Returned

I haven’t written in a while. 

That isn’t to say I haven’t wanted to. I have wanted to, sort of. I have plenty to write about, I just. Haven’t. Making all sorts of excuses to myself, mostly about being too tired to write. That never stopped me last year. In fact, that probably kept it going last year. 

No. The reason I haven’t written is because I was avoiding the pain. Not that it worked, other than last night, I cried myself to sleep every night for a week. All about the same stupid guy. Who I can assure you has not thought about me in quite some time. 

I’ll avoid that topic at first, maybe ease myself back into this. 

Cody is coming tomorrow. Not for long, he leaves again on Sunday. But I haven’t seen him in almost a year, and yet a lot has gone down in that year between us. I forgot how close we were until I started actually making plans with him to hang out while he’s here and got unreasonably excited. I guess I forgot we called every day of the first half of outreach. I did forget that for a reason, but the reason no longer hurts, so I don’t have to protect myself anymore. I’m excited. But I don’t want to be using him to fill the Trevor shaped hole in my life. I think I could very easily start to do that, and I’m not sure how to prevent it. However, he’s not Trevor. He’s Cody. And I’m more reserved. We’ll see how this goes. Last time I saw him, we hadn’t almost dated. I hadn’t said I loved him. This could be. Interesting. 

Advance has gotten better, schedule wise, since being back in Lynden. I’m doing ministry I actually care about, I’m able to do social media stuff, I have a plethora of coffee shops to go to when I want to study (not that I do. The common room couches are my spot of choice as of late). 

It’s also been hard because of the potent memories etched into every single surface. That carpet square? Oh yeah, we ripped it playing spoons day one of DTS. That lamp? I used it to write every single night last year. That set of drawers? Ashlin and I somehow shared the space. The counter-cup song the day of Outreach reveal. The office desk-Christina, Trevor and I late into the night. The boardroom? Playing guitar with JT. The sidewalk itself. Walking to go anywhere. That was hard. Really hard at first. It got easier as I’ve made new memories in the space. But it’ll still hit on occasion, when I turn off all the lights in the common room and remember the night of the prayer burn. I hear a song I played over and over on Outreach and am violently transported back. I wonder if it would be better if the memories were bad. They aren’t bad. The issue is they are the best I have to offer myself. 

Reclaim it. That’s the big thing Mama Sarah suggested I do, and that also helped. A weird amount actually. 

Ok enough with the tiptoeing around the big subject at hand. Trevor. I had hoped that I wouldn’t need to write any more about him, that I would magically wake up healed, but of course it never works like that, does it. 

Most of these are just notes app snippets like usual, because I may not have been able to bring myself to write a full length post, but I sure do have a lot of thoughts all the time. 

“God didn’t tell me to let go of Trevor because he knew that I wouldn’t listen anyway. He let me live it instead.” Hi so this sucks. I had prayed many a time that if I was supposed to let go of him, that God would tell me. I never got an answer. I took the lack of answer as a don’t let him go type thing, but I fear I knew I was lying to myself. I was going to ignore the distinct call to go into full time missions for that boy. God knew that, I knew that, and I was willing to do it anyway, even though literally no one asked me to. So here we are. Be careful what you idolize, kids, because God likes to remind us of where our hearts should be, and it is painful. 

I’m not sad today. Give it a few days, I’ll probably be sad again, revelations about him, life, missing my DTS only last a few days max. Although, someday I’ll look back and realize I haven’t hurt about them in years. 

“What if I’d fought harder in the beginning?” I’ll never know. Maybe it would have worked and we would be friends now, and it would all be okay. Probably not. I likely would have just ended up blocked a few weeks ahead of schedule. Or maybe I wouldn’t have ended up blocked, because he would have expected my reaching out again. I think at this point, there can be no what ifs. I can what if until I keel over, and nothing will have changed. 

“If I’d just not said anything.” Oh look, another what if. So, yeah. Sure. It would have come out when he got a girlfriend. When he actually started dating her, and then I really would have been in the huge wrong, and not just the miscommunication wrong. I think the better what if is “what if I hadn’t assumed he knew, and mentioned it earlier, like when he bought plane tickets or something?” It probably wouldn’t have ended like this. I don’t think it would have ended well though. 

“Does it ever go away?” The pain of missing my DTS in particular for this one. And I have heard resounding no’s across the board. The missing them doesn’t go away, your life just gets bigger. 

“I need to know WHY. There’s more. I KNOW there’s more.” Yeah, this sentiment still stands. Maybe not need. Maybe need. I don’t know what that would do for me closure wise. I do know there is something that hasn’t been communicated. Something big. I mean, besides the obvious girlfriend that he still likely doesn’t know I know about. But until he decides to be a big boy and communicate, I don’t get to know. And thats ok. (NO ITS NOT TELL ME AHHH) it really is ok. I’m fine (SCREAMING INTO MY PILLOW) it’s fine. 

Found a ladybug in my bed. It was just sitting on my knee. You couldn’t tell that operation get ladybug safely out of my bed ensued. Just know that it did. 

“Over the course of one year, we went from frenimies to friends to best friends to low key sort of lovers to low key sort of lovers long distance to best friends long distance to friends long distance to no contact on good terms to no contact on bad terms to blocked.” Ok so not quite, but so close. We weren’t ever really frenemies, he just didn’t like that I liked him at the start of DTS. I forced him to be my friend, and he went with it willingly, and then we got super close right around outreach. There are many instances during the second half of outreach that I wrote down without expanding in my journal that could hint to his potential at least allowing there to be a situationship (ew death by 100 little tiny poison toothpicks for using that word) between us for a bit there. Some of the things he said and did point to. Something more. Based on how he acted around girls he did like. Idk. However, by the time graduation rolled around, that was no longer the case. We were still best friends, but he didn’t show any signs of liking me anymore. We were besties digitally until this all happened. There was no fade. He got Marco Polo for me (an app he hates and has since deleted his account on). He was the one and only person who read my blog. UNTIL everything happened. That is what actually happened. 

“Things he promised: that we would finish planet of Lana together, so I couldn’t look up the ending. That we would road trip to see JT, Milana, Ellie. now I have to plan that alone. That he would help me buy a car here. Now, I don’t have one, and don’t know what to look for or even how to do that. That he would teach me how to drive stick shift, so I wouldn’t let my dad teach me. That he wouldn’t leave. That, I have receipts for. I deleted the rest.” I was taught to take promises seriously. When my DTS promised that we wouldn’t lose contact, I foolishly believed them. When Trevor let simple promises slide off of his tongue in every day talk, I took them to heart. Broken promises suck so badly. I will never ever look up the ending to Planet of Lana. 

“There’s still pieces missing, and until I talk to him in person, I won’t get to know them. I do’t know if I’ll get to do that either though” if i do, it won’t be for a while. It hurts to say years, but realistically, it’ll be years. I don’t want that. 

“He stopped doing anything with STS besides going to lecture the day after he left me, and even failed because of it. That could be unrelated, but. The timing fits. The timing fits too well. The last thing he turned in was the paper that I saw on House Arrest, and then he stopped entirely.” I shouldn’t know that. I won’t out who told me, but I also will say, I didn’t do anything nefarious to find out that information. If I didn’t know Trevor, I would think this holds more significance, but he’s like me. We don’t finish well. But also. He had been diligent about it. My mom wants to read into this one. 

“My innate desire to KNOW is going to be the end of me. But I don’t need to know. I can accept this reality without knowing why I have to.” Weird moment of optimism from past Kiah. Let’s keep that up. 

“I can’t villainize him.” If I could do that, it would hurt so much less. I can’t though. It doesn’t even matter why he reacted this way, if he was in the wrong for doing so. I could never hate him. 

“I think whatever it is, it isn’t about protecting himself of his girlfriend. It’s me. What is he trying to protect me from? later- he knows he can’t love me the way I want him to love me. Another piece of the puzzle may be him giving me the opportunity to find that love elsewhere instead of settling for the best that he could give.” I know better than to put words into other people’s mouths. However. Even if the bottom chunk isn’t true, i do think that the top one is, and I have evidence (screenshots of our last conversation) to prove it.

“SJ disagrees with no contract. No contact isn’t a boundary. Where is the plan for redemption?” CATCH IT. I never go no contact, I just fade out. I’ve had to do that on occasion, and it works rather well. And leaves the door open for any needed correspondence. (Maybe I couldn’t handle a door, and maybe he and I both knew that)

“I lay my passport down at the foot of the cross. However” I cannot remember what that however is there for. 

“Sometimes I think I don’t actually believe that he’s gone, so when I remember that he is, it hurts all over again.” My cool new thing now is forgetting not that he’s gone, but that we were ever friends. (Bad Kiah, not a good way to heal). The Trevor that occasionally gets brought up in conversation and the Trevor that was my friend are two different people, and only one of them can exist. (Noooooo not the way to heal)

“After talking boundaries with SJ. All this means for me now is that I need to respect his boundaries. Actually respect them. Stop checking his blog. Stop messaging his deactivated account, stop checking Unsent Project. I may not agree, but because I broke them in the past, this is what needs to be done. I just wish I had heard this before I had said anything in the first place” I’ve been working on this. It might have a bit of a learning curve. 

“They chose his side, but I think that it’s pathetic that there’s even sides in the first place.” I thought that if I just let time pass from that day in Salem, I would get over it, but I’m sort of not over it, and maybe I need to actually talk to people. But it’s also pathetic of me to care, is it not? So. I say I should talk to people, but I won’t. 

“He was never worth this pain” most people say it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. NOT ME. GET THAT CRAP OUT OF HERE. I wish every day that I had never met him. (No. That’s not true. I would have missed something and never known what.)

“Oh yeah, God took him away it’s good for me! I don’t think I’ll ever breathe again” dramatic. Gets the point across though.  People seriously need to stop telling me that this was good for me. I might reach that conclusion on my own someday, but it will not be because someone tells me. That one, only God can speak over me. 

“I can’t look at ANY of my outreach videos because he is in every single one of them, and I cry every time” Maybe I’d cry anyway. Who knows.

“He took writing from me too. The one time writing may have actually helped, I can’t bring myself to do it, because he was the one who gave it to me in the first place.” This is just me reclaiming it. Maybe. Or I knew that today is a no cry day, so I could safely write about these topics. (There have been zero tears.)

Ok that’s all the notes app stuff, I’m getting tired, and this is really long. I’m gonna end it here.