited to finally have a place to call my own.  I was gonna be entertaining all the time (...) and having people visit and stay in the guest room (...) and do all the things that make a house a home.  I had no idea where I was supposed to start, or how I was supposed to do it, because everything was so insanely daunting.  I assume you've painted a room before, yes?  Gotta get the painters tape, carefully do the trim, put your drop-cloths or plastic tarps down and then go, right?  

Have you ever painted every single room in your house?  

How about the ceilings?  

How about the trim?  The doors?  Windows?  Re-stain the floors?  Replace all the lights?  The outlets and switch plates?  Did you repaint the outside, redo the porch, build a new deck, pour your own concrete pavers and patio?  Probably not.  

Also I'm a goal driven and over achieving Capricorn, so big fuckin' surprise there.

May 30th, 2019

I didn't do it all by the time this picture was taken, mimicking the shot from the day I bought the house and in the same outfit a year later.  Here, I had only finished the interior, sans the floors and closets.  I'd also finished painting the front and side of the house, but whatever.  On the one year anniversary of owning the Manor, I  met the third great love of my life.  He had read the four blogs I posted around my renovation, and reached out on a whim because he was so impressed by the hardwork and determination I had shown.  This is where the story turns...

PSYCH!

Think I'd waste my goodbye blog to the Manor talking about the fuckhead that left me high and dry at the drop of a dime, right before the pandemic ruined 2020?  Get real.  I'm a whiner, not a masochist.

By the end of the first year, I'd really not entertained much.  I had a few get-togethers, but nothing huge and I always wanted to do more.  And I meant to do more... just didn't get around to it.  As for people visiting, I had more visitors in my first few months at the Manor than all of the second year combined, so make of that what you will.  No hard feelings of course, it just is what it is.  My hopes of what I was gonna get out of the house had waned by then.

My second year was really spent finishing the paint job outside, working on the garage, then the massive undertaking of refinishing the floors over winter.  What lesson did I learn from that, you're asking so loudly right now?  Well, I'll tell ya!  NEVER stain your floors dark if you a) have pets, b) live in the house, c) plan to walk on them ever with shoes on, d) all of the above.  Keeping the floors clean was such a headache and damn near impossible, and eventually I just said "fuck it" and let them be.  In 2020 no one was really coming around so who gave a shit anyway.

During quarantine, my amazing neighbors Jake and Allison and their little boy Fitz sold their home and moved about 20 minutes south.  I was happy for them and sad for me... it's not often you take the risk of buying your first house and end up with utterly amazing neighbors.  That was the first hit.

Then the dreaded project outside commenced once spring and summer hit.  Landscaping was the last great obstacle for the Manor and I knew it was going to take my entire attention in order to get it done.  After a few passes of tilling the front yard, the grass seed went down.  Then there was edging to put in, and plants, and lots of watering in between.  Then came the pavers... and the patio... and the walkway.  By early July I was just about done outside, but my ambition had waned.

This summer I just hit the wall.  I wasn't happy in many aspects of my life in general, and the noisy street with its constant thumping music and block parties and gunshots and fireworks... it was too much.  And it made me start to resent the house... and though the blog isn't about 'ol fuckhead back in WI, after he left, it made me think differently of my house as well.  So many memories here were with him, and it just turned what was once such a positive into something remarkably negative.  

Staying here when the weather cooled off was a terrifying thought, and that's the honest truth.  I can only liken it to PTSD.  Facing another winter alone, with those memories and no projects to distract me?  I had to get out.

I reached out to my friend Chad, and by the end of July the house was on the market, and three days later it was sold.

It took a lot out of me to pack the house up, which was odd because I'm usually pretty gung-ho around that kind of stuff.  Whenever I'd be in the house doing it, I would get motion sick and tired, or my stomach would be turning and I'd have to lay down.  And it went on, this despite never being sick during the day... and always feeling better when I was away from the house.  Make of that what you will.  More on it later.

After some feverish hunting, I found a new home.  There was a mix-up with my closing dates though and I am living in a temporary apartment in between.  I told myself that this was a good thing though, because what was it I keep saying about 2020?  It's the universe telling us to slow down.  This mixup was telling me that I needed to stop being in such a rush, that I needed to scale myself back and just observe.  Process everything that has happened, everything that will soon be happening, and move forward calmly and with purpose.  This is easier said than done, but gentle reminders are nary a bad thing.

That brings us to today.  The movers came the other day and packed my life into a truck, save for a broom, vacuum and a dust mop so I could do a final clean of the house.  But when the floors have been swept and the stairs vacuumed, the mirrors cleaned and all but one of the lights shut off... I didn't know what else to do.  I looked around at the walls that sheltered me for a time.  The walls I had poured my blood, sweat and tears into restoring and bringing to life.  What now?

So I sat down, in the same outfit I wore the day I bought the Manor, and I took one final selfie.  We go out as we came in.

September 17th, 2020

Looking back on it, the sense of gratitude I have for the Manor is overwhelming.  I sit here in the empty living room, and the sounds of my keystrokes echo off the walls and reverberate through me.  Noteworthy, because for a time, an author did live here.  It's quiet outside right now, a rarity on this street, but one I am very grateful for right now.  I've got a little music playing, and while I'm happy... I've got this underlying sadness as the minutes approach to saying goodbye.

Houses are living things, aren't they?  They take care of us in every meaning of the word.  They keep us warm in the winter, shelter us from the storms, and fill us with their light as they retain our memories.  I like to think of houses as the great keepers of secrets, standing sentries to guard and protect them.  In a way they do the same with us... the Manor has to me.  

