Thinking

Tim was here last night.  Very much wine, and very little sleep.  Also a lot of sitting outside and talking while he smoked.  The smoking thing is annoying.  The trouble is, I like this guy so much, but what I like is more about me than him.  I like having the company.  I like the way he feels next to me.  I like the obvious attraction between us.  But I do not like a lot of the intrinsic stuff about who he is.  His life is about smoke and drink and getting up and going to work the next day.  And there's nothing wrong with that in general, but there's a lot wrong for someone who I want to care about.

Not that I want to care.  More that I want to be cared about, and I'm not sure that he's great at that, either.  Part of my wants to be loved so badly, needed, cared about.  And I'm being offered that elsewhere, probably, but that this is conditional, on the side, on limited terms.  Which might be exactly what I want for now.  But as the basis for what the rest of my life looks like?  I don't know. 

And I think that's truly what I'm looking for, some idea of the shape of forever.  I don't think that I can have that, truly.  Impermanence.  I don't think that there's a cookie-cutter than I can fit myself into that is going to show me... whatever.  The future shape of Nina.  How these things will fit in.  Tim.  Tim and time, something like that.  Tim and time, and my other friend who is more and less of what I want, all at the same time.  And the part of me that wants desperately to be in a committed relationship, because there is that part, however much I'd like to pretend otherwise.  And the part of me that would run a million miles from the possibility.

I just want something so much today.  Some of it is to show off, I think, to say, look at me, I can drink and smoke and fuck like a teenager.  Still.  There's a part of me that recognizes the Nina of many years ago, and wants to be that person, but happier and freer.  There's a part of me who is not that person at all any more.  Someone bruised and damaged who needs love and caring in a sad and desperate way.  And I'm not sure how to get either of us, an of us, what we want.

I am not sure who I am, without Michael.  It's not that I need him to be me, but for so long, he was the center of my life, my best friend, my husband, the gravitational pull that kept me in orbit.  An unstable orbit, as it turns out, but still, an orbit.  I miss him, in a way.  And not, in other ways.  But on a day like this... and on a night like yesterday... I feel his absence acutely.