A white echinacea from my own garden. Somehow that seems appropriate today.
I am okay but I seriously thought I might die of heartbreak yesterday. It felt that bad and confusing. I think ghosting is a particularly cruel way to end things. Because you get no closure.
In the morning I had an in-person meeting with our mid-thirties, neuro divergent office manager and our president online. That went fine. It is one on the last of these I will need to participate in and my transition out of my current role is being recognized.
The office manager and I have developed a good working relationship, it is cheerful and she feels sad about the change. I will still be working with her but at more of a distance. Anyway, afterwards she got to hear about my heartbreak (she is one of the few people in the real world that knew some details about the fling) and I got to hear about her three hours of testing today for ADHD.
On the way to the office I decided I would delete Mr. B.s contact info and our text history. But it is way more complicated than just hitting a button. This is on Apple devices. So much of me was hoping that somehow, I had gotten it wrong that he was just busy and distracted and he read my message wishing him a happy father’s day and just got pulled away.
But that is a fantasy. The guy can’t deal. So, he is ghosting me.
When I got home, I commenced the project and was a bit confused about the technical aspects. Unfollowing him on Instagram was easy, technically. Emotionally not quite so. Deleting his contact info, was about the hardest thing I have done in a good long while. I wanted so much to believe. My hand hovered for a small eternity.
And the texts? Our main form of communication? That took some time and I ended up needing to consult Claude the AI. I left a few pictures I had sent him and one text from him. The one that says, “I love you, Noko.”
As I was trying to figure out how to navigate the rest of my day, I thought what the heck, I will ask Claude what the healthiest way to deal with being ghosted is.
I mean, if anyone know how to manage being ghosted, it is the internet, right?
And according to the collective wisdom I am doing all the right things. I am having feelings. Carlo will tell you that, I spent a big chunk of the afternoon wandering around talking to myself.
Invectives were involved.
And then I got online with Walt and The Painter for Coffeeshop Philosophy. The painter keeps these amazing sketch books and he sent a picture of it, with the two side by side pages, one with my Elf King poem I wrote a couple of weeks ago copied out in red and the second with this little painting of a white knight fighting off a couple of very lively crows in a medieval sort of pattern. The Painter is a party of one, that is for sure.
Talk about neuro divergent. But in a good, extremely creative way.
Walt was so darn happy to have me back in what he thinks of as his fold. He was.
What he doesn’t understand is that I am not the same person I was three weeks ago and if he could see past his own ego, he would know that. When a fish describes water, he doesn’t know he is swimming in it.
As we head into the dog days of summer, I have a lot of work to do building a life that gives me on the regular some of the things I glimpsed, enjoyed and experienced with Mr. B.
Wish me the energy to make it so.
Claude says I need to grieve the loss of the friendship as well as the romance.
That’s the part that almost kills me.
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