Summer in the City

It's summer in New York today- the sun is bright and parties have spilled out onto the streets. My block is bursting with Latin sounds and the smell of grilling meat and the smoke of firecrackers.

I can't help but think that this is a new beginning for me...as the new job is starting to feel like routine and my life is opening up with new possibilities. Some things have stayed the same, although I have a fear that with every thing new and exciting comes something from my old life being pushed out.

There are friends I haven't talked to in ages that I wonder about. My best friend is getting married in a few short months and yet phone calls to her have gone unreturned. I haven't talked to her since she announced the engagement, and I miss the sound of her voice.
I no longer have the security of the ex's voice on the phone, although gruff and unemotional most of the time, was still a way I pushed through the loneliness.
I haven't talked to my sister since I came back to the city from a visit over a month and a half ago. I am partly to blame--I think the sadness I felt at the old job was more serious than I knew at the time. A depression, possibly, although I don't want to admit it. I feel a bit of a cloud over my life now even though everything at work is what I imagined it to be, and my social life is starting to pick up again.

Everything is how I have planned it for so long, but my head is spinning. I can't slow down the days enough to get my breath and I feel I am leaving some very important pieces of myself behind.

Insider Trading Tip of the Day

Sell your shares in Microsoft. Bill Gates did. See my story:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070510/microsoft_insider_transactions.html?.v=1

* Note and disclaimer: I actually know nothing about finance.

Long-Awaited Milestone

It hit me on Saturday very unexpectedly: I think I am over "The Relationship."

He is back in the town where we went to college; I am here. We have plenty of miles between us, and plenty of reasons to move on, but somehow I thought it would never happen.

We both held on like we were nothing without the other, even if things between us had changed beyond recognition. He met someone a week after I moved out. He moved in with her four months later. Every part of that, even though he never spoke of her directly to me, crushed what little bit of hope I had for a reconciliation.

But I still held on, for some reason: fear of not finding someone better, fear of moving to an overwhelming and unfamiliar place, and fear of losing the one person with whom I shared a huge piece of history.

After more time passed, and after hearing from other friends about how how his new relationship was getting more serious, I tried to pull away. I stopped initiating conversations, I stopped finding reasons to send a text message or e-mail. But he kept calling, and I kept picking up.

That about sums up the last two years. Whether he realized it or not, he was pulling the strings. And I let him for a million different reasons. That relationship, the one after me, ending in cheating. The day after he moved in with her, I later found out, he read her diary and found out she had slept with a married man. Any sympathy I could possibly offer was completely overshadowed by the feeling that this situation was the best kind of karma - I felt like he fell in love with a girl that dished back everything he ever did to me. But the satisfaction came way too late.

Everyone that knows the two of us, and how long it has been since we were happy together, would undoubtedly roll their eyes at my admission that I now feel "over it." Should have made a clean break. Should have never given him so many chances. Should have never continued a friendship. Should have left it alone, and moved on. Should have never taken this much time to get over it.

So now I have finally caught up to everyone else who was begging me to leave it alone. I am even pushing to finish this blog even though I just got an e-mail from him:

"i was cleaning up my computer and found some of these pics from your rowing banquet - not sure if you had them or not

hope things at the new job are going well

I head home on friday for jenas graduation..."

And just like that, its done.
Of course my mom snapped last night when I said this, and rightly so. Its far from 'just like that' - it has taken so much out of us, it has taken me to a place where I thought I would never trust again, and I still am in a place where I am terrified of being alone.

But this correspondence feels enough like the final ties being cut that I am thinking, sigh, its finally over.