Ah, the south.

With dragon*con ear­lier this year being my only expe­ri­ence of the area, and hav­ing spent most of that time within the con­fines of two adja­cent hotels in down­town Atlanta, I really didn't know what to make of it. So I resigned judg­ment until I could actu­ally see what it all had to offer, and exactly what 'south­ern hos­pi­tal­ity' really meant.

That oppor­tu­nity came last week­end when a cou­ple of friends asked me to come down and see them, think­ing that a change of scenery and the com­fort of real-time direct friend­ship would be ben­e­fi­cial for me. Per­haps they had some­thing there.

* * *

I won't mix words. I've been hurt­ing. Bad.

There really is noth­ing more won­der­ful, more absolutely beau­ti­ful, than to finally be able to say the three mag­i­cal words to some­one, know­ing that you truly mean them and that you don't regret say­ing them for one sec­ond. Hear­ing them in return is what makes the knots in your stom­ach, the pound­ing of your heart, the pure insan­ity and raw courage required to say it in the first place, all worthwhile.

And there's noth­ing more hor­ri­ble than watch­ing this per­son, some­one who you've come to love, deeply, walk out of your life only to return to theirs, not nec­es­sar­ily because they wanted to, but essen­tially, because they had no other choice.

My stom­ach still churns when I think about it. Not because of the choices we made or because of the out­come we both knew was unavoid­able, but because I feel as if I've lost some­thing I never really had in the first place, and that just seems.…wrong.

In addi­tion to this, such as it is, I wholly real­ize that I have indeed lost some­thing which I know I did have. Some­thing that, by all accounts, I should still have, yet don't. A truly won­der­ful friend.

Indeed. And that right there is what hurts the most. Know­ing that there's a great per­son out there, who is, in addi­tion to many other things, a friend. Yet I can't bring myself to talk to her, to answer an e-mail, to even pick up the phone when I see her name on the caller ID, because the pain is just.…too much. Too much now.

Per­haps too much for a long time.

And that's why I found myself in Alabama, awake at 5am, talk­ing with Amy. Try­ing, fetch­ing, grasp­ing to make sense of every­thing, why it hap­pened, and more impor­tantly, how to move on from here. How to make the pain go away.

There's no shortcut.

So, for now, the phone remains unan­swered. As do the e-mails. And the stom­ach remains churning.

But I wasn't 1300 miles away from home sim­ply to wal­low in this fact. Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say, and this isn't some­thing that would be fixed in one, either. Some day, maybe, hope­fully, I'll be able to call her and talk, start­ing with a sim­ple "hi", and not have the simul­ta­ne­ous urge to throw up, the thought of what I can't have loom­ing over me, and how, for once, I cared enough about some­one not to fight for them, because we both knew what was best. The only way it could be.

Some day, that thought will be com­fort­ing. Not now, though.

And so I jaunted parts south and found myself sur­rounded by a domes­ti­cat, spouse, and 2.5 felines of the male per­sua­sion. Movies, bev­er­ages, and much, much dis­cus­sion per­me­ated the time. Throw in more sleep depri­va­tion than you can shake a stick at, a few freshly TiVo'd episodes of "Daria", some much-needed hugs for cats and humans alike, and add in a dash of musi­cal cheese good­ness and you have quite the nice lit­tle week­end retreat. There are sim­ple plea­sures every now and againthey're just incred­i­bly hard to find at times.

I didn't 'get away' from the pain. But that really wasn't what this trip was about. Did this excur­sion cure me of my anguish? No. Was it sup­posed to? No. All that needed to hap­pen was some good comfort-time with some good friends, and that's exactly what hap­pened. Heal­ing hap­pens in lay­ers. And you have to start somewhere.

You know that you should feel good when the worst thing that hap­pens over the course of a week­end away from home is when Misty breaks out a game that's "kinda like Spades, except with soup. Oh, and you don't want the bullions."

When this sit­u­a­tion is sud­denly more dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out than your per­sonal rela­tion­ships, you must be doing some­thing right.

Some­thing, any­thing, is bet­ter than the alternative.