January's a horrible month. From what I can see, we've been oscillating between freezing sub-zero temperatures and heavy drizzly rain. At least with the rain, you don't have to stand outside hopelessly trying to bash ice off your car with a useless expired Matalan store card whilst waiting for your fingers to start falling off...
I've been thinking a lot about ice-breaking recently...
Firstly, things are back to normal with O. We've been chatting a lot recently and he seems fine. I guess I'll know tomorrow - it was his birthday on Tuesday so I'm going to visit him. It will be the first time I've seen him since he broke the ice about his feelings for me at the beginning of the new year, so I'm going to be on high security look out just in case, but I'm sure things will be fine. I'm really glad assuming he's back to normal - his outburst was not him at all and I was a bit worried about him. And I'm glad it never came to the point where I had to tell T about what happened, which is good.
T still has great admiration for O and I's friendship. I don't know whether he took a leaf out of my book, but T decided to break the ice with his ex, who he hasn't spoken to since they broke up over a year ago. He sent her a simple straightforward "Happy Birthday" text on her birthday, just over a week ago. Enough to say "Let's end this awkwardness and be civil to each other". And one week later, he got an equally straightforward "Thank you" back from her. I told T that I'd put the week long waiting period down to a lot of female analysing of the "Oh my god, what does he mean by his text?" type, just like us girls tend to do. Either way, I was proud of him for having the courage to finally make the first move. Apparently their mutual friends have been trying to piece things back together after the breakup and tiptoeing around them both, making sure they don't end up bumping into each other, and I hope for T's happiness that he can do that comfortably now. The ball's in his court to continue talking to her for now on, but for funsies, he decided to wait a week before getting back to her too 
I also broke the ice rather spectacularly in meeting more of T's family a week or so ago, namely his eighty-five year old gran. We went to hers for lunch, and his parents had also come down, which made it the third time I'd met them. Apparently, his gran has quite a few war time stories to tell - I think she was in prison at some point! I'm sure I'll hear some of them one day. I love T's family, they're all really nice, totally honest with each other, and make me laugh - his gran was talking about her neighbours, lovingly proclaiming in her Belgian accent that she'd "kill them" at least twice during the time we visited! T's quite like his gran as well - when he talks about her, I can hear a lot of his personality coming out in what he says. And he has her eyes.
Anyways, his gran had a spectacular house, with shiny wooden floors everywhere, including the stairs. I decided to visit the bathroom about ten minutes before T and I were going to leave, and on coming back down the wooden stairs, promptly fell from the very top step, on my arse all the way to the bottom, even though I tried to hold on to the curtains to break my fall. Luckily for me, I was out of the line of sight from the in-laws, but the resulting *thump thump thump* that they heard could only have meant one thing. I was quite shaken! Luckily, coffee had just been made, and I sat myself down in a chair rather quickly with a hot sugary