"Bringing My Best With Me, Nothing to Conceal"

For as much as I like to think I act with purpose and guide my own life, I often find that my feelings about something have changed while I wasn't looking. In my life in the last few years, I've had to do a great deal of moving on and letting go. While I often think I'm doing this consciously and with purpose, I often find that the biggest changes are those I don't realize while they are happening, but only see in retrospect, when comparing "how I felt then" to "how I feel now."

I had another one of those moments tonight. So there's this band that Moneypenny and I have seen an embarassing amount of times. He saw them when they first started out, before we ever met. I had heard their national singles on the radio and liked them, but hadn't had any of their music. After we started dating, we went to most of those shows together. In the last few years they've been playing again locally and we've gone to most of those shows. When we first started dating, when we were both very much working on ourselves and that was a path we were sharing, he played this song for me, because it really summed up how he felt then.


Closer-The Urge

Not too much I have to steal
Bringing my best with me
Nothing to conceal
Thought of the renovation
Made sure that I'm showing my appreciation
The future's wide open
Wide open
Wide open

Not much left to be revealed
She made this poor man rich
the freshness that she gives
This is something new
Does she feel the same way too
Future's wide open
Wide open
Wide open

She brings me
A little bit closer
A little bit closer to heaven
She brings me
A little bit closer
A little bit closer to heaven

So for over a decade, every time we've heard that song at a show, it's reminded me of that time. I couldn't imagine hearing it and not thinking about him. I couldn't imagine a time when that song wasn't special and about us. Or at least about those people we were then.

Moneypenny finally has a girlfriend who is cool with me. She's gone out of her way to be gracious and accomodating. She's bent over backwards to be friendly and to meet me and get to know me. And she's really nice and sweet, but in a way that doesn't make you want to gag. The last time I was in town visiting, I came to go to the Urge show with Moneypenny. While most of our previous Urge outings had been just us, I said that he should see if she wanted to go with us. Though they weren't really her kind of band, she'd never been and wanted to get to share this thing he was into as well as hang out with me. I knew that the time had come, the time when he'd have someone that those songs would now be about that wasn't me. I knew that it would probably be a little difficult for me, but I also felt like it was something I had to confront head on.

Of course, it didn't go exactly how I had thought it would. It was a little difficult for me but while I was lost in my own thoughts that night, while I was thinking about how this song was now about their relationship and about how excited they were to be exploring changes in their lives that they wanted to make together, it hit me what those changes where and the beliefs behind those changes and how just the sheer fact that I could never be the kind of person that he wants to be with in that sense. When we were first dating and this song was about us, we thought that the changes we wanted to make would bring us closer to the kinds of people that anyone would want to be with, not just that the other person would want to be with. But I know, hell I knew then, that he wouldn't have dated me if I wasn't on that path of self-betterment. He would have been my friend, but he wouldn't have been my boyfriend. And so I ended up twisting my path to better fit what I thought he wanted, which meant denying so much of who I really am. I feel like I'm still walking that path of self-betterment, if at a slower pace than I wanted to back then, but it will never make me the kind of person that he would want to be in a long-term romantic relationship with, even if it makes me better and a better person, because it will never magically make me a person that is better suited to him when I wasn't already. I remember thinking that night that if it wasn't for our shared history, I'm not sure we'd even be friends, our beliefs are so different. But from what I know of her, she does seem very well-suited to him. At the time, it was very bittersweet, but it helped knowing that I could never be what he was looking for, and also knowing that the reverse was true, that he could never be what I was looking for. I had just started getting serious with The Professor and Ginger and I knew that the things I had finally found in them I would never find in him. But I was ok with that and I knew it was a big step in the right direction, if one a long time coming.

Tonight, several months after those thoughts, Moneypenny, his wonderful girlfriend, and I went to another Urge show. When they played this song, I had a different reaction. Tonight, the song became about someone else for me. Or rather someones. This week has been incredibly difficult for me, much of it revolving around the pressure of this trip and bringing my cats to live with Moneypenny. (Short of it is that I'd like to stay as much as possible with Ginger and the Professor, both just to get to be with them and as a trial run for moving in together but The Professor is allergic to cats and I can't bring them with me while we're in the same smaller space.) Ginger, the Professor and I have all been having issues with our crazy, which makes it harder for any of us to know how to or be able to help either of the others. So this week when my stress level shot up largely as a result of something I was trying to do to be with them more during a time when I had a hard time seeing that they wanted me to be there, it made things even more difficult. But when I heard this song, I felt my attitude do a 180. I know that they've already proven time and again that they accept who I am, that I don't have to conceal anything or be other than who I am. I just need to find a way to run with that instead of letting my insecurities and my past experiences run the show. I've already had so many experiences that I had just straight up given up on and I know that when they are doing better they are completely invested in helping me explore the things that I want to do, try, experience, just as I am for them. Even when they aren't doing so great, they are still as supportive as they have it in them to be, which is still pretty amazing. But I need to keep turning my mind to how the future is wide open for me, not the ways in which it might be closed off, whether those are permanent or temporary, which is often something I don't know. I have to be reasonable with my goals, know that I can't make everything happen tomorrow, but that doesn't mean that it won't happen. And maybe with one fewer person in the hole, things will be easier and it will be easier for them to get out of their own holes.

Writing about this now, it doesn't seem to be such a big deal, but it made me so happy to know that this one song, a song I love and have loved for over a decade, has gone from an almost bitter reminder of unrealized hopes to a call to me to pull myself up, to make those changes to make my life better both for myself and those I loved, which is something that I never could have forced to happen.