They say, “life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” K offered that making a single choice can reduce a large number of infinite options down to a smaller number of infinite options. Of course, the people in our lives also reduce the number of those options as well. It seems as though most long distance relationships don’t start that way. It’s hard on a relationship to not see someone, harder when you don’t have a base established. Harder when you live the way I do; busy, and stressed.

L once said that she’d be going to grad school in the near future, so it didn’t make much sense in getting too serious because we’d be apart then. I told her that I’d probably be willing to move when that day came to follow her. She never said so, but I’m convinced that I felt that way made her uncomfortable. We never talked about that, nor a great many number of things. She wouldn’t find the time for me, so I would email her my thoughts instead. That almost always ended terribly, despite the fact that we always got along well in person. I always hoped it was her feelings for me in my presence that made this true, but maybe she was just bad at personal confrontation.

I don’t talk to L or M anymore. I tried to maintain a relationship with both, to differing degrees based on what I wanted, but both failed. L finally asked me to stop contacting her until she could decide how to respond to me. I said I wouldn’t again until she asked me to. Or maybe unless. I don’t expect to ever hear from her again. I’ve thought many times about how angry I’ll be if she ever wants to get together to reminisce about the good old days. Maybe I won’t though, I’m probably just coping. M stopped caring, and after I went out of my way a few times it was clear there wasn’t anything there that was sustainable.

Friends used to imply that my breakups with L and M were only so hard because they had broken up with me. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for the relationships to end to some degree, but I knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, that implication bothered me and felt insulting to the conversation at hand.

I’ve said in the past that I thought I could have built more of a relationship with K, something long term, if I had tried. I couldn’t promise anything more at the time, which made it just die. R wants to reconnect in June, and I think about just how much _life_ occurs in a couple of months. Particularly these couple of months, with having to return to Maine to bury my father in May. I don’t know… It’s disheartening, and I know I could do more, but I don’t have the energy right now. It’s all just so, very, hard, and while I don’t want to go it alone, it just seems destined to work out that way until I can find another model through which to explain everything.