Passing that baton along to the next owner is heartbreaking in its finality.  

There are a number of things I'll miss about this place, don't ever confuse that of me.  How the window frames seemed to glow when they were hit by direct sunlight.  The gale-force rush of air from the furnace vents.  The way the wood of the giant oak tree outside smells after it has rained... just the giant oak tree in general.  The creak of the floorboards and the height of all the wood trim.  I'll miss the light here in general, as I always found it healing and plentiful.  I'll miss the matured trees of the street and the history of having the oldest house on it.  I will miss the stories I learned about the Manor as I meticulously brought it back from the edge.  The halls and how narrow they were, the stairwell and the energy of the spirits that still occupy it.

Oh yes, that's right.  I've never talked about the ghosts.  Well you'll have to wait for Halloween, I'm afraid, to hear about the spirits.  Specifically how active they were this week.  I assume it's because they knew I was leaving, but I digress.  That story is for another time.  Rest assured I was living in the Poltergeist house.

Hello and goodbye

I love that quote by Joan Didion at the top of this... about remaking a home in your image and that it belongs forever to the person who does so?  That was me with the Manor.  I claimed it as my own, did the work, and the result is that it will always be mine.  Just as I will always belong to it, in a strange, woo-woo sort of way.  There it is.

But now it's time for me to go.  It's time to turn off that final light, take the key from my ring, and set it on the counter.  I didn't imagine things ending so quickly here, but I am forever grateful for the lessons.  Good and bad.  I loved the Manor for a time... and as has happened with all three of my relationships, I fell out of love, too.  I look back with fondness for the past, glamorizing it in a way I have become adept at.  But I need to say goodbye.  To some of the memories, to some of the lessons, and to a lot of the heartbreak.  We can only do what we're meant to do, right?  I'm meant to leave.

Ciao for now gang.

when you're lost

I've thought a lot over the past few months about writing something just for the sake of writing it.  I used to do that, pretty often in fact, but stopped somewhere along the way.  Part was to start holding a certain amount of privacy in my life.  Part was because I was too lazy to share it.  There's always a reason though, isn't there?  As to why we do or do not do something?  I believe we are preternaturally destined to search for an excuse to shift the blame to something other than ourselves, beyond any sort of determined control.  But that's just me.

I waxed poetic at the start of the year, thinking heartbreak was best left in the last decade.  That wasn't true.  Maybe it was the great cosmic joke of 2020 and the new decade to effectively prove how much "heartbreak" is just part of who I am at my core.  That it's what I get... if not deserve... and that I just need to continue learning how to shoulder.  It gets really hard to shoulder sometimes, and I'm so embarrassed to admit that.  

It's harder to shoulder it when you don't want to go back to therapy to learn new and additional coping mechanisms.  It's even harder to shoulder it without turning toward medication.  The result is feeling lost and living a life that is based solely on moments.  I finished the patio; I sold my house; I visited my best friend in California.  It's the spaces between the moments that I find myself wandering around and looking for purpose.  A year ago I felt like I had purpose.

Six months and one week ago I felt like I had purpose.

Purpose is only a temporary thing though, right?  It's not meant to be permanent... the entire goal of "purpose" is to achieve something.  Maybe you do, and that's great.  You can then revel in the ensuing sense of accomplishment that comes with it.  But if purpose is ripped out from under you, even if you aren't sure/weren't sure/won't be sure of what that purpose was... what do you do?  I occupy a space of general uncertainty in my life now, and I can't really put my finger on why that is.  What is holding me back?  And if not holding me back... what force is holding me down exactly where I am?

2020 has been good for one thing and it has been that it's held a mirror up to all of us and asked that we look deeper into who we are at our core.  How will you handle a pandemic?  How will you navigate relationships with friends any family?  How will you change personally from Black Lives Matter?  When will you finally speak up about something that is just plain morally wrong that you've ignored for years?  How will you find the pieces of your heart... pick them back up... and then try to hold said pieces together in a shape somewhat vaguely resembling what they once were?

That last one I'm still trying to work out.

Even though I've written about the situation I found myself in this spring, I think back on that quote "everyone has a chapter they don't read out loud." I think about how much I've pulled away from the blogs and writing in large, concealing a big part of who I am as an individual because I'm often uncomfortable in speaking it out loud.  But maybe it's time I did give voice to what goes on in my head.  Here you go.

It's been a long year and we're just eight months in, and while I'd love to share some glorious gems of introspection as to what I've learned, I'm mostly just a heartbroken person who shuffles through the days, one moment to the next.  I'm irritable often and my good-natured mental state collapses at the drop of a dime for certain minor inconveniences.  I feel taxed in so many avenues of who I have to be and for whom.  I feel jubilant randomly for no apparent cause.  I get dizzy as I'm packing the boxes that are slowly building toward the ceiling my dining room, and have to take a break because it feels similar to being car sick.  I lose weight and I gain weight.  I laugh often and I cry rarely, but when I do cry, it's sometimes harder than I ever have before.  I feel alone a lot.  Conversely, I feel anyone I want is within reach through a phone call or a text.  I am a walking contradiction and I'm complicated and I'm determined and I'm trying to figure out how all of that fits into the cramped space of my skull that is too big to wear most baseball hats.  Sometimes I feel like no one wants to listen to me anymore... that they don't want me to bring up failed relationships or sad thoughts or concern over where my life is or isn't going.  The year is hard enough with out all of that, right?  Other times I feel like should I just speak, I will have an audience.  Maybe not the biggest in the world, but one that matters.

