G's words are rattling around in my head.

It occurs to me that I really have no solid reason not to trust him, just a vague gut feeling. I can't even pinpoint it.

But is my gut feeling based off of people I know/knew with a similar personality, who were bad liars? (I can think of one, in particular, whom I had to warn my cousin away from this Christmas.)

Or is it based off the feeling that he's lying to me?

I just don't know.

I miss him. I do. It makes me sick to think of it. I've been allowing myself to think of him too often in the past few days.

~

Just before we parted ways at last, he leaned over in a moment of daring and kissed my cheek, close to my ear.

Automatically I raised my hand and pressed his face to mine.

I can still feel the warm curve of his cheek in my palm, and it's killing me.

~

"You only hurt the ones you love," he told me. "What does that tell you?"

I didn't respond.

That's the closest he has ever come to expressing real (real?) feelings to me.

Love was often a topic of conversation when we still talked. He would ask what love was and I'd try to explain my idea of love.

He had not decided what love was yet, and so did not express it well.

Someone once told me of a theory of life. Everybody is on earth to learn a lesson, and they get reincarnated until they learn that lesson. Then they get reincarnated to learn another lesson.

After a finite number of lessons, their soul becomes perfect and they...ascend, maybe? I don't know.

I liked the idea of having to learn a lesson each lifetime.

I have long felt that learning about love has been my lesson this go around, and oh, it has been a hard one.

~

"You pull me," he told me. I had been teasing him, and he was getting sad. He usually gets sad when he's seriously trying to articulate himself and I'm teasing him too much.

"It's my ass, isn't it?" I say, twisting around to look at the offending area. "I knew it!"

"No, no," he says, "it's--"

"It's my beautiful face!" I counter. I'm not sure I want to hear his words. "My beautiful face brings all the boys to the yard."

He's getting sadder, and presses a hand over my heart. "It's this that pulls me. It feels like...it feels like a rope pulling me around."

~

I miss G. I miss our conversations. I miss bantering with him, arguing with him too.

I have a hard time relaxing around people and just being myself. To lose someone with whom I felt that easy connection is very painful. I feel the void in my heart like a festering wound.

~

The grand prize question, now: did he apologize because he's truly sorry, or did he apologize because social pressure made him?

That is the million dollar question.

.

Rosie.

Before&After