This is not a post about teaching...

I've stopped crying all the time... now I just do it in little spurts, when I sit down and am not doing anything else, and only at home, not on the street outside the dry cleaners or on the bus or the train. Sleeping is better, thanks to SimplySleep - I'll try it on my own again tonight. But concentration? No, concentration is still shot to hell. Eating is not so good, either. I know it's important, so I make an effort. But I don't really want to eat and when other things get in the way - like parents arriving early while I was still eating lunch - I'm not really hungry. Concentration is a problem. I think about what I should be doing, and how easy it would be to just start doing it, and how much easier today was, in general, and then I think, maybe too easy, shouldn't I be more upset, and then I start thinking about whether I am sad or not, and then I wonder if he's sad, and I think about smoking. I hope he's not smoking too much. I could smell it in his apartment when I went to pick up the clothes I'd left there over the past 3 years. He'd collected all my things and put them in two bags on the couch. I saw the note and started crying, with my head against the wall, and later against the fridge, and two tears dripped down onto the side of the fridge, and I thought that maybe this would be the last time I ever came here. I know, I know: it's not over, it's just a break, to sort out our feelings. So then I remember that I was starting to think about beginning to work. Like I said, concentration is a problem. Before I left with my things, I cried at his kitchen table, because the apartment was so clean - please don't clean too much, I've never seen it this way before. I cried in the bathroom, getting my jewelry and noticing that the bracelet he gave me was broken. I cried in the living room, trying to figure out how to carry it all in one trip so I wouldn't have to come back and do all this again. The bed was the only thing still messy, and I wondered if he slept, or if he'd stayed up all night, like I had, until his eyes hurt.

I never have felt the right things at the right time. So I worry that I'm doing it wrong again, that maybe I'm too upset or not upset enough, or that I don't really know how to love someone and I was fooling myself all along. What if I started feeling better tomorrow, and that was it? Would everything be erased? I am so afraid. I don't want to stop missing you, ever.

I just want to know what you're doing. You're probably at work, or the gym, keeping busy, not sitting around over cold vegetarian chicken soup trying to get started working but not quite being able to start. It would be so easy to just call you, call off the break, make things go back to how they were before.

It hurts so much, it really does.