Last week I was in California visiting Tina and we went to Rodeo beach, just outside of San Francisco.  I snapped a selfie, as I'm prone to do, because I finally felt like I was where I was supposed to be.  I had this overwhelming feeling of content that I don't know how to accurately put to words.  The problems I've been navigating this year were pushed away, the under-riding sadness wasn't there, and I just felt like everything was going to be okay.

Having the feeling that I had found where I belonged and also knowing it was where I would never be able to afford... it was heartbreaking in its own right.

A few years ago I shared a quote that said "don't look back, you're not going that way."  I love it for countless reasons, mostly because the quote itself means that you should have hope.  Hope for the future and what wonders it will bring, hope for ease and comfort and love and joy.  None of those are particularly exclusive to the other... but any variety would be appreciated.  The past though has a way of coming around for me in ways that are often unexpected and sometimes just unwanted.  

Like a photo that popped up on Facebook back in July and just about destroyed me when I saw it.  Or the memory(s) shared by an ex, while happy in tone, that dredge up a world that ultimately didn't work out and subsequently never will.

It's hard for me to look forward when I have a past that was so good, in so many respects, that it haunts me.  No, I'm not looking back... but it's always in my peripherals.  Is the answer going to be found in moving to a new house?  I don't know.  What I do know is that it will give me more projects, which means more time painting and tinkering and doing god knows what while I listen absentmindedly to music and trick myself into thinking I'm all better.

None of this is a cry for help... it's not a plea for anyone to step in and show me the proverbial light.  These are the words that have been floating in my head and I've typically found it cathartic to get all of that out to a page in order to process and move forward.  Will it work?  Search me.  But I know it can't hurt.

I'd apologize for the downer of a blog but in the words of Rihanna, "baby, this is what you came for."  So for now it's a shower, then bed, then back to work (officially) for the first time in roughly two weeks.  Time goes on and wounds mend, thoughts get cleared as the world falls into place.  2020 will probably throw something else horrible before this is all done, but I guess in whatever weird way, it builds character.  How else can you look back and say "remember when?"

Ciao for now.

a year on

I write a lot about anniversaries, specifically when things hit the one year (or yearly in general) mark, and trust that this little habit it isn't lost on me.  I think I've always been a fan of being able to look at the past and observe what has changed.  Me, the proponent of changes, big shocker I'd want to see how I have bettered... or worsened... with the passage of time.  The funny thing is that it can be easy to get lost in the past, right?  Lamenting on how things were instead of how they are?

Maybe that's the mark of someone that hasn't processed grief or trauma or whatever you want to call it; they still look back with a certain fondness to how it was, or maybe how it was supposed to be.  So with today being June 6th, I look back to a year ago, and my first date with Andrew.  I also write this, knowing that finally, it is the last time I will ever write about him.

I suppose it's fitting to write this now and round out a year of my life with a certain flourish that three months ago I didn't think would be possible.  I have to admit that thinking about our first date... his crisp white button down and nervous smile so permanently engrained in my mind... it did take my breath away.  You build an illusion and persona so completely in your mind that seeing it fleshed out, in so many ways better than you could have possibly imagined, it was just... something.  We hugged, and then sat down, and not for one second did it cross my mind that I'd be sitting here writing about it in this regard.  

That could be because I didn't think it would reach the point of hearts being broken... or it could be because I was so certain it would just work.  But here I am, alone in bed (save for Sophia staring out the window), and I'm writing.

I think for me, the hardest part of a relationship ending is letting go of the idea of what it was supposed to be.  Dropping the notion or idea of your "person" feels nearly impossible, because you know them, right?  You know how they like their coffee, what foods to cheer them up, what jokes will get a bigger laugh.  You know the right things to say and the right way to kiss, and when the mood strikes, you know the... other things as well.  But then all of a sudden you don't.  And if you're like me in this particular instance, at least, it is shoved so hard in your face that you never knew them that it just freezes you.  

How could you have not?  You took the verbal and visual and physical cues, you took them for their word... but then to have them point blank say "the version of me I showed you wasn't me, it was a lie," well... what do you do?  

How do you let that go?  Yet somehow, as time passes... you just drop it.  

I look back to my blog in April, where I quoted Charlotte in Sex & the City and her theory of duration to get over an ex.  And really, I doubted it very much.  By mid July I was supposed to be over him?  That felt like a hot shot from a cold hell.  A few days after posting the blog, I was at a low enough point (quarantine, breakup, it was Easter, it was snowing, and I was out of wine) that I reached out to him.  Not a boo-hoo text, but just a, I don't know, a hello?  How are you?  

I think about you always.  I hope you're well.

It was me reaching for a lifeline... it was me being weak and vulnerable, still struggling after a month and a half to wrap my head around what the hell had happened.  And he did respond, courteously within the hour.  And I suppose courteously as well, he answered the couple questions I had in a vague manner.  But there was no warmth or care, there was no love that had once been there.  A friend described it as "clinical."  I thought it was cold, and it was certainly empty.

It would be remiss of me not to say that the switch inside of me was finally flipped.  And though it took one or two days to fully engage, that switch hit the mental lights over the words "Hey!  He doesn't care about you anymore, Sean!"  Neat.

I've never really been one to grovel.  Call it being a stubborn Capricorn so set in my ways that I refuse to acknowledge my shortcomings, I don't care.  But I don't grovel.  I've written before how appreciated it was to have such an outpouring of support from friends and family, but the real person I needed support from was myself.  I needed to be the one to say "enough," turn away, and start walking.  And I did.

