I have a question to ask, and I already know what the answer will be. I suppose in its way I could pretty much assume the question has already been asked and answered. But it’s one of those things that shouldn’t be assumed. I haven’t officially said it. I don’t officially have an answer. And I really can’t, or at least shouldn’t, ask it now.

But I know what I want. And I want it to be now. Not tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. Now.

I’ve never been any good at waiting. And while this is worth waiting for, no matter how long the wait, I don’t want to have to any longer. Oh, I will wait until the time is right. I just want that time to be right now.

Can’t sleep. Much too excited that it’s less than 24 hours until I see Yar again.

But must sleep!

But can’t!

Must!

Can’t!

(This moment of lunacy brought to you by the letters Y, A, and R)

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Especially after all the stuff that happened, all the things he did. It sounds like it ought to have been an attempt at apology or explanation. Unfortunately, the “nice” stopped with sending the cards at all. The things he wrote on them were nothing but hate, vitriol, and crazy.

He told us that he’d reimburse my mom for some of the more than $3,000 bill he ran up when he kept the rental car a month past the end of the time he contracted for. Some, but not all. Because, he claims, he had a contract to return the car he’d rented on 12/22 and get a van or a truck to pack all his stuff into for his cross-country move, but that my mom, or my mom and I together, forced Enterprise to cancel the contract and confiscate the car. So he will not reimburse her for the $450 fee Enterprise added for going out and towing the car and refusing to either return it to him once it was refueled or give him a different one. His claims about the contract are patently false. Enterprise had been calling us since the end of the contract on 11/10 when the car wasn’t returned. They were quite patient about it, really. It wasn’t until the car had been overdue to be returned for a month before they started telling my mom that they would report the car stolen and that because she had allowed herself to be put on the contract as prime driver, she was legally responsible as well as financially.

He told us that he had a fungal infection so severe that it required a prescription to clear it up, and told us that it was our fault. That he’d gotten it from our dirty toilet (he had already tried to claim that the toilet, which *I* have cleaned regularly *and* we’ve had a weekly maid service in and *they* cleaned it also, had shit stains on it that had been there when he visited two years ago) or from our dirty cats (don’t even know how that one’s possible) or from the dirty recliner I normally sat in until he took over the living room and forced me out of it. I will admit, the recliner is horrible looking. The supposedly stain-resistant fabric was, quite frankly, not at all, and my grandmother when it was her chair spilled coffee on it, stroked the arms compulsively and ground in her body oils, and was a bit incontinent but would not admit it. We have tried to clean the chair. We’ve had professionals come in and try to clean the chair. It’s as clean as it will ever be. It is stained, yes, but that is entirely different from the filth he claims.

He then went on to say that he is so relieved that at least my grandmother no longer lives here, but with my uncle and aunt. Because she lived in an awful environment here, was horribly neglected and mistreated, and didn’t deserve it because she’s never been anything but sweet and never abused either my mom or me. Which is news to me, since she drove me to the point of wanting to kill myself within two years when I lived here during high school, and when I tried to talk to her about it in a last-ditch effort to get the abuse to stop, she beat me for being stupid as well as a monster who ruined the lives of anyone who had contact with me. She drove my mom to the point of wanting to die within a year after my mom moved here to take care of her and my step-grandfather. And when my mom was sitting there with a razorblade to her own wrist, my grandmother didn’t give a damn right up until she realized that if my mom was gone, there’d be no one to do the shopping and cooking for her.  Then when I moved here and wound up taking care of both her and my mom after my mom’s stroke, it took me three years to get her to understand that hitting me any time she didn’t agree with me was unacceptable and she had to stop. Her verbal abuse got significantly worse thereafter, but she could no longer hurt me with that and her emotional blackmail. It no longer controlled me and it no longer made me hurt and hate myself, it only made me angry. And in spite of that, I cooked and cleaned and did her banking and met with her accountant and tried to find funny or interesting things to talk to her about to keep her entertained since she had lost her sight and had been far too visual a person to adjust well to the loss. I got only two to four hours of sleep every night for so long that my own immune system crashed, yet I couldn’t let myself stop because if I didn’t take care of them, there was no one else. And for doing all of this, I got told daily how much my very existence was a burden and that I had completely ruined her life. And that was before the Alzheimer’s really took hold and she totally lost it. It was a complete relief when the day came that she could no longer remember who I was. It was the first time in my entire life that she ever treated me with anything other than hatred and contempt at best. But she’s sweet and never abused my mom or me. Yeah, right. But we were complete monsters to her. Again, yeah, right.

