Grieving

 "Grieving" as an action has always been a pretty abstract concept for me. After having a discovery call with my new therapist who will give me EMDR treatment and starting to read "Complex PTSD" by Pete Warren, I've decided to start grieving and writing down all of them. The first thing I'm gonna write about tonight is Eric, after getting some guidance from ChatGPT. ChatGPT tells me that there are things I can grieve about Eric but I don't need to shut the door and walk away and kill the tree that we have. Eric and I haven't had a real conversation since July 1st when he was hiking in Malta and tried to get to the top of the cliff so that he could get signals to talk to me; after that he doesn't really initiate texting anymore. Sure, one can say that he's busy traveling in the UK, Portugal and his hometown. He's also meeting up with his wife in Portugal but he's leaving there before his wife does. I have no idea where he is right now but I just feel that he is not there, or can't be there for me. Sometimes I still catastrophize and think of the worse-case scenarios--him falling back madly in love with is wife, his wife is pregnant, he's having group sex somewhere, he's intellectualized his way out of us--believing that there's no future between us and what we have isn't real, or that he thinks everything was just an ideation or misunderstanding.

This kind feels like the anxiety I had for 2 years after moving into my current home; all the thoughts I had were magnified terrors and obviously they didn't happen, but I had so much anxiety living in my own home and had to leave whenever I had a day off. Therefore, I want to write about the things I'd like to grieve about Eric, completely in my own words. ChatGPT tells me that I can grieve without having to shut down, so I'm going to try.

1. When we met on June 16 after 12 years, we had a very long hug. I cried in your arms and you were emotional, trembling with some laugh. There were a lot of feelings mixed together--the day before I was physically attacked by Angel, so many things, more bad and good, had happened to me, and maybe you too, in the past 12 years, we still felt each other so intuitively, so deeply, and I don't believe it was just a fantasy. That morning you asked me if I'd be away from my neighborhood enough so that we could have a proper hug. Our hug was more than proper. I completely melted. I parked my car in front of your hotel and as soon as you saw my car, you walked out. I got out of the car and rushed to you and we hugged without saying a word.

2. The day at Sutro Baths, which I already wrote about in this blog. If I don't go back to read my writing, I wouldn't remember much about what we talked about, but I remember exactly how I felt. It was safety, luck, and lots of care. Everything was working in our favor--no rain at all, which totally defied the weather forecast and a perfect sunset. That morning when I got into your car, I asked you, "if there were no tomorrow, would you still take me to the same place?" without actually knowing where you were taking me, and you said, "Yes. I've always wanted my ashes to be spread into the ocean so if there were no tomorrow I'd still want to be on the beach."

3. The things you've waken up in me over the past few months of chatting--all those 3 to 4 hours of late-night phone calls that neither of us didn't want to end but had to because otherwise our bodies would be too messed up. You made me remember what it felt like to connect with someone on my intellectual, verbal and emotional level. I finally remember and understand what it feels like to be truly understood and be wanted to be understood. I've spent my whole life polishing my verbal skills in two languages so that statistically over 2 billion people should be able to understand me, but really, no one else can understand me or has a strong desire to understand me besides you. I thought if someone had the credentials on paper then they'd have the capacity to understand me, since I'm so good at explaining things and it's what I do for a living. It doesn't work that way. For someone to understand me, they also need to have the desire to do so, and you did. You did 12 years ago, and you did now. I don't know if you still will in the future.

4. There are some things that I wish we could do together--we talked about going for a scenic drive and sharing our music tastes, doing karaoke together, and that if we ever kissed for the first time, we both know it'd be different.

5. Your tendency to intellectualize and complicate everything makes me want to shut down first and then enlightens me after some delay. You've given me some really good ideas--you told me that I need to make sure that my kids have someone who share their vibes to hang out with, that I should wait for maybe a year before I really decide to buy that luxury condo, about mental health and HRV (I actually just bought an Apple Watch Ultra 2 so that I can start monitoring my heart and HRV).

6. Sometimes when you shut down or hide behind your jokes and sarcasm, I see through them too, but sometimes I feel your fear too and that makes me want to distance myself too.

7. There are things you've said to me that I'll cherish forever: "I wanna protect what we have too", "I have all these mixed feelings but I feel happy most of all and that alone is enough to push down the other feelings", "What we have is much rarer than falling in love", "There's no word for what we have because most people have never experienced this in their entire life", "If you ever feel that I'm distancing myself from you, it's because my structure doesn't allow it and I'm afraid of losing you if things are overheating. I never want to lose you again in my life and I want you to remember what I've just said", I said, "I've already forgotten about it. I need you to say it again, and I will need you to say it again and again in the future" and you said, "OK".

It's already 2:20am. I miss you so much.