I'm leaving this picture up so that Jeremy, wherever he is right now, can access it if the computer he's on is filtered. But it's also on deviantART, so it's not of any particular relevance here.

So it appears that it's been long enough since I looked at this thing that Blogger has changed a few things about the system. All improvements as far as I can see. And recent events have goaded me to perhaps revisit this old habit of mine. I feel the need to set my thoughts down if only to stop them flitting about and banging against the walls in my head.

God damn it, my down arrow is broken on my Lappy. You never realize how integral it is until it doesn't fucking work anymore. SUCK.

But yeah. Okay. I've been thinking about this whole Jeremy situation a ton of late, of course. Talking to a lot of people about it too - Brian and Katrina. Both of them reacted the way I would have expected. Brian was his usual incredibly insightful and helpful self, giving me advice on how to help bipolar people (he would know). Katrina, as I expected, thinks I'm fucking nuts, which is okay, because I think I probably am too.

The thing is that even when we were kids I was less analytical than she was. Less logical. But between she and I, that's always been the means of problem-solving. It works great for us. It appears, though, that the intervening years have only made me less logical, more intuitive, more inclined to act on my hunches. She and I can still understand one another, but she can't quite understand the things I'm doing now, because they no longer make any real rational sense.

I've never felt so strong as I do right now. I've never had such bottomless, unfathomable conviction that I cannot be shaken, that I will accomplish what I seek, that I can help him. And yet, the past few weeks - maybe past few months, really - have been so surreal that I frequently feel as if I must be dreaming. The person that I was - the rational, cold, analytical person who absorbed and spat out Ayn Rand and aced her Philosophy and Logic courses on debate alone - doesn't understand what I'm up to.

I'm gambling again, is the truth of it. I've always done this - involved myself in people with whom I became fascinated, embedded my energy and my abilities in their struggles, tried to affect the outcome. I don't believe this has ever been an altruistic habit on my part. I'm not altruistic in any sense. Up until now, I believed myself aggressively selfish, self-promoting, self-absorbed. I did these things, took part in the lives of these people, because it interested me. I would gamble - bet my emotional stability, my friendships, my livelihood sometimes - on the attempt to change someone else's life.

I've failed before. One major failure. It destroyed me for about four years after. So I know what the stakes are. If anything, they're higher now. I love Jeremy more than I loved Sara, and Jeremy is far more actively self-destructive than Sara was. I also have more to lose now. Brendon and I are arriving at our second anniversary of being together. He's the light of my life. I don't think that anything has the power to destroy that, or even shake it, but if something happens to Jeremy, it could certainly ruin my happiness in just about everything for quite a while. The same is true of B.

So it's another gamble. It's the hardest thing I've ever done - I've never fought someone so exceedingly eager to test me before. I've never tried to catch someone so far down. And I am staking more than I ever have before on this.

You think I'm nervous?

Fuck no.

Heh, it sounds crazy. This is why I think I must be just a little off my head at the moment. But no, I'm not scared. There is nothing in me, not a goddamn thing, that even begins to imagine that I might fail. It's not that I feel like I can't, like I don't want to - it's that it isn't a possibility. To get nerdy about it, even if I roll ten ones and critical miss this one, I can't fail. My skill modifier is that high.

I'm engaged the biggest gamble of my life, but I feel like a card-counter in Vegas. Yes, there's an element of chance involved. But you know what? I'm the best in the business at this.

No one else can do what I do. If there is someone else on this earth with my abilities, they're not anywhere near Jeremy. Circumstances have aligned to put me in a position to help this man, and because I am willing to do it and unwilling to give up, there is no possibility that I won't.

Why am I willing to do it? That's something that he keeps asking me, and I want an answer as much as he does. I don't like not knowing why I'm doing something, especially not something as potentially life-changing as this. So why am I trying to save him?

It's not because I love him. I do love him. I have since I met him, and having him here will only strengthen that. But that's not the reason I'm doing this.

Up until today I couldn't find an answer. I just felt a rock-solid conviction that I couldn't not. But today, as I was doing dishes and pondering, I found the truth.

I don't know why this is so. But I know that, in my intuitive fashion which has become the norm - so far divorced from the rational, pros-and-cons-stacking that I did even a year ago - when it hit my brain, everything in me spoke its truth. It resonated in me as things only do when my conscious and subconscious are in complete agreement as to my motivations.

I am doing this because he is worth it.

Even if I didn't love him, I would do this. Because he is worth it.

He is a person who has already brought such brightness and grace to my life, and who, as long as he lives, will continue to do so. There is nothing, no one, who can ever reproduce his effect on me, my life, my Love. Jeremy is irreplaceable.

I talk a lot about my daughter. I talk about her as if she were already here, as if she could hear me, as if she were a guaranteed event. In a way, she is. Like a relay runner standing in the turn, holding out his hand, she awaits me somewhere ahead in time, seven years, ten, waiting for me to catch up with her, waiting to leap into my body and into my life and through me into her own life. My Julia is already there, before me, and she is watching everything I do that leads me to her moment, her birth. I love her already. She is already changing me.

That, Jeremy, is why I speak so fervently of how you will affect her. She already knows you, knows how I feel about you. If she doesn't get to meet you, she will know all too well what she is missing.

For her, for Brendon, for myself, for Jeremy. I'm doing this because it is worth it. It is worth anything and everything I have to give. Maybe that's something that Jeremy won't be able to accept now. That's fine. I'm willing to tell it and keep on telling it every second between now and the end of the world. Maybe when her voice joins mine, when she speaks her love for you and you can see my adoration looking out of my child's eyes, maybe then you'll believe it. I'm willing to gamble on that chance.

Deal the cards, dearheart. And know now that you're playing with the fucking best.

Labels: Brendon, Hope, Jeremy, Julia, Love, Polyamory