He closed by telling us he can’t believe that we’d throw away 44 years of friendship like that.

So that was our Christmas card from him. Merry Christmas.

The Christmas card arrived day before yesterday. Yesterday came the card with belated birthday wishes for my mom. It was another rage-inducing spate of insanity and verbal poison. I’m honestly so enraged right now that I can’t remember most of what he wrote in it. I can remember two things. One that he hoped either Juan or I had baked her cake because being stranded in El Paso without a car, taking care of a terminal cancer patient and fighting a fungal infection was better than baking stuff for the birthdays of swine. And two that there will be a snail mail letter to follow with instructions on what to do with all the crap he left here that he is now unable to pick up because of what we did to him with the car. So that means any day now we can expect a third round of being told how horrible and monstrous we are and accused of all kinds of evil things that we have not ever done.

He has gone from chosen family to never darken my doorstep again and is now in my “dead to me” list. As far as I’m concerned, the man I’d loved as an alternate father, who had been there literally all my life, who I had planned once upon a time to have move in with us and I would take care of him as I had my blood relations should he ever reach a point where he needed a caregiver, is dead. Dead and gone for good. And better off dead than being who he has become in the last several months. This person contacting us now is a complete stranger, and evil in ways my “godfather” Danny would never have even considered. He is no one I have any desire to know or hear from again. Now if only he’d actually “let go and walk away” as he keeps claiming he has to do from such awful people, since he’s the one who keeps renewing contact, if only to tell us again that we are monsters and to accuse us of everything horrible he can think of.

The horrible things he said to my mom before he went on his supposed two week trip around California turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

He couldn’t get access to more than a certain part of his money either through withdrawals or use of his debit card. He couldn’t temporarily extend the limit on his debit card because his account was less than six months old. So when it looked like he wouldn’t be able to get the rental car in time to pick up his cousin at the airport to start their trip around California, my mom gave him a hand. Yes, in spite of the horrible things he’d said to her just days before. She can’t drive. Hasn’t driven once since her stroke. But she allowed herself to be put on the contract as primary driver and the rental guaranteed on her credit card to give this man who’d just verbally attacked her a helping hand. Again. Such a horrible monster, she is.

Danny said that as soon as he could get the rest of the money from his account to cover the rental fees, he would have the contract rewritten to remove her and her credit card form it. He didn’t.

The car was supposed to be returned 11/10. It wasn’t.

Danny has not been returning our email to him. He has not returned our voicemail. He has not answered his cell phone when either of us has called him, except one time. And then he hung up as soon as he realized it was my mom on the line. He has been refusing to contact Enterprise about the car.

Thursday, Enterprise called my mom and told her that they were going to be reporting the car stolen. Since she was on the contract as primary driver, she was legally and financially responsible. Both she and I had visions of the police showing up and hauling her away in cuffs to jail for grand theft auto.

I talked with the manager of the local Enterprise, who felt sorry for us since he knew this was something that my mom had done to help someone else out. He said the was on our side and would help us to try and hold Danny accountable, but my mom did sign the contract so what help he could give us was limited. I did get him to promise to hold off reporting the car stolen until Monday so we could redouble our efforts to try and get hold of Danny. Also so I could talk with the police myself to see if there was any legal out for my mom so she wouldn’t wind up in prison.

I went directly to the police after the conversation with the Enterprise manager. I spoke with a detective there. He said that while on the surface to the layman, it seemed like grand theft auto, it wasn’t actually a police matter. And he’d be telling the same thing to Enterprise when they talked to him the next Monday. There was a contract signed, and Enterprise handed Danny the keys. He did not break into the car and take it without permission. That meant it was not grand theft auto, but breach of contract, and was therefor a civil matter. So at least my mom wouldn’t be thrown in prison for Danny’s actions. And since the Enterprise manager didn’t want the responsibility to fall on my mom, in a suit we might be able to negotiate with Enterprise for them to go after Danny in court instead of my mom.