I spent the next month and a half working on the yard, and getting back into the groove with what we were doing at work (in a limited capacity, of course).  Focusing on the book and finishing not only the written edit but the edit to the hard-copy as well.  And with a little bit of this and that, I gradually found myself healing.  Or healed, as it were.

So imagine my surprise when Andrew reached out the other week (after said month and a half of radio silence), and also imagine my surprise in that I did not take this communication too well.  Not in an "I broke down in tears and cried all day" kind of way... more that I was initially just shocked to hear from him, and then when his intention became clear (clearing his guilty conscience), I was angry.  I was furious, actually, at the nerve.  That he would come to me for some absolution for how he was feeling, and (how I looked at it, at least) that I would owe it to him.  And I hadn't felt that anger through this whole thing, so that was the true surprise.

I could've told him to fuck off.  That he's a narcissist hell bent on destroying anyone that could possibly try loving him.  That he's a selfish asshole with only his best interests in mind.

But I didn't.

I pulled a classic Sean Parker, in a way a few of you have maybe been privy to over the years, and I put my cold, calm, and calculated intellect into words.  I didn't swear, I didn't threaten, I just let it out in two short paragraphs.  Did the tone come through?  I imagine it did, because he never replied, and the radio silence has resumed.  Did I feel better afterward?  No, not especially, because there were a million things that spanned a spectrum from love to hate that I wanted to convey and couldn't/wouldn't.  

Did I feel worse?  Absolutely not.

You see, Katie reached out that night to see how I was doing, she having known what was going on during the day.  I told her I was fine, because I was.  I wasn't even phased.  The whole THING didn't phase me, apart from being caught off guard on the day I was opening my store back up for business after two months of the doors being locked.  But truly... I was fine, and that was when it hit me that I was fine.

I was fine with all of it.  I'd taken quarantine on my own in Minneapolis, and I used it to heal.  To face myself, my truths, the ugly sides and the good, and come out from it.  I'll never again be the person I was before I met Andrew, and that makes me sad.  It makes me sad because it was a person that had not been jilted thrice by men he loved.  But it also means that I know a little more about myself, that I know on a deeper level who I am, who I had been, and what I allowed to happen to me in the name of love.  I changed for him and not necessarily in positive ways, so to look back at those changes now and be able to not only recognize them, but to shake my head and think "won't be doing that again for a guy," that's a wonderful thing.  

Introspection leads to realization which leads to balance and then growth.  It leads us to change.

I saw this photo the other night on instagram and I saved it, and since then I've seen it a dozen more times so clearly it's making the rounds and HOPEFULLY that means it's catching on.  I think we all get so caught up on the negatives of life lately and 2020 and all that it has brought us, but maybe we should be looking to the positive.  

So much has happened in such a short time this year, and it's really an incredible thing to look around and see how it has changed us.  Not all positives, of course, but not all negatives.  We've been forced to slow down, look around, and realize what exactly our world is and has become.  Outside as well as in.

But still, I'm here, writing.  I suppose that's the gift Andrew gave me?  He pushed the magnitude of my blogs so high up in the sky that I realized I needed to get back to writing them?  I dunno.  You've gotta take something good from all the bad, and if it was my desire to write again... I won't complain.

Still, I miss him.  For all the anger I had in that flash of a moment, it's subsided.  I'll always look back at that first date with fondness over how perfect it was and the hope in my heart for how perfect it could've been.  A man that held my hand on a busy street in the fading daylight, who gave me our first kiss surrounded by people on a corner, and who pulled back from that kiss with all of the wonder and excitement on his face that I felt in my heart.  But it wasn't mean to be, and that's okay too.

Now I'll lock Andrew away in my heart with the great loves that came before him, and that's where he can stay.  Always there, never forgotten, because it's the burden that I choose to carry.  Albeit with a lighter step now.  I do love an anniversary <3

Toodles gang.

when it's time to self-isolate

'lil friend in the yard

It's kinda rainy outside today, and with chores wrapped up in the house and me procrastinating a bit on editing, I find myself turning to a blog.  The bigger reason is because I'm trying not to write Andrew a letter, and hoping that by getting my thoughts out here instead of there, I can move forward with a little more dignity.  We all know dignity has never been a key player in my life though ::insert winking emoji... then crying emoji::

It's humorous for me, not in a "haha" way but that, y'know, other way, to look back at my great big goals for 2020 and how great things were going to be for me.  I didn't put pen to paper on most of these goals, I certainly didn't make them law for my new resolution, but I had them.  I'm sure everyone entering this new decade thought it would start out with exciting changes and fresh starts.  Little did we know what those exciting changes would entail... little did I know what those would entail.  And I think for the bulk of us, this little quarantine and removal of a lot of our normal daily tasks has forced an introspection whether we wanted it or not.  Maybe that's just how I'm taking it?  The opportunity to look at myself, my life, and my choices?

Today is day 23 under self-isolation.

Being apart from people, or being apart from what I had once considered a normal routine, has done strange things to me.  When Pottery Barn (or rather, Williams Sonoma Inc) announced we'd be closing for two weeks (now another two weeks (who knows beyond that)) my thoughts were scattered in three directions.

The first was worry for my team of employees.  Being the General Manager means being essentially a parent, despite most of my team being older than me (some old enough to actually be my parent).  How would I keep them motivated, and if not motivated, reminded that I'm thinking of them?  That I'm here and that I get it and that I understand what financially this means to some of them.  That I know it's scary.

The second direction was fear for my own sanity.  I'd been in such a blended state of emotions since Andrew left that I often didn't want to be around anybody, but I was finally getting back to a place where I was looking forward to going to work.  A distraction, maybe, but also a place where the people love me and I love them.  Where I could focus on day-to-day tasks and get through it.  Now I had to stop?

