Sad and anxious

Despite everything, I have decided I need to give up on Elijah.  Like what I think happened with Jezebel before me, he just gets into a mode where he is mad at me for no reason and everything is my fault.  I am too awesome and interesting of a person to be crippled by this treatment.  He tells me it is all because I hate myself that he acts this way toward me and actually believes that he is just living his life and I am ruining everything by not taking it.

Unfortunately for Elijah, I have gone through too much in my life.  I have fought for and lost many people who treated me better and who I loved a lot more than him, including Bojangles, Amariah, Ezekiel, Jett (may he rest in peace), and even Diva, my beautiful cat who ran away.  I lost my PhD, my MS, thousands of dollars, and most of my worldly possessions to Vermont, in addition to losing two lovers, my car, my apartment, my job, my beloved cat, and my dad (I know you're up there with Buddha, Datty) while there.  I feel like I have been devastated and born anew many times already.  I ponder many times how it is that I possibly find reasons to be happy on any given day, yet most of the time these days, I do.

I love myself.  Unfortunately for Elijah, I don't hate myself enough to want to be in this situation with him anymore.

I have goals in my life that I have finally made for myself.  I want to be a writer (check!) and I want to travel the world.  Making this transition to leave Portland is tough for me, but it is what I have always wanted.  I am sad about it but also happy at the same time.  Sad as in, I feel some level of pain at leaving Portland behind as of now.  Growing pains, you might call them.

It was comfortable to love Elijah and to be with him, until he made it so that it wasn't.  I am not the leaving kind and probably could have worked with him for a while if he weren't screaming at me to the point that I burst into tears.  He was being no sort of friend, either.  One of the things that alarmed me was his refusal to pick me up one night even though I promised him money for gas and he was doing nothing besides playing video games at home.  Yes, I had agreed to ride the bike, but that was before it got late on a Friday night.  He could have come over to hang out and have with Hannah and her husband and I, but he said he is bored hanging out with my friends because he can't have sex with any of them.

Details, though.  It confirms a lot of what I already knew about him from my own experience and from stories about his past.

When everything hit the fan with the triad, it was clear Jezebel complained about him all the time and those complaints were valid, but in reality just wanted to be with him anyway so I thought that it was more bitterness in the end more than anything else.  The triad was that she wanted Elijah, E wanted me, and I wanted her but she's not bi and/or just wanted him.  I see that now.  So of course it destructed for the three of us to have a relationship and it sort of still comes down to the three of us each still pining after the one that does not want us back.  Also, it is true about Elijah's abusiveness and I can't imagine why, since that is true, Jezebel has taken so much of it.  It isn't my life though, I have to remember that.  For my part, I thought it would be worth a shot to try being with Elijah without that strange triad  dynamic since he seems to love me so much.  I am sure that he does love me, but he doesn't know how to treat a lover, and I am quite sure that once I am gone he will be moved on and, as I always say, he will just have a new person with a new life story to memorize for a few months and then forget about when they go away.  He can get through a lot of people in his life that way, and I think that is the kind of poly that will make him happy.

Peace to him, then.  I guess I still believe in love, but it once again did not pan out.  I really do love Elijah, so that made it hard to leave.  After all this shit, I would have thought I would never love again.  I'm not even swearing off of it anymore.  Actually, I am embracing it.  There is a major part of me that is in love with life right now and feeling so free at being able to go forth in the world with my head up high and float among the continents and countries and beautiful cities old and new.

I have grown so much from knowing Elijah.  In an amazing way that I will never forget.  But at the same time, I am not responsible for his floundering life, and if every single person I know is telling me I can and SHOULD do better, that is a major red flag.  I hate that I could not make him want to be better and I hate that he can't see the potential that I saw in him.  I loved him for who he was and was not so quick to write him off as a "loser" as most people I know are.  At the same time, I can't take on his problems and I am not responsible for his life.  If he feels it's all my fault, I think the best thing I can do as a person who really loves him is to leave him in his mess of a life and let him continue to try and blame other people until he realizes it's too late or, Heaven forbid, he actually comes to take responsibility at some point.  Either way, it's hard for me, but I'll be long gone.

Just writing this little venting makes it all feel a bit better.  I am soothed by some tea at the old coffee shop on Woodstock that I used to sit at with my dad years ago.  Hannah and I used to go here, too.  I came here in 7th grade sometimes as a break from the public library.

People come to Portland seeking something and usually leave after to go back wherever it was they came from.  I am lucky that Portland is my beautiful home and I will always have this to come back to.  Already since I left eleven years ago, I have come back a few times and it has been great every time.

Someday I will be back for good.