We finally got hold of one of the people Danny had planned to move in with when he moves out of here. He said that last he’d heard, Danny was in El Paso, but would be returning to California in time to take care of it. This was another way Danny was in breach of contract, in addition to being well past the time he was supposed to return the car. The contract stated he was not to take the car outside of California.

Danny’s statement that he was going to come back to California and take care of it was, however, another lie.

He, for the second time since he rented the car, ignored the gas gauge until the car ran out of gas. This time, instead of leaving the car there and walking to a friend’s house to get help, he called Enterprise. He wanted them to tow the car because he wanted to change to a different one. He lied to them and said that he’d broken down in California. This was when it was discovered that he was actually still in El Paso. Enterprise towed the car and refused to give him another.

Danny did not volunteer to pay the outstanding balance he’d run up. Which means that my mom has to pay the $3,000 bill, something we can not really afford but now have no choice.

The manager of the local branch of Enterprise where the car was originally rented also told us that when Danny finally did contact Enterprise, he demanded that Enterprise cease calling my mom about the car. Not because any of this was his fault. But because my mom is on psychiatric medication, is crazy, and should not be listened to about anything because her craziness makes her a horrible monster. Another lie. My mom is not on psychiatric meds. Danny is, and he is the one who has completely flipped his wig.

My mom figures that he had been planning to not return the car and just drive cross country, staying with friends along the way, until he was in Philly where he planned to move, leaving us to foot the bill, and possibly buy him the car altogether since I don’t know that he planned to *ever* return it. We are also left on the hook to deal with his car, which is undriveable, uninsured, unregistered, and two years behind on payments so likely to be reposessed. It is a PT Cruiser, and parked at the head of the driveway, with my mom’s 300 behind that, and my PT Cruiser behind that. We can’t roll it out onto the street because then the city will have it towed and we will have to deal with impound fees thanks to its unregistered and uninsured status. And there’s the danger that a repo team will take MY car, thinking it is his. I don’t trust them to necessarily check the VIN to make sure they have the right one. Plus we now have to deal with the huge amount of his junk he left here, that he kept saying he’d come back for and then never did.

My mom and I, we’ve often been hurt and betrayed for trying to give someone a helping hand. But this one is by far the worst, coming from someone we had loved and trusted so long.

I was slow on the uptake once I knew that Yar would be on his own for the holidays. If I’d been thinking, I’d have suggested as soon as I knew about it that maybe he should come here for the holidays. I have miles saved up, enough to lower the cost of a ticket, with my frequent flyer membership. As long as we could find something that wasn’t crazy expensive and didn’t mean he’d be out here for his entire winter break (much as I’d have liked to have him here that entire month, and then some. And then a *lot* more, and even more than that) then it might be doable.

This afternoon, it finally proved doable. I managed to dig up a ticket from Michigan to California for about $450, which is vastly superior to the mostly $600 to $800 prices I was finding. He’ll be arriving 12/20, and heading back on 1/4. We might not get out of this stupid hick town, or at best get in a day or weekend trip, while he’s here. But at least he won’t have to spend the holidays on his own, and we’ll be together. It’ll be the first time we’ve had these holidays together.

This is the best Christmas present ever ever ever. Ever.

When he packs up and leaves for the east coast sometime in the next couple weeks, that’s it. I may be civil, but after some of the things he’s said and done in the last couple months, I can’t really think of him anymore as a part of my chosen family. And, after all these years, my mom doesn’t feel she can think of him as a friend.

That was underlined today by an extraordinarily passive-aggressive email. My mom was supposed to have a nephrologist appointment on the 10th. The doctor’s office called and said that they were changing the appointment to the 18th. Not long after this, my mom got an email from Danny saying he’d be back to take her to her appointment on the 10th. She explained that the appointment date had been changed, and either Juan or I would manage it.