And third, honestly, the excitement of having two weeks away from work (essentially) where I could have time to start working on a few projects and get my personal life in some form of an order.  It was going to be great to catch up with friends, reaching out to people I hadn't spoken to in months if not years, and reconnecting.  To finally get back to what I had always considered my own reality.

But then that ebbed.

It was a quicker realization than I maybe anticipated.  That "reality" I was focused on returning to?  It didn't exist anymore.  I realized that while I maybe thought it was just within my grasp, it really wasn't at all.  Not that it's a bad thing.  Within a few days of isolation and having time to just be alone with my thoughts, I could see that some of the paths I walked in the past are gone now.  Washed out by the rains, if you will.  The directions these paths took, be they friendships or relationships or familiar bonds... the routes I myself took at the forks in the road, had shifted things in me.  I realized that sometimes it's okay to just let the past be where it is.  Maybe all roads converge again at some point, maybe they don't.  Who am I to try to mess with that?

I've always been fond of the quote "dreams die hard and you hold them in your hand long after they've turned to dust," and I refuse to let that be me.  I can't let that be me, squeezing the past so tightly in my grasp that I don't realize how everything around me has changed yet thinking I remained the same.

To start my isolation, I made a Multiples video.  Bucking tradition, I excluded two of the multiples and just brought it back to the main team of myself, Lane, and Nicole.  The point of the project was to write out something in a script that would be the slap in the face I needed.  I could give Nicole the more "honest" things to say, because that's what she's here for.  To shine a light on the dark bits and maybe brighten the mood as a result.  Typically I love making these videos, despite the amount of work that goes into them, because I have such a fun time in front of the camera.  I usually mess up a lot, make light of things, slip into voices, etc., and then you the viewer gets to enjoy (hopefully) a chorus of bloopers at the end of said video.

This time it just felt heavy.  Aside from a few line flubs as Lane, hardly anything as myself, and then difficulty remembering whole speeches as Nicole... it was heavy.  I was still upset about Andrew.  Scratch that, I am still upset.  I guess I figured having to scream the line "I AM angry!" directly at the camera would offer some sort of catharsis, but it didn't.  I screamed the line four times and then broke down in tears.  And I had a good cry.  And then I finished a few lines with tears still in my eyes, and wrapped the shoot.  When I was editing it all together, I sat and watched myself screaming and then the subsequent falling-apart, and then I fell apart again because I've never seen that side of me.

I don't know about you, but I don't really cry in front of cameras or mirrors very often.  Could just be me though.

I released the video to general appreciation.  It made people laugh, which is always my goal, because I love to laugh as well.  Particularly I love to laugh at myself, because what's the point if you can't do that?  But there were a handful of you that saw something deeper in the video, who picked apart at the subtext.  And I wanted to say that I appreciate you seeing me.

The interesting thing about self-isolation... or I suppose isolation by government mandate, as it were... is just exactly how much time you have to think.  So why do I still find myself thinking about Andrew?

Really, why?

It's more than a month and a half on, yet my thoughts return to him on a daily if not semi-hourly basis.  I made the Multiples video to move onward, but if anything it just brought everything back into an incredibly sharp focus.  I know this should change, and that everyone says it will change, but it hasn't yet.  So I keep trudging forward.

I thought I would be good at a month.

The hours after he left turned to days.  The days turned into a full week, and I wrote him a letter.  Did I tell you that?  I actually used to write Andrew letters often, my idea to deal with the hard time we were having with the distance between us while he was living in Wisconsin.  I thought if there was something physical, tangible, to hold on to then maybe that would help to bridge the divide?  So it was only natural for me to write a letter when all of this had crumbled.  All the things I didn't know to say, that I didn't know I wanted to say, composed in hopefully something that made a little bit of sense.

And he did write me back... and it was what it was.

That week turned into two weeks though, and then before I knew it a month was gone.  Is it like Charlotte said in Sex & the City, that it takes half the time you dated someone to get over them?  And if so, does my feeble attempt at a relationship that didn't even hit the length of a full-term pregnancy mean by mid summer I'll feel better?  I can't imagine so... at least right now.  If anything I'm dreading summer because I'll just be thinking about how GREAT it was last year.  What a fool.

I guess more often than not I'm just embarrassed.  I mean, c'mon team, let's not beat around the proverbial bush here.  If one of my friends was this torn up from a not-quite-nine-months relationship, I'd tell them to get the hell over it.  And here I am... so why can't I?  That's the embarrassment.  It comes slinking in through the shadows like some evil swamp witch, going to rest right in the corner of my mind.  It's an ugly feeling, and it's one I've not often faced as an adult, but I think that's the advantage of getting older, right?  You care less about what others think and are therefor less embarrassed by your actions.

But again, here I am.  Embarrassed.

I do find it curious that at this point I'm still recalling minute details about our relationship and expecting them to somehow continue existing.  When I go to bed, I still roll over before turning the light out with a current event to share.  I still sit down to play a video game and think to ask him if he wants to play too.  I know this won't last forever... in fact, several things have already disappeared.  This makes me sad in too many ways to list.  There have been lots of quiet times during this isolation and plenty of moments to think, but it's the true quiet times that are the worst.  When the lights are turned out and I'm alone in bed, the fan running and the cats circling me for a place to sleep, and that's when I think about what's gone.  I think about scary things, too, like an intruder in the house or a monster waiting in the guest room for when I inevitably wake up to use the restroom in the middle of the night.  Then I realize the only monster is an angry past and the fact I'm not over it yet.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I still feel like I'm paddling at the water as it tries to rise above my head.  Every time I get a thought of him, that water creeps higher.  Maybe eventually the thoughts will wash away from me and drown on their own accord, but I don't know that.  What panics me is that I'm not changing in the way I thought I would.  I'm not reverting to the old person, pre Andrew.  Conversely, I'm not really transforming into some new version of myself, post.  I'm just here.  Existing.  Going about the day to day and trying to figure it all out.

