Breaking Bad/Break-up Bad

There are a few reasons that it has been so long since my last blog post. The first is laziness/busy schedule. The second is a mild case of writers block that has involved several starts and abandonments of recent post ideas. The third is trauma and grief. That is probably the biggest. For you see, gentle readers, my boyfriend and I have broken up after four and a half years and I am sad. We had a really great relationship, but at the end of the day it came down to one thing...babies. I want them. He, it turns out, does not.

To be fair to myself, I think it is much more complicated than the basic question of whether or not to procreate, but this blog lets me self analyze myself, and I don't think it would be kind to analyze him in this format, so the story we are going with is the basic "we loved each other, we just wanted different things."This is a safe and comfortable story that has no hero and no bad guy. And our love story has no hero and no bad guy so it works and we move forward in our separate lives with this story to use when someone asks. However, life is complicated, and love is complicated and relationships are hard work and the people that you love can surprise in the best and worst ways.

But life goes on. My days are different now. When I arrive home from work sore and tired there is no one there to hug me and rub my shoulders. I have to watch Breaking Bad by myself now, a show I never would have started watching if not for him, but is now too excellent to give up. I'm Jasper's sole guardian now, his sole dog walker, poop collector, belly rubber. It's been almost a month and I still sleep on "my side" of the bed. Somehow, little 12 pound Jasper takes up the other half.

I'm very sad and emotionally erratic and everyone tells me that this is normal. My mother explained that I will experience the stages of grief. Every day, a few times a day I cycle through the stages of grief, sometimes in different orders. DENIAL, ANGER, ICE CREAM EATING (DAIRY AND NON DAIRY),  WINE DRINKING, BARGAINING, DRUNK TEXTING, DEPRESSION, SOBBING TO FRIENDS, and finally, ACCEPTANCE. These are the official stages of grief. I looked them up. And sometimes a day that starts with me crying ends with me laughing and sometimes a day that starts with me laughing ends with an empty carton of Ben and Jerry's and a hangover, but that is all a part of loss, I suppose, and everyone says that I am doing really well.

The fact is that I loved my boyfriend. I still love him, very much, and if I learned anything from Sex and the City, sometimes the guy that doesn't seem right comes back in the last season and turns out to be THE GUY, so who knows what will happen in my future but I know that something will and it will feel better than I feel right now. And when I am not in the ANGER stage of grief, I am mostly nostalgic about all the great times we had together, because he really is a lovely guy (this usually leads to the DRUNK TEXTING, DEPRESSION AND SOBBING stages.) Basically, what I am trying to say is that I have no regrets (most of the time) and I hope he feels the same.

I read a quote recently that really struck me as appropriate and comforting. It read, "Sometimes you have to go all the way down a road to see where it leads, or where it ends." This may be the end of our road, but I am glad that I took the journey.