Hiding from the truth

I think I've made a big mistake.

I've spent the past month or so believing in this fairy-tale notion that The Boy had really changed, that maybe he isn't such a Boy anymore. Of course I got my badly-needed reality call in the form of a rumor that turned out to be true.

It's so funny how we choose what we're going to believe, and base our feelings entirely upon that. It was easy to create a fantasy that things could work out between us--because after a year, all I was left with was the good stuff and the notion that maybe he'd become the man that I knew he could be. There wasn't a whole lot of reality in the picture I drew in my head. And of course I feel stupid. And of course I hear a voice whispering "I told you so..." For all my rose-colored musings, I still never believed in my heart that things were going to work out. But I SO wanted them to. I so want him to have grown up. Is it wrong to love somebody in spite of their inability to love you back?

Is this the loneliness talking? The ten-month manless drought? Maybe. I keep trying to put God in a box, figuring that he's kept me waiting because something better is coming, and that something must have been The Boy--look at the evidence: the perfectly-timed phone calls! The message in the fortune cookie ("someone from your past has come to steal your heart")! But of course it doesn't work that way. This is another challenge. How can I move on to a mature relationship when I clearly still haven't moved past this one?

I'll survive. Maybe I really will see him in just a few days, like he promised. But my feet are back on the ground now. I'm not going to forget who I am, and what I deserve. A man, not a boy.