He wrote back with some passive-aggressive bullshit that pissed us both off. Coming as it did on top of a spate of him insulting me a bit, yelling at Juan until Juan tore out of the parking lot of the hotel Danny’d moved into for a little while before leaving on a trip around California with his cousin, and completely ripping into my mom and telling her some horrible things, it’s the end of this long presence in my life. I might have put up with the insults to me, and just ranted about them here. I might even have let the craziness he turned on Juan slide. But the things he said to my mom were the final straw. The email was just the cherry on the cake of “Oh NO you fucking didn’t, you dickhead!” Be a dick to my mom and I will want to kick your teeth down your throat. That’s how it is.

I know a large part of it is the medication he’s on. When it first started to take effect and he had energy again, when he wanted to talk and do stuff and was back to himself again rather than the depressed lump he’d been, my mom and I were so happy. We wanted him to feel better, to be happy again.

But then the medication started making crazy come out. The meds were going too far the other way. He was manic and hyper. He wasn’t sleeping. And that’s when he started becoming someone else. I had thought about saying something about how maybe he should tell his shrink and his therapist that things had gone from good to, at best, weird. My mom actually did say something once that she was concerned that the medication might be going too far, and maybe the dose needed to be adjusted again. He took that as if she wished that he was back to the depressed man who sat on the couch not speaking. He directly said to me several times that someone (“and by someone I mean your mom”) wished he’d go off the meds, shut up, and be what he was for most of the 9 1/2 months he’d been here. Almost everything my mom ever said he interpreted as something negative. I can think of some times that I was in the room when my mom said something, and he reacted as if she’d been yelling at him. I was right there, and knew that she hadn’t. But he even seemed to remember those incidents as her actually yelling at him. The times he claims she yelled at him when I wasn’t there (and toward the end, he seemed to think it was everything she said, no matter the tone of voice or the volume) with a large grain of salt. He misremembers a number of other things too, is so convinced of them that it’s nearly delusional instead of poor memory.

So while I know that there’s a lot going on because of the meds he’s on, at the same time, I can’t let the things he said to my mom pass. Some of it was very legitimate concern, especially about her drinking. But most of it was just insane and bordering on evil. As an example, he seemed quite joyful that the house we live in is in poor shape and will not sell for much whenever it does go on the market, so that whenever my uncle decides to sell it, my mom will not be able to afford to live anywhere and will be homeless. It apparently serves my mom right, because, according to Danny, my mom is sitting here like a vulture waiting for my grandmother to die so that she can get her hands on her part of my grandmother’s estate. Pure and utter bullshit. And also, smiling and being celebratory that my mom would be homeless, acting as if she deserves it somehow and acting as if he looks forward to seeing it, well, that’s pretty purely evil. Especially given all that she’s done for him.

This is not the Danny I knew. And I don’t care to know the Danny he is now.

Buhbye, Danny. And honestly, with the way you’ve treated my mom? Good riddance.

I tried calling his cell, but it’s either off or has no power, since it went straight to what would be his voicemail. I say “would be” because he has never set up his voicemail, so I can’t leave a message. It’s been that way for a year or so, ever since he switched carriers.

At this point, I’ve moved past “maybe his internet is down, or he lost power at the house” to “what if something happened to his folks or him” in my mind. If he doesn’t show up at all tonight, I’m gonna reach be close to the point of frantic. Ironically, if he wasn’t always so good about letting me know when he’s going to be late or not around at all, I wouldn’t be so worried. I’d wonder, but I wouldn’t worry like this. The break in that routine makes the lateness much, much more likely to seem scary.

One of the games I play online is Popmundo. For those who don’t know, it’s a browser-based game, the core of which is to try to make it to stardom in the music business. For all it’s a deceptively simple seeming game, it has some pretty amazing depth. You can try to make it as a solo artist, or as a member of a band you form with other players. I’ve been playing for more than a year now.

My character in the game is a member of a band. We were up to five members. As of last night, we’re down to four. The one who left did not do so entirely voluntarily. It was mostly a decision made by the rest of us.

The one we wound up asking to leave the band last night had been a member of the band for more than a year. He started playing roughly two weeks after Yar and I did. He started off enthusiastic about the game, and I had a great time sharing the game with him and my boyfriend and a few other friends.

