Losing hope

"God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
courage to change the things we can,
and wisdom to know the difference."

Obviously, I am not a member of the AA nor do I believe in God. But the power this Serenity Prayer holds still amazes me.

Friday night, all the emotions of the past week caught up with me and hit me like a ton of bricks. I saw a video on YouTube and started crying so hard that I couldn't even *see* most of it. Eventually, I caught myself and stopped crying, but I burst into tears a second time that night and I finally understood why people in movies sit in the shower, shivering because the water has long gone cold and still can't stop crying. Thank god that our water tank was still filled with enough hot water or otherwise I would have experience that as well.

I'm not a person who cries easily. I don't cry with other people and I don't cry when other people are around. I can remember every single time that I have cried in the last 6 years, not just lost one or two tears but cried the way I did on Friday and yesterday (and today). In the last 6 years, there were four occasions that made me cry. This week brought the fifth.

This shouldn't affect me this much. After all, it is 'just' a TV-show, it is 'just' a fictional character. But I know exactly why it does affect me the way it does. I have known that I am gay since I was 15. I was madly in love with a woman who was way too old for me. She cared about me and she listened to me and she really helped me through a hard time, but she never was more than a friendly teacher. But to me, she was. To me, she was everything. Obviously, it never went anywhere and while we were slightly on the path to a friendship, things happened and when I graduated, I knew that she probably wouldn't want to stay in touch with me. I should be over her by now. It has been over 5 years and there were times when I felt like I could forget her. People say that you are never fully over someone until someone else takes their place. God, am I ready for that next person to come along. Back in the day when I felt like I could only ever love her, I figured that in a year or two, when I was ready, I would move on and meet a nice girl who was more my age. The years passed and I met girls, but I never met a special one and I was never special to one either. Soon I will turn 21 and I still won't know what it's like to be special to someone. I still won't know what it's like to kiss someone. To hold them close and feel like you wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world.

I think one reason why I so desperately want to move away from here is because I feel like I will never meet someone special here. I'm weird and I'm different and there was a time when I felt it was okay that I didn't belong. But there comes a time when you so desperately want to belong that you would give almost anything to just feel like this once. There have been times when I felt some sense of belonging, but these times were always very short-lived. I don't know where my place in life will be and I don't know whether I will ever find it, but right now, I've lost hope.

Which brings us back to Erica Hahn. I felt like I could have something, see something through her eyes, that I so desperately miss in my life. I watched her fall in love with Callie and I fell right with her. I watched her watch Callie and I felt the way she must have felt. I felt my heart beat faster and I *knew* what this was like. What I didn't know was the part that was supposed to come next. The part where Callie showed Erica that she felt that way too. The part where she cared too. We saw some small glimpses of that, but it got lost in all the gay panic. It got lost in all the talk about sex. And now it got lost in a network that was too cowardly to see the real beauty in their story.

It got lost and it will never return. And that leaves me wondering whether it will ever come. Whether I will ever be worthy of feeling the way Erica felt and having these feelings reciprocated. And this is why this hit me so hard and why I can't stop crying. Why I nearly burst into tears in the middle of a store because I wanted to buy some chapstick and was reminded of Callie's beautiful lips. Why I nearly burst into tears when my friend looked at me and tried to see how well I was doing. Or how poorly.

If you feel like you can, watch BetweenThaLines' beautiful video, which is like the farewell that we didn't get to see on TV. Serious tissue warning!