cowboy boots!

I could not think of anything else but...

cowboy boots!

Yes, cowboy boots. He wore them all the damn time. Needless to say, I am not a fan. When I met him, he was wearing Adidas. The white ones, the ones that were in style and they looked really cute with his NORMAL jeans that he was wearing the night I met him... you know, the normal ones. Not the tight wranglers that you see in old westerns. Granted, we live in the South, but I am not into the whole cowboy thing.. I just couldn't do it, so.. what did I do?

I ended it over cowboy boots.

I knew I was being nuts. I knew that I was doing what I always do, and that is run. Run, Run, Run. "Im like a bird, I always run away..." Thanks Natalie Imbruglia or whoever sings that song, it is a pretty song but it is not a pretty situation that I put myself in.

So.. I am not going to go over the specifics of all the other "victims" in my life, but the basics are this: There was always a cowboy boots kind of reason when it came to every guy that wanted a relationship with me. Whether it was they didn't have a good job, they were too skinny, too short, too tall, too lanky, stuttered sometimes, had too white of eyebrows, (yes, I know).. I stopped talking to them. No explanation... I always thought it had to do with someone in particular, someone that I am actually dreading doing a blog about because yes, I think that this person has affected me in ways that I still don't really know all too much about.

Lets call him Barry. 

empire strikes again ch.2

Just some casualties...

Victim 1: high school. my first memory of being idiotic and weird with my running-away-self. JN were his initials. We met at a party, and I really liked him. I remember crushing on him for a while before he called me and asked me on a date. I was so excited- getting ready for hours (hello-- it was my first date!) I don't remember what I wore, where we ate, or what we did (besides make out in his moms car in some parking lot because god-knows-why... eww, gross...) But, I do remember this. When he dropped me off, I felt sick, like I never wanted to hear from him again. I was grossed out or something. I tried to brush it off, and eventually I did. The next couple of weeks, he was my "boyfriend." Although it was all on the phone (oh, high school..) I remember he was talking about something- a new hat he wanted to get- and he was going to go get it and he wanted to come over and show it to me. The signs ensued... hot flash, panic setting in, the need to ESCAPE. Impulsively, I told him I had just come out of a relationship and that I didn't want to jump into another one. ( bold face lie, since I had never been in a relationship before then.. EVER!)

Victim 2: Sullivan. Long story short, we got set up by a mutual friend who had actually dated him for 2 years. Random. Anyways, that lasted like 4 months I believe. Everything was going great and I thought, phew.. I am not cursed. Nope. I slipped a note in his locker impulsively because I got freaked out, and that was it. However, we did become best friends afterwards, and there will actually be many more posts referring to this particular Sullivan later on...

Victim 3: JMarks... Okay, so funny story about how this one and I met.. A couple of my friends and I got kicked out of a concert, summer of 2003. A Something Corporate concert. How lame/funny/weird is that. We werent 21, and we were drinking. Typical story that you have probably heard before..Who kicks us out? JMarks. How did we end up hanging out? He gave me his number AFTER he kicked us out.. Oh, the stories I could tell if I had the time.. Anyway, this one doesn't end so pretty either, and you can probably guess the ending by now. I became INFATUATED with him... After I met him, we began to hang out. He lived about 30 minutes from me so I didn't see him every day, and he worked all the time, at a popular music venue. But when I did see him, it was great. He was tall, dark, and handsome, and he was pretty hard to get at first. I remember being at a restaurant with a friend, and my heart was aching because I hadn't heard from him alllll day ( I cringe at my old self sometimes, but this is all about reflection so I can't make up that I was cool, calm and collected at the time.) Anyway, this love stint lasted all of 3 weeks. I think this is when I truly realized I had a problem. We were laying in his bed, and he picked up his guitar. He started playing a song for me, and I began feeling the familiar sweats and the panic set in. I left about 20 minutes later, and I never answered his phone calls and I never called him again.

Victim 4:  BW... He was sweet, handsome, and charming. He was a ladies man, and my roommate had gone to high school with him. "He might hurt you, be careful. He likes to play the field" is how he was described even before I laid eyes on him. She knew that I would be interested in that kind of guy, obviously (more on my masochism later.) When I met him, I was instantly into him. We began hanging out more over the course of a couple months or so, first with mutual friends and then by ourselves. In every definition of the word, we were dating. I would spend the night with him often. We ate dinner. We had sex. We watched movies. We made out. We went to parties together. We had sex... Okay, so this is college, people! "Wow, I have never seen this side of BW before," my roommate would say. "He must really like you."About a week later, I came down with the flu. I was over at his apartment and he took amazing care of me. I was being vulnerable with him, and I wasn't afraid to. I guess this is my first memory of that, looking back. He ran to the store several times to get me what I wanted, he rented Ali G, my favorite movie at the time, don't ask why..

BAM. Something snapped. After I got home from that 3 day period of him taking care of me while I was sick, I stopped answering his phone calls. I kept picturing an image over and over and over in my head until I could not think about anything else but...

empire strikes again...

"Tim" will be who this is mostly about, but first, I want to touch on me...

I met "Tim" when I was 22, he was 26. It is funny to look back on that now, because I am about to be 27, and when I met Tim I thought he was so much OLDER than me. At the time when I met Tim, I was single.. boy, is that an understament of the year.. The truth was, I wasn't just single... I was single, I had been single, and had always been single. I never wanted to settle down. ever. ( well, at least to the ones that wanted to settle down with me, but more on that later.) At the ripe age of 22, I had seen every single one of my friends enter into a long term relationship, some with even two or three long relationships under their belt, while I was on the sidelines of all of this, having never been in a "real relationship" myself. Why? I don't know. Commitment scared me. And it was not the typical scariness of, "Oh, I don't want to answer to another person," or, "I won't be able to go out with my girlfriends or meet up for wine night anymore..." No, it was different. Every time I felt like a guy who I had been hanging out with was starting to like me on a different level (i.e. for more than just casual sex or hanging out in groups with friends),I started to panic. I remember the feeling all too well, and it felt the same every time. I can even look back on some of these "victims", and I just cringe. Little did I know, that I would become the victim in the end.

first post

This is the first post of the first blog that I have ever written. The purpose of this blog is so that I can revisit my past relationship and answer some unanswered questions that I have. The reason I have not answered these questions are because I haven't wanted to ask them of myself. I think in order for me to fully move on, I need to start reflecting on myself and reflecting on my past relationship. Join me.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the name of this blog is empire of dirt, because I was listening to Johnny Cash- Hurt earlier. The lyrics are as follows:

"what have I become?
my sweetest friend
everyone I know
goes away in the end
and you can have it all
my empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt"