magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

out of shear stupid hopefulness (or maybe self-delusion) i half expect to hear her on my voicemail every time i call to check it. but, it's only been two weeks. the first time we stopped talking it lasted a month and a half. the second time lasted just over a month, and was broken by my return to providence from rome. the third time lasted three months, during half of which we saw eachother almost daily, and then took another two weeks of painful interaction before we got back together.

all of this sounds like an argument for not getting into it all over again. but the good outweighs the bad for me. and i still feel that the problems that have led to this happening again and again are things that we could work out in the long term, i thought we were making some significant progress, although the last month or two in texas may have brought us a few steps back.

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yesterday's rain turned into last night and this morning's freezing rain. everything's covered in ice. it's pretty, but at the same time crushingly oppressive. the forecast highs for the next ten days are all below freezing. i could stomach it if i knew that i was eventually going home.

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the more i think about it, and it's hard not to, the more i manage to convince myself that we'll work things out. it's just that we've been right here before, and it's hard to believe that things are really all that different from how they were then. she's said the same exact things to me, i've felt the same exact way, had the same exact doubts.

when i was walking around the woods by myself the other day i thought: maybe stef and i are the sort of couple who need to spend a month apart every year. and maybe we are. i have to admit that without the perspective of this current crappy situation it's not something i think i would ever go for. if stef had said to me, 'i think we should spend the month of january apart,' i would have been livid. but it would have beat the alternative: this.

if we can work this out, maybe it is something that we should really take a look at. it seems that these cycles of her feeling claustrophobic, needing a way out, making a rash decision, will keep happening. and maybe it's something that if approached from a different direction would be good for both of us. a chance to learn something new about ourselves. to come back to the relationship refreshed.

or maybe i'm just grasping at something, anything, to keep myself from floating away.

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it seems as if we don't have tv service anymore. i thought that maybe it was the ice, but the guide is still receiving data, it just tells you to call for ordering info on pretty much every channel. this is not a good thing. i've got a fair amount of down time (thinking time) that i really need to fill with a variety of distractions. and tv is one of those. especially since daniel and jeanette go to bed much earlier than i do.