why do I think about you?

As angry as I am with you, I think about you all the time.

All of a sudden, you have come back into my brain. I wonder what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it with. And I always wonder why it’s not with me. Why you stopped contacting me, why you didn’t talk to me.

I knew you were messed up and I didn’t listen to myself. I knew that the job quitting had to do with a woman, and I know I answered your phone to that woman the night we met. You asked me to, I was just following instructions, and the look on your face when you saw the phone number when I grinned and handed you the phone after answering like your secretary, that should have told me everything that you hadn’t. But I guess I’d had a bit to drink and was really enjoying talking to you, I didn’t see much at that point.

You keep running through my mind recently, dreams, your hockey team, just hockey in general, but my silly little heart goes pang and my tummy flips when I see the Red Wings. The music we had in common, especially Miranda Lambert, and I can’t listen to Chris Ledoux anymore. All of a sudden those that you had met, they’ve started asking me about you, after all these months of silence. Two months of silence on the subject, out of embarrassment I’ve only told a few people how you disappeared.

I had so much hope. And you’ve ruined it for those that might come next. I no longer hope. It was such a little time you and I, but you’ve dashed any progress I made over the last 6 years…by saying nothing, by being too much of a coward to tell me that you liked me but you couldn’t do it.

I hid the hockey cards, the ones of you that I bought to make a gift for your new business. I thought they were put away in a drawer somewhere, for what I have no idea. Then as I was neatening up the other day, they fell on the ground, with your smile staring up at me from my floor.

Then it was you in front of me on the road Friday night while I was going to meet a friend for dinner. I know you saw me. You were talking on your Bluetooth thingie, you looked in your rear view, and kept looking. I didn’t even realize it was you at first, just a familiar looking figure in the car in front of me. Not until I passed you and took off that I realized it had been you, that I recognized the car.

I make it harder on myself then it should be, but a friend tells me that you got my hopes up, you were nice (or so I thought), chatty, and you did all the right things to make me think you were interested. And I think you were. And then I think everything in your life that was too scary to contemplate at Christmas time came crashing down on you, your move, your ex, your car and house down in Tennessee, the pressure of the new business venture. And probably the continued contact (necessary as it was) with the ex, and me asking questions you weren’t comfortable answering.

I hate that you paid me any attention to begin with, that you asked me out for New Years, that you kept making dates with me, most of which you showed for, some of which you cancelled. I hate that you lied to me, and I know you did, I’m a smart girl, I found out, when you’re a public figure, you should really be careful about the lies you use, particularly if you’ve used them before and they were written about in the media. Easily found.

If there is something I hate, it’s not knowing. Not knowing the truth, not having what I suspect confirmed, not having you say you’re sorry for what you did.

I have a sneaking suspicion that you are going to turn up in my life again, and probably sometime soon. And that makes me afraid, because what will I do when I see you, and what will I say to you?

I am well aware that I dodged a bullet in you, that it would have been a million times worse if things had gone further, because you still would have taken a runner, you haven’t dealt with your demons. But you took from me my confidence, my hope, my desire. I am now an apathetic shell of what I used to be. One that says no when asked out by a man. Because I just can’t be bothered anymore. I opened myself up to you, and you slammed the keyboard cover down on my fingers. Damaged me a bit more then I was already.

I give you way too much control over my life by allowing you to enter into my mind. I spent an hour or so yesterday in your new town, my friend not knowing that’s where you were, terrified I’d run into you, and yet scanning crowds hoping for a peek at you. Once more, for the road, those eyes with so much pain behind them, and that beautiful grin. Your smile. I can see you sitting beside me smiling down at me, those green eyes. It's in my mind.

I told myself months ago that I wouldn’t cry over you anymore, and yet, tears are so raw, so at the surface still.

And why I could possibly still feel this way about you I can’t fathom.