Within two months, the friend got bored with the game. It’s pretty open-ended, with little in the way of set goals to strive for. Once you’re past the tutorial quest, you mostly set your own goals. That kind of game is not for everyone. A lot of people like more structure.

Starting about a year ago, my friend stopped doing much in the game. He’d log in often enough to keep the character from dying of neglect, but little more. Since he was a member of the band, that meant that there were some things that became problematic to accomplish. They were things that needed all members to do. When we hung out and talked in the chat channel we share with the rest of our little group of friends, I (and later another member of the band as well) would start off by asking as nicely and politely as I could for him to accomplish X with his character. He’d say he’d get right on that, and then not do it. After asking the same way a few more times, I’d ask less nicely. Then I’d straight out ask, no nice or polite about it, when it still didn’t get done. From there, I’d move on to stating that this needs to be done, then that this needs to be done NOW. I’d work my way through starting to demand that it be done, order that it be done, rant about it not getting done, and often have to reach the point of threatening to dump him from the band before it would get done. If he were a solo artist, or this was a game where a group of people in a band have to rely on each other to some degree in order to move forward, the dilatory attitude wouldn’t matter at all. If that’s the level of involvement he wants, and that’s what he enjoys, then it’s all good at that point.

But this is a game that requires cooperation and involvement to at least some degree from all members of a band if you’re not a solo artist. One person not doing their part impacts the experience of everyone else in the band. If one person doesn’t bother to set to rehearse their scenes in a music video, then it’s useless to film even if everyone else is fully rehearsed, as one example.

On top of that, the repeated rounds of going through all the asking nicely through threats meant that the other band member and I would wind up feeling like horrible nags. We both hated feeling that way. It made us feel like awful people. But at the same time, we couldn’t do much to play the game ourselves without cooperation from the rest of the band. There’s only so much we could do ourselves, and she and I had already taken on the majority of the work with scheduling shows and jam sessions and recording sessions and dealing with our record label and scheduling video shoots and and and…

Yet he forced us to go through that every time. We worried he’d come to resent the nagging, and possibly us for doing it. But given the lack of cooperation, we had little choice unless we summarily ejected him from the band, or left ourselves to start from scratch after all the work we’d put into this one.

Periodically, he’s get interested and be active for a couple weeks, and things would actually get done. We’d rejoice because while yes, we wanted to get these things accomplished and would keep after him until they did, we both much more wanted them to get done because he enjoyed doing them, not just doing them to shut us up. We wanted this to be fun for all of us, including him. But then after a couple weeks, he’d largely disappear again. He’d still be in chat, and we’d still talk and nag when necessary, but he’d rarely do anything in the game without a new round of nagging.

Recently he has hardly ever been in chat either. Some of that was circumstances beyond his control. Some of that was not, though there were reasons, and reasons I absolutely support. If we had not already gone through a year of non-cooperation, we’d have just ridden the current situation out and worked around him the best we could. After all, with his almost never showing up in chat, we now couldn’t even go through the ask nicely with following escalations if necessary. We were all happy with the situation that kept him away from chat. He was happy, and that matters to us much more than a silly game. But we had a year of frustration already, and even when he came back to chat regularly at some point in the future, it’d just go back to what we were dealing with before.

The rest of us in the “band” agonized over this for months. We didn’t want him to feel that we didn’t want him around. We did, still. And still do. But we couldn’t take any more of the pattern we’d been dealing with. Playing a game is supposed to be fun, not headache-inducing. And we’d given him scads of chances in the year since the pattern started. We even did drop him from the band once, and then took him back as soon as he showed up and announced that he’d play more actively. As usual, that lasted about two weeks.

So finally we made the hard decision that we didn’t want to make. We decided to remove him from the band for good. We mentioned this to his girlfriend, who told him so he could log in and she wouldn’t have to act as relay. At first he said he was okay with it, didn’t really bother him, and didn’t matter that much. The more he said that, because I’m good at guilt, the more guilty and the more upset I felt. By the middle of talking with him about it, I was starting to get all teary-eyed and sad and, well, feeling guilty.

