I am supposed to be sleeping

I am supposed to be sleeping, but it is 1:20 in the afternoon and I’m awake.

I have a best friend.  I want you to know that I have a best friend.  I have known him for, what, -counting backwards– shit, this seems impossible, almost 10 years?  Holy crap.  Wow.  Seriously, you’ve no idea how mind blowing that is.  Ok, anyway.  My best friend, I’ll call him “T” was the best man at my wedding.  My husband had no issue with this, he and T immediately hit it off the first time I introduced them and became fast friends.  T is also “an ex” of mine.  Seriously.  Hard to imagine in hindsight but at one time, we actually thought maybe we’d build a life together.  Uh, 10 years ago we were both really young.  Yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket.

By some miracle, that relationship evolved into an extremely close friendship.  I confided things in him I never would have even considered telling anyone else.  The passion died (more like, we euthanized it deliberately) and what was left was this warm, loving friendship which I’ve never felt with anyone else.  He is a “big brother” (though younger than me by 4 years), best friend, “hold-me-when-I’m-scared-and-make-the-monsters-go-away” kind of person, all rolled into one.  I want to be clear, I have absolutely no romantic feelings for him whatsoever.  This isn’t a case of “me thinks she doth protest too much,” this is a case of people seem to be unable to fathom that one can have an extremely close, emotionally intimate friendship with someone without it having romantic strings or overtones attached.  Imagine your dream version of a big brother – someone you can lean on, someone you can count on, the stereo-typical non-husband protector.  That’d be T.  And I am his little sister. 

Here’s the catch:  I haven’t spoken to T in almost a year.  This is 10% the fault of a conflict between the email server I was using some time ago and 90% my own fault.

I’m sitting here crying and in fear because I just sent him an email, and I have no idea how he is going to respond.  What’s my response to these feelings?  Blogging.

I only started realizing a few months back that I have this twisted pattern of behavior – rejecting before I can be rejected.  In the course of my life, I’ve played this scenario out with pretty much every person I’ve ever known.  There were two exceptions to this:  My husband and T.  Somehow, and I’m not really sure how, last year I allowed it to play out with T.  Things dragged on and off for a few months with me making a few attempts to reach out, him answering and me dropping the ball again.  I’m not sure what sort of response I was hoping for from him – I’m not sure that any response save flying across the country and planting himself on my doorstep would have gotten me to stop playing games.  I’m not even sure THAT would have been enough. 

As most of you know, my behavior has nothing to do with him.  It has nothing to do with anything he did or didn’t do – the gods know that man has the patience of a saint.  And I swear to you, he has never once in our entire relationship tried to hurt me in any way.  That’s not to say I’ve never been hurt, I have, but not because of something he did (though at the time I certainly “enjoyed” blaming him back when we were still involved). 

He and my husband are nearly identical in their loving, sensitive, sweet kindness.  Ladies, I’ve had the corner on “good men,” let me tell you.  I have been blessed to have been loved by three amazing, incredible men in my life.  Hubby and T are two of them, J is the third.  Only one I married was hubby, and that was (and is) for the best for all of us.  It is no surprise that the three of them became friends, they are very much alike and have in common all loving one very lucky girl at one time or another.  Instead of that being a divider, it became something which united them.  If there is anyone in the world who has always looked out for what was in MY best interest (even when I wasn’t doing a good job of it), it has been the three of them.  J is another (good) story I’ll get into some time, but not right now. 

So why did I blow it with T?  I have absolutely no idea.  I don’t know why I stopped pursuing when emails were bouncing with weird rejections from AOL.  I know that T wasn’t “rejecting” me – I know it was a conflict between AOL and my (then) service provider, that he wasn’t even seeing what I sent.  I certainly had T’s phone number.  Why didn’t I call?  His mom and I were always close, it’s not like I had to be afraid of calling his parent’s house!  Why did I just keep letting it go, putting it off, procrastinating, telling myself “I’ll do something about it tomorrow” until a year had passed?  I don’t know!  It was utterly irrational and stupid behavior which made no sense on any level.

I happened to log into the email account I used for a long time.  I hadn’t done so in months.  I found an email from T, from Christmas, sending Christmas wishes and love.  I debated, “Do I respond?  How do I fix this?”  And what did I do?  You guessed it.  Nothing.  Not a thing.  Not a fucking thing.  I sat there, stared at it, and got too scared to respond.

Today I logged back in again.  This time there was an invitation in there from Vonage.  T uses Vonage and apparently tried to invite me to sign up for it as well.  Now mind you, he did this almost 2 years ago as well.  We were still speaking back then.  So I looked at this invite and wondered, “Did he just invite me again?  Is he trying to reach out?  Or is this just something the Vonage system generated because I’m in their files somewhere?  Did he initiate this on Feb. 9th like it says, or is this Vonage just cycling through the names of people in their database who never signed up for their service?”

I don’t know the answer to that yet.  What I did know was that I was not letting one more day go by without responding to him.  So I replied to his Christmas email.

I am afraid to go look and see if he has responded yet.  I know he probably has not.  It has only been a few minutes.  I’m terrified.  I have missed him every single day.  I have a wonderful picture of him and my husband from my wedding day which I look at all the time.  My two favorite men in the world, standing together looking quite handsome on my wedding day.  I love that picture, I even carry a copy in my wallet.

I’ve missed him so much, I can’t even begin to describe it.  Especially as I’ve been going through all of this adoption stuff.  T doesn’t have to “get” adoption, he “gets” me.  He has always “gotten” me – sometimes even having to explain to my husband why I am a certain way.  And somehow this works for all of us, I don’t know how.  They were always both so sure of their place in my life that it seemed to never even cross their minds to be threatened by each other.  T knew I would never be involved with someone who could not handle my friendship with him, that I would never give up our friendship for any man.  Hubby knew that no man could ever be to me what he is, that there is no one in the world who could take his place as the love of my life.  So instead of feeling threatened, they felt love for each other even separate from their love of me.  With their personalities, they’d have been friends even if I hadn’t been in the picture.  I know damn well that I am the luckiest woman on earth for having been loved by these guys.

So how could I risk that?  How could I let that friendship go, even for a moment?  How could I not move heaven and earth to stay in constant contact?  How could I allow myself to cut him out of my life, even for a day?  How could I?

I have a best friend.  The question is, does he still consider me his?