I hate this part.

I'm doing okay. I'm alive, surviving, whatever--what it comes down to, in terms of sadness, is that I've never lost something that was worth having before. That, and I just miss every little thing. Mornings are the worst. By the evenings I start to shake it off, think about all the good. I've been spending time with friends, laughing and smiling and living my life, because whether I like it or not, it does go on. But in the mornings...ow. Every time I wake up, it takes a few seconds, and then it all comes rushing back again, as though all of yesterday's progress never happened. I wake up, and immediately think, "Oh, RIGHT." I can't tell yet, for the immediate future, if things will get better or worse every day. Unfortunately, a big part of it will be the decreased communication. We didn't date for long, but spent considerable amounts of time together. And since we met, the e-mails, texts, etc have been more or less constant. The challenge is just getting used to the idea that in his former capacity, this person just is not in my life anymore.

I do still want him in my life, though I want to know what he's up to, where he is, how his kids are growing up. I told him we were both so lucky to have had the time we did together--our relationship came at a point in our lives where we both needed to know it was possible for something good and something real to happen, and it did. I know what I can have now, and as much as this hurts, the fact that I will just never go back to sub-par relationships is worth it. I would like to be friends, though not today, and not tomorrow. Our relationship was good, and it deserves a healthy end--time to grieve and time to heal. But at some point, I think it's possible. Even when we were saying our goodbye, I realized that I have already learned SO much from this person--about trust, about honesty, about what a good relationship with a GREAT person means. There may be more lessons to be learned from this experience, but I can already honestly tell him "You have CHANGED MY LIFE". And it has changed, for the better. But he isn't in it like he was before, and this is hard to accept.

My friends, by the way, are again my champions. Some know exactly what to say, and some know exactly what to do, and all of it is exactly what I need. They're amazing.