But then he tried to lay on a minor guilt trip. And while I’m really good at feeling guilty on my own, even in other situations where I have no real reason to, guilt trips don’t work on me. They just piss me off. I didn’t say anything to him at the time. That would have just been escalating the situation. But because guilt trips make me so angry, I needed to rant about it somewhere.

It was a pretty simple statement. And while true, it nevertheless was an issue. The simple statement was about how none of us had emailed him when we needed something done, or sent him so much as a single private message in the game. Yes, that’s right, we didn’t. I suppose we could have and should have, but we didn’t. But you know, he was never around. We didn’t see him doing anything in the game, he was never in chat, and he never told us that even though he’d be gone, he’d be checking those things every two or three days. How the hell we were supposed to know he was bothering with those, given his complete disappearance otherwise? As far as we knew, we’d be sending messages that would never be seen, and get even more frustrated with the lack of response.

On top of that, there was the way he had been so uncooperative about getting anything done when we talked to him directly about it. If it took a couple weeks of everything from “May we please have your character set to rehearse for the video today? We have a deadline to film by. Thank you. :)” to “Get the frigging video rehearsed NOW or get out.” then why would we think a private message or an email would be at all effective? To me it seemed like something that would be even easier to ignore than when we were talking directly to him. An entirely wasted effort.

So the “Yeah, and no one has my email” followed by “I would like to point out that none of you sent me even one PM. Not one.” guilt trip combo only succeeded in making me want to rant or shake him or both. Especially after the year’s worth of chances we’ve given him, over and over, to actually do his part, or leave the band with no hard feelings on either side if he felt our playstyle in the game wasn’t for him. It took until the point where I was prepared to start banging my head on the desk in irritation and frustration before we reached the point of asking him to leave, and for having ridden out his making all of us that unhappy for a year, we got awarded an attempt at a guilt trip.

When it comes to the game, at this point, he can go fuck himself. I’d been wishing we’d kept him. Right up until the guilt trip. But that? That turned it from “Maybe we’re making a mistake” to “I’m fucking DONE.”

I always hate these appointments. With my tendency to freak out at the possibility of losing my sight, the last week before one of these appointments comes around is difficult at best. It’s a phobia I’ve had since around the second grade, when I started the school year with 20/20 vision, and was so nearsighted 3/4 of the way through the semester that the optometrist told me he wouldn’t trust me to walk across the street for a loaf of bread because I wouldn’t see oncoming traffic. I only got worse from there, needing radically stronger prescriptions every six months for years. Even every six months was pushing it and things were getting pretty blurry even with my glasses on by then.

So the approaching appointment is always a big issue. And I’m always convinced that I will hear that the macular degeneration is progressing fast, or that it’s changed from dry to wet and thus going to move far faster than even the fastest version of dry. By the day of the appointment, I’m to the point of asking why I even bother going to these things. It’s not like there’s anything that can be done to cure the macular degeneration, or even completely halt it. It will progress, and eventually I will lose most of my sight. All these appointments do is tell me how fast that’s going to happen.

I went, but decided it was the last time. Why spend the money we can ill afford on something that can’t be cured, can’t be at least completely halted, can only, at best, be slowed down?

The first piece of news from the appointment came when they checked the pressure in my eyes. I’ve spent the last several years being listed as a “glaucoma suspect”. The pressure in my eyes has been high enough to be dangerous, and in some could mean glaucoma. The inner structure of my eyes was managing to stand up to the amount of pressure there without damage. Apparently those structures are stronger for me than they are for some. But we track the pressure in case of an increase, since there are things that can be done if I develop glaucoma. I’d started going to the ophthalmologist for this in the first place, which led to the discovery of the macular degeneration. The news, however, was not that there had been this increase in pressure. Not at all. It seems that the pressure inside my eyes has dropped. Both are back in the normal range. It’ll still be monitored, but for now I’m no longer a glaucoma suspect.

Next, the cataract. It was caught very early. Even with the instruments they used and the exam by the doctor, when it was found last year it was just the barest beginning, so much so that the ophthalmologist said he almost could have missed it. This year, he said that it has not progressed. At all. It is still the barest of bare beginnings, nothing that will affect the sight in my left eye for a long time to come. Especially if it continues moving this slowly, it will be a very long time before I have to even start to consider corrective surgery.