The good that comes from all of this, if you want to call it that, is the random messages I get from people.  Some reached out after reading the breakup blog... one of the breakup blogs, I guess... and let me know how they experienced the same.  Or similar.  Or not at all but how it touched them.  Moved them.

Those are the good.

They make me feel a little less alone, they make me feel like I can maybe help by sharing my heartache.  It's hard for me to say I want more people to reach out, because it also depends on my current mood.  Sometimes people reach out from the blue and say "how're you doing with the breakup?" and my mind is instantly catapulted backward from whatever good moment I had been having, and I get mad.

I suppose maybe that's because I haven't been as mad as I should be?  I also suppose that at this point I do see the large amount of negative aspects that came with this relationship.  His jealousy, my self-silencing, and the paranoia and the fear someone would screw up from both of us.  The constant need to try to impress, the constant worry I'd say or do something that would cause disappointment or distrust.  That's not a relationship.  That's not the relationship I wanted, it's not the one I deserved, but it is the one I found myself in.  For all of the flaws though, there were a million more bonuses.  And for some reason those are the only things I have been honing in on.

That quote is what it all boils down to, I think.  My friend Che posted it this morning and it was one of those "a-ha" moments I'm so fond of stumbling across.  When the cards are laid out or when the dice are rolled, whatever you want to call it, Andrew just wasn't honest with me about a lot of things.  Nothing earth-shattering, nothing that would make me say he's a liar, but he was not honest from the start.  And what I felt... the love I exuded and poured into him... couldn't have been reciprocated with all of that hanging over his head.  I know that, I do... but knowing and understanding are often two different things.  And I'm still trying to understand it.

Self-isolation goes on though.  Work on the house goes on.  Editing of Episode IV of the book series goes on.  I'm powering through shows I've kept on the back-burner, I'm listening to music I've never heard before, and I'm talking to people I never expected to find friendships in.  Many of them are Instagram friends, from California to Spain, and their humor and attitudes and perspectives have been a truly wonderful thing for me to embrace and enjoy.  I never had a penpal growing up, but I imagine it would've been like this.  To an extent.  It's never a bad thing to connect with individuals around the world, like my friend Salem in Spain who creates the most beautiful artwork I've ever seen.  Or my friend Carlos in California who shares the same sense of humor I do.  It's a time for branching out right now, because there really isn't much else to do.

I read a quote the other day that said "Maybe you're not healing because you're trying to be who you were before the trauma, and that person doesn't exist anymore.  There is a new person trying to be born; breathe life into that person."  That's where I'm at now.  Who do I want to be?  What road do I want to take, what changes do I want to make?  It's an exciting prospect on the one hand and a scary one on the other.  Maybe I just need to join my hands together and be nervously optimistic, both at the same time.

I'm not at post-breakup "anthem" levels of music yet, where belting out "Party for One" by Carly Rae Jepsen or rage screaming "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morissette both feel out of place.  But I found a song recently called "Slippin" by Bre Kennedy that I felt comfortable enough attaching to this blog.  With that, I'm going to retreat and find something to do around here.  That part of me is still familiar, it hasn't changed... never gonna stop, either.  Toodles gang (c:

Am I getting colder?

Time is just slippin' through my hands,

'cause I'm getting older.

Nothing is going as planned.

And every love I've ever lost

was just another line to cross,

for reasons I'm not made to understand.

It's time slippin' through my hands but,

I don't wanna say it.

I kind of hate it.

But it's fine, it's time,

just slippin' through my hands.

when a heart breaks again

A perfect day.

I've been here before.

I look at that photo, unpublished from a series taken on a hike during the first day we spent together, and I'm transported back in time to when this was new.  When the excitement was just beginning.  And the song, too... unofficially "ours" but one that continually reminded us both of the start.  Hearing it and I'm thrust into the light and the warmth and excitement that came with finding love.  I remember sending Andrew this song on our third day of talking, a few days before we'd actually met, while he was driving from Green Bay.  He had said something along the lines of "I'm listening with the windows down and the sun is shining, the only thing that would be more perfect is if you were holding my hand."

In blind deep I was drawn to you,

but I never want what I need.

And my third eye was wandering,

just made it harder to see.

But like I said, I've been here before.

Quite a few of you have been here with me.  And though I'm filled with a certain and particular type of pain, I guess I need to say welcome back?  To you, to me... to a feeling I never wanted to feel again.  Might as well cut to the chase and rip off the proverbial bandaid then, yes?

Andrew left me.

Most people have asked if I knew it was coming, and the short answer is no, I did not.  Could I sense it?  No.  Had I maybe squinted my eyes to the truth just a little too much and missed a couple of key indicators to this, most unfortunate of climaxes?  No.

Have I ever felt a pain like this one before?  That one is a little more difficult to quantify.

The reason behind all of this is simple, and in some respects it is finite.  Andrew felt he could not be the partner I needed, and in order to deal with his internal demons he decided the best course of action was to leave.  A few of you know more detail than that, most others aren't really privy to it.  Seeing as he didn't cheat on me or (fully) betray my trust, I'm going to grant him a certain amount of privacy that before now has not typically been offered in blogs such as this.

