can't breathe

Literally, I had 3 cigarettes tonight after 48 hours without any (P. only had Marlboro Reds which I wouldn't bum off him), I had a big Japanese dinner with P. and a friend of ours who is leaving here tomorrow, going home after 5 years, her boyfriend, and 2 other collegues of P.'s, and now it is 2.00 a.m. and I can't breathe properly. To be honest a bloated painful hard tummy doesn't help, nor does his constant tossing and turning in the mattress next to mine (he can't sleep either). I did drift off, but I have a tendency when I lie next to someone who tosses and turns like that to jolt awake.

The day whizzed past, as they all do. I went to work after going to the doctor to have my stitches removed (next time I should trust my intuition, I knew I could've done it myself). I was looking forward the whole day, as my tension accumulated over the past days, to my meeting with T. the behavioral therapist, but I ended up almost missing it, and comine 20 minutes late, because I was binging in my room, had several windows open on my computer, one a power point presentation, another a data file, another a web forum, and one was love letters I have been getting from a militant participant on one of the forums, who has identified himself as someone I know from the HIV forum. I don't know why this guy is so stuck on me, since we have never met, he is (presumably) HIV-, and he has obviously never seen me. It is like some kind of cruel joke. Here I am with my very real problems in another country, with my boyfriend not planning ahead and letting me go off alone to a family reunion he was invited to several times in another country (leaving Wed.), and never uttering "me too" no matter how many times I say "I love you", and the other guy is, like, "ïf it doesn't go well with you and him, know that I would marry you tomorrow". WTF?! He doesn't seem crazy, but he obviously is, and to me, that's some kind of abuse. The last thing I need in my life. I have not encouraged this guy at all asides from the odd occasional line here and there, and he knows, not only from the forum but from our correspondence, that I am in love with someone else. People are so troubling sometimes. They all seem to want something, and don't understand that I am exauhsted, and have very little to give, and the few resources I have are constantly being depleted.

T. said, close your eyes and imagine that you are in the cinema watching your thoughts on a screen, or feeling your feelings, including physical sensations. And when I was all alone with her in the small room, it really helped, as though she infused me with some of her traits. We are the same age but she has been in a relationship for 7 or 8 years, lives on an old farm with her partner, has the best job working 4 days a week doing counceling, not even therapy, but just reaching out and helping people in a practical manner like this, she is well balanced and well rounded, completely at ease with herself and the space she occupies in this world. T. would never poison herself with smoke, or let men do to her what I have always literally asked them to do to me, or bing to calm her anxieties. T. would get the job down, and her job would be entirely her own, not too big or too small, just right. But I am not T., my life is completely different (although, much better than it has ever been and that I could imagine possible; I have been yapping on and on to P.'s friends about people from my parents' generation who made huge life changes, either because they were compelled to by circumstances such as divorce or bankrupcy or because they chose to take a career path, even start globetrotting at an age when most people retire... and in all this while, I haven't said a word about myself, and nobody knows what's going on with me, and P. listens to the talk and collaborates with the lie, the pretense, that my life is, although he told me yesterday he wouldn't mind me coming out as a poz, but it's my personal issue therefore he has never told anyone of his worries, which surely must exist. Yet I know that coming clean as a poz is just one aspect, and that once you start getting real, you can't stop, and I am already in the process, and I can't stop, and the waves are washing over me, and no matter how much I will try to resist them with food and smoke, they will return over and over. My destiny.