With the macular degeneration, there had been “one line of change”. This is apparently a negligible amount, not much worse than might have been expected in the eyes of a 40-something without macular degeneration, after a year’s aging. So all the measures I’ve been taking to slow the progress – multivitamin with “eye health” support, diet with a greatly increased number of high antioxidant foods, avoiding the sunlight, cutting down on the smoking – have been very effective. While there’s nothing that can totally halt the progress, I’ve gotten about as close to halting it as it is possible to get. If I can keep that up, and the macular degeneration doesn’t go from dry to wet (which could happen at any time, really, for no known reason), then I should be able to keep my sight for most to the rest of my life without any real impairment.

After all this good news, I suddenly had less problem with the idea of going to these appointments. They didn’t seem quite so useless. So I have an appointment for next year.

That one little word? If. If if if. If, instead of when. “If we ever live together” instead of “When we can live together”. It’s always been “when” before. Up to and including when I was in my worst moments of despair, after my mother’s stroke, when I was so busy taking care of her and my grandmother that I was getting 2 hours of sleep per night for a month and a half. When I didn’t see how I could ever not have that amount of responsibility on my shoulders and could get free to be with him. When I thought that, as horrible and hurtful as the idea was to me, the fair thing to him would be to let him go, rather than make him wait for me and a time that it seemed to me would very likely never come. He stayed optimistic – as he says, he is an optimist – and kept me from sinking any further. He made sure I knew it was a “when” that would happen, that we’d have our someday even if we had to wait for it.

So that “if” tonight, it really shook me. Last year I’d finally gotten over the fear-verging-on-certainty that something this good could not possibly last, not for me. I mean, it never has. The men that made me miserable, they stuck around forever, or at least it felt that way. The ones who made me happy left soon. The happier I was, the faster they ended things. It took me a long time to accept that this wasn’t going to be like that. I’d been so happy for so long, and given my previous track record, it should have been the shortest relationship I’d ever been in, over almost before it began. It took me more than a year to stop dreading that I’d check my email and find another “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t love you and I haven’t for a long time now, I just kept waiting and hoping that it’d come back” message. Or else be greeted by a similar conversation next time I talked with him either online or on the phone.

But then one change of word tonight, and all that fear of losing Yar came flooding back. A little voice in the back of my head said, “So, this is it, then. This is the start. The beginning of the end. It’ll drag on for a while, maybe for months, with him increasingly quiet and distant, and me increasingly desperate but unable to let go, convincing myself daily that I’m misreading it all. When it does end, even though I’ll have known from this moment it was going to happen all along, it will be more devastating than anything else has ever been.”

It’s been more than four hours since that conversation, and my mind just will not let it go. I have tried to lose myself in a game, tried to read, tried to sleep. But my brain just won’t stop. My thoughts keep circling that one word and the mountain of supposition built around it, carefully making that molehill into Everest. And I know, I know that it is completely irrational, my reaction to the word then and the inability to stop obsessing on it now. I know that if I were not being hit especially badly with hormone-caused moodswings, I would not have spent most of the last four hours either crying and in deep mourning over a relationship that has not, in fact, ended, or else in terror and near-panic over whether he’ll call it quits tomorrow or next week or next month. But I just can’t seem to make it stop.

I am not yet to the point I was when prescribed extremely heavy doses of hormones to try and kickstart my monthly cycle when I was diagnosed with PCOS, when I was screaming at people and considering banging my head against the wall because I was trying to do something nice for them. But this is certainly one of the worst bouts I’ve had with moodswings, irrationality, and intensely painful cramping without it being medically induced. Usually when I know that I’m getting hit harder than usual by the monthly surge of hormones, simply knowing that allows me to control the mood changes and not go completely irrational. Not this time. Even knowing that I’m having an especially bad time of the month, and knowing that if this conversation had happened last week, or next, I’d not be a wreck, does not help. This time I can hold onto the knowledge, and it does not ameliorate either the hurt or the terror. I’m doing this to myself. I know that, and yet I can’t stop.

It’s going to be a long, long night.