Alia/Rob: Glue

It's weird how I can be hundreds of miles away from my city, my friends, my body, my life, but some problems feel like they're right in their backyard.

Learning the truth about Todd, about what had happened last year, was very strange for me because when the new person took over his body, and it seemed as though he had simply changed, my feelings toward him changed. It was hard for me adjust, but slowly I came to the realization (through his lack of enthusiasm toward me in all ways, even the friendly ones) that we had truly grown apart. I went through a number of different phases - frustration, depression, petty revenge, acceptance... not necessarily in that order. Sometimes when I would think I was finally over him, something would remind me (a place we'd been, a song we'd listened to,) and I would feel like a stupid girl with an unrequited crush again. I've said this before, probably, but it's been on my mind a lot lately. I always come back to it when I wonder why the hell I went to Maine in the first place.

When I learned the truth, it was confusing and scary and everything (remember I had just been transformed!) but on some level that became more apparent later, very comforting. To know that the person that I'd known that year wasn't my Todd at all gave me a lot of hope, even as bleak as everything seemed, it was a relief to know the truth, to feel there was a chance things would turn out okay.

Re-reading what Todd wrote in this blog, I saw my name mentioned a certain number of times and it made me feel very glad to see I was so important to him, because it was over the course of that lonely and confusing year that I learned how important he was to me as well. As cheesy as it sounds. I look at it this way: when we broke up, that's why he left Toronto, I was the thing keeping him there. He never openly expressed much desire to go on the road - maybe as an elaborate fantasy but never did he say "Alia I want to go to the States" and I told him "No, you must stay here with me." Hell, I would have liked to have gone with him, but I had obligations of my own.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's important to care about something, to want to stay in one place for something. To have glue keeping you where you belong. I feel like Todd and I always had that, and now we realize it. So when he found out about his situation with Erica, he did all those things he mentioned in his entry, and then he came to me on MSN and explained it.

I love out MSN conversations. for the first time in years I feel like I'm really talking to him, as myself, not as this person I look like. I can say what I really feel without being self-conscious about the way he might interpret it with me appearance. (I know that's kinda silly but it's true.) He can imagine me as the girl I am, not the person I appear to be.

Anyway. It was my job to talk him down from the ledge. He was very confused about how to handle the whole thing, and I really didn't know what to say to him because it's such a weird situation to have sprung on you. I had to convince him that, since Erica and Sean Flaherty are a couple they would probably handle most of the responsibility anyway, but I guess his time as Anne-Marie made him more sensitive to parental issues.

PS - I'd explain how it came to be that Sean and Erica were apart and Erica and I slept with each others' boyfriends, but frankly that's a story that makes nobody look good.

I don't know. I guess the whole thing has been sort of a re-bonding experience for us. It made me think. It's Friday night and I'm blogging about my long-distance boyfriend. I feel like I'm in junior high.

-Alia