happiness is being lost in Venice with the woman you love...

    Do you ever look at something that's happened in your life and try to figure out why it happened that way? Try to determine whether it's a discrete incident or whether you—consciously or unconsciously—set in motion a chain of events that brought about the occurrence that you're analyzing? Attempt to deconstruct your choices, to know just where you went wrong?
    Last week, I had an object lesson in 'knowledge'. I got some news that should not, logically, have been news at all. It should have been foreseeable, given the evidence that I'd acquired previously. I should have known. But I didn't know. I didn't see. So when I got the news—via Twitter, of all things - it came as a rude shock. What the hell? When did this happen?
    Somebody I used to know, whom I've loved since before I really knew him, I guess, is in love with someone else.
    He's not waiting for me.
    He has...moved on.
    If it was ever in question for him at all.
    I haven't spent all this time circling the drain, paralyzed with wondering. I haven't waited, literally, for his return. But I have, in a sense, been waiting, all along, for him to come back. For that life (which we never actually had, but to which we had only looked forward) to begin. And it really is never going to happen. Because he really doesn't want it. Because he's got it with someone else, yes, but even more—because he's not in this half-life of waiting, either.
    Can I honestly say that reading his news on the 5th didn't affect my perspective on the 7th? My sense of loneliness and restlessness at the wedding? That it didn't influence my decision-making, my choice to contact Toby, my willingness to see him again, even though it ended so stupidly before?
    How much of my own life am I in control of? How much controls me? How much is completely out of control?
    What is the happiest moment I can imagine? Lost in Venice with the man I used to love, who no longer loves (or thinks of) me? It's time to get out of this.