Then somebody loves you just enough

(Bernard Fanning, from Powderfinger)

Today was a tough day. I woke up from a dream about being molested (very vivid, extremely disturbing.) to groggily drive to school and sit through chem and bio, all while feeling nauseous and guilty about food and anxiety about the test I have to turn in by Thursday morning. Then I got a text from J (a million minutes late, because the Science Center apparently sucks whatever signal there is along with a few souls.) For the past three weeks I've been diddling along, trying to get on with whatever approximation of living I've been doing. Today, I realized to what extent my ways of coping with saying goodbye involve forgetting. Trying to forget the way it felt, so that I can't compare it to the present; trying to forget that I even met him, that we ever interacted... which is horrible, and really sad. It's not that I actually succeed in the attempts to forget, but after all the goodbyes I've said in my life, why am I unable to look back and reminisce without the poignancy, the nostalgia becoming overwhelming? Why can't I just enjoy the re-hashing of scenes and sensations (insofar as much as possible) without wishing to not be in this moment (which is definitely something I want to avoid)?
With this goodbye, in particular, I have run the gamut (so to speak) of reactions: I've been angry, sad, hurt, and even relieved to some extent (the latter mostly being because I was having trouble focusing on studying, when I need as close to a 4.0 I can get to apply to med school-- so far, I'm at a 3.89, or something.) But today, (and the other day), when I heard from him spontaneously, when I was alerted to the fact that I'm still on his mind despite everything that's going down in a new and exciting place, I was struck. Struck by how much I miss him, by the very fact that I'm important, by how much I was holding back, by the strangeness of my mode of coping, and by how it seems so callous. No wonder I'm afraid of being forgotten, when this is the way I deal with things. I braced myself for a big reaction at the beginning, when I thought I had time to deal with it a little more... but now is when it's hitting me, when it's been three weeks or so. So I try to deal with studying for my tests and struggling with myself for control of anything, when in actuality all I really want to do right now is write and cry and sleep and draw and dream, and then maybe go dancing when I wake up.