When people speak of the traumas they have endured at certain points in their lives, I always think in my head "oof, I've never been through that, but I can imagine and boy how it must suck."  I never feel, or felt, I had anything of my own that was traumatic.  I've never been beaten by a boyfriend/fiance. I've never been emotionally abused by a partner (as far as I know).  I've never been witness to a murder or anything else even remotely horrifying in person.  My friend Andy was over the night this all fell apart, racing from his apartment to my house to (literally) hold me in his arms while I sobbed and dissolved on the sofa.

After an hour or so, with my tears quieting a bit to just random intervals, I was discussing some of the deeper issues at play in Andrew's reasoning (i.e. certain traumas), and lamenting that I've never had the luxury... if that's the right word... of attributing anything in my life to trauma.  Andy sort of paused, and as gently as he could, said that maybe my traumas were my breakups.

And it struck me, because he was right.

I've had two break ups before this that actually carried weight.  One with Ken, that arguably should have happened a year before it actually did, and one with Derek, that happened but did not wrap itself up until two and a half months later.  Both were from infidelity, and while all is forgiven and under the table now, at the time there was anger.  There was so much anger, and being able to direct that at a person for something THEY did?  That helps in the process.  But it was a process I learned from, and adapted to.  When it had happened that second time, it was a familiar territory that I was entering.  Not that I wanted to, by any means, but there I was anyway.

Now?  Not so much.

My silly guy.

You see, this time, I don't have that anger.  I don't have hate.  Until this past Sunday morning, when I came downstairs from a decent sleep and had some time to kill before heading to work, I was full with the purest and most beautiful form of love I've ever known.  A love that did not falter, that continued to grow and blossom and develop every day as the future unfolded a little bit at a time.  But a tense conversation ensued, I left for work upset, and then Sunday night came home to a conversation that made me start to waver in my beliefs.

After airing my grievances and subsequently putting them to rest, Andrew cautiously shared that he had doubts about us.  That he was afraid he would do something to hurt me down the line because he had never processed events from his past.  That he maybe wasn't the right man for me.  And that we should take a break.

I guess the optimistic part of me thought throughout the next day at work that I would come home and he would say "Hey babe, I'm sorry for how last night went, let's sit down and talk and work it out."  But he didn't.  I came home to (not noticing) his car packed with the furniture and belongings he had moved out here.  I opened the back door to the house and saw his computer monitor sitting on the kitchen floor, and like a runaway truck, it hit me.  I looked in the dining room and he was sitting there, his hands clasped in front of him, with the most anxious expression I had ever seen on his beautiful face.

I nervously sat down opposite him, and watched his eyes tear up as he tried to find the words.  So I found them for him.

"Is this goodbye?"  And he nodded, and the tears started from both of us.  He was sorry... he was ashamed of himself... but he was collapsing under the weight of our relationship and turning farther away from the person he really is... and it wasn't fair to me.

I don't... I don't know what you say to that.  You can't scream, you can't accuse, you can't swear... you just sit there dumbfounded to what is happening.  Stupidly gazing at the love of your life as he tells you he is leaving, and all you can think about is "how did this happen?"  We're supposed to rent a truck in less than two weeks to empty the apartment and fully move him out here; how did this happen?

Because it happened so fast.  There was no warning.  There was no downhill launch into an oblivion unknown.  There was a rough Saturday of moodiness on both our parts, a stressful Sunday from the morning awkwardness, and then an ending Monday.  I shouldn't say ending, he referred to it as "taking a break," and reaffirmed this to me when I stupidly asked "what about taking a break?"

I didn't scream or beg or really do anything.  I just cried.  And then I told him he'd better get a move on, knowing the five hour drive back to Wisconsin quite well at this point.  So he got up and I got up and we hugged, and as I wrapped my big arms around his big shoulders, the panic really took hold of me.  Because I was losing him... had lost him.  Break or not.  He was walking out of my life as easily as he walked into it, with no warning either time.  What had started out as too-good-to-be-true had turned into a nightmare come to life.

He struggled to pick up everything in his arms and then struggled with the door, and I stood there with my hands over my mouth sobbing unapologetically.  And then he was out the door, and I was on my knees wailing against the shitty wood floors of my kitchen that were next to be refinished.  I realized I hadn't kissed him, that I hadn't gotten a goodbye kiss, and I hurried to the pantry window to see if he was still here.  I could see his hat disappearing as he got into the car.

I opened the back door and sprinted down the pathway to the garage, swinging the gate open as he pulled away, not seeing me.  And I stood there for a second, the desperation icing its way into my throat.  And I walked back to the house in a daze, and I shut the back door behind me, and I screamed.  I screamed a scream that I have only made twice before.  One of rage and sadness and terror and pain and horrified understanding of what was actually happening.  The same scream I had reserved for Ken and Derek.

I texted Andrew right away... said I hadn't gotten to kiss him goodbye... and he replied that he should have kissed me and he was sorry.  And I waited motionlessly in the kitchen for him to come back and do so.

And I waited.

I just... thought he'd come back for me.

I thought he would turn around and pull in and run up the back pathway and that we'd meet again for one final embrace.

But he didn't, and I didn't ask, and then it was too late.

You go from living and breathing a person to just... nothing.  It's gone.  And at first it's the most horrible thing you feel you could ever possibly endure, particularly when not having any choice in the matter.

The minutes drag on.

In a desperate gaze for something, anything, your eyes land on places in the room and conjure the invisible memories of what transpired where.  A kiss on that chair.  A hug there.  Hours spent cuddled on the sofa watching TV or playing games.

Then the deeper, harder reality sets in as you remember these things... and it's that you don't know what to do with yourself.  What to do with your hands.  In exasperation you shake them out and your throat clenches while your face crumbles, and the tears you thought would surely have dried up are once again spilling and you realize this is your life now.  Again.

That you're back to a point of such low self-worth that you don't know how you ever did it before.  How you did it twice before, actually, because this is your particular kind of life trauma.  How did you pick yourself up last time?  How did you dust it off and keep moving, when everything you did reminded you of the love you had lost?

It's been three days.  Four, if you count the trepidation that filled me all day at work on Monday.  Has it gotten easier?  Yes.  I won't lie or be dramatic and say it's as bad as it was that first night.  But in a way, it's worse.

Worse because it is sinking in that I won't have those memories refreshed again.  Because that's where they can only exist now, in this clouded part of my mind I didn't think I'd need to fully rely on, to relive what had become such a daily occurrence.

My best friend Kyle told me yesterday to "take the memories, keep and cherish them.  Don't ever regret or hate them, they were pure when they were happening."  And he's right, because that what it was for 99.9% of the time.  We were happy.  I was happy.  I was so happy that I never in a million instances thought this could happen.  I thought I'd have a warning maybe... that I'd see or feel it crumbling down, like a change in the temperature outside.  But I didn't.  Maybe part of that is on me, maybe it's not.

There is something I do know, even in the dark and sadness that I find myself in.  Something I have to hold on to.  I still believe in love.

Love

I believe in my love for Andrew.  He did not betray it, he did not cheat on it... he just couldn't fulfill his end of it.  I'm going to keep continuing to believe in love and I'm going to keep loving him and I hope he knows that.  He has to know that.  When the going gets tough, I get stubborn.

Will that love last forever?

I don't fuckin' know.  Right now, yes.  Because it's easier to cling to the notion of love lasting than it is to cast it aside and shrug.

In the end, you lift your head up and take stock of who is still in your life.  What friendships have you let slip by the wayside through your euphoric bliss?  How many friends have you lost, how many are waiting around, and how many are by your side?  I know of a couple that I lost, and that's fine.  It wasn't fine a couple months ago, but in the end, it all happens for a reason.  This happened for a reason too, though I'm still struggling to decipher what it actually is.

To the people that have reached out to me, through text and phone, thank you.  To Andy and Renae who came to sit with me, your support is everything.

I know I got through this before with the help of my safety net of people.  And I know that in the three years that have passed since I last needed them, that net has changed.  Drastically, in some cases, but just as strong.

This feeling I embody now is temporary and I know it.  Hopefully this break is temporary, too, but I don't know that.  As the days go on and the event gets farther in the past, and as my heart begins to seal itself back up but hopefully not turn as cold and hard as I fear it will, it gets easier.  Easier isn't right now... and right now I feel so utterly hopeless and alone.  And it kills me.  It terrifies me.  In the beginning of our relationship I wanted everything "right now," I wanted the future to get here so I could spend forever with Andrew.  In the end, I want everything "right now," too, for different reasons of course.

I'm leaving this blog with a song by the band Muna, one that I always thought was a fun bop with great lyrics.  I happened to come across the acoustic version and it struck new chords with me, no pun intended.

To Andrew, if you're reading this, I'm still hopelessly in love you.  That hasn't changed.

To everyone else, ciao for now.

I knew,

when you told me you don't wanna go home tonight,

and you tried to just shrug it off when I asked you why?

Somebody hurt you, somebody hurt you, but you're here by my side.

And I knew,

'cause I can recall when I was the one in your seat.

I still got the scars and they occasionally bleed.

'Cause somebody hurt me, somebody hurt me, but I'm staying alive.

And I can tell, when you get nervous,

you think being yourself means being unworthy.

And it's hard to love, with a heart that's hurting,

but if you want to go out dancing...

I know a place, I know a place we can go,

where everyone gonna lay down their weapon,

lay down their weapon,

just give me trust and watch what'll happen.

'Cause I know, I know a place we can run,

where everyone gonna lay down their weapon,

lay down their weapon,

don't you be afraid of love and affection.

Right now,

it's like you're carrying all the weight of your past.

I could tell your bruises, yellow, dark blue and black,

but baby a bruise is, only your body tryna keep you intact.

So right now,

I think we should go get drunk on cheap wine,

I think we should hop on the purple line,

'cause maybe our purpose is to never give up when we're on the right track.

And I can tell,

when you get nervous,

you think being yourself means being unworthy.

And it's hard to love with a heart that's hurting,

but if you want to go out dancing...

I know a place, I know a place we can go,

where everyone gonna lay down their weapon,

lay down their weapon,

just give me trust and watch what'll happen.

'Cause I know, I know a place we can run,

where everyone gonna lay down their weapon,

lay down their weapon,

don't you be afraid of love and affection, just lay down your weapon.

They will try to make you unhappy, don't let them.

They will try to tell you you're not free, don't listen.

I, I know a place where you don't need protection,

even if it's only in my imagination.

I, I know a place we can go, where everyone gonna lay down their weapon,

lay down their weapon,

just give me trust and anything can happen.

'Cause I know, I know a place we can go,

where everyone gonna lay down their weapon,

lay down their weapon,

just give me trust and watch what'll happen.

'Cause I know, I know a place we can run,

where everyone gonna lay down their weapon,

lay down their weapon,

don't you be afraid of love and affection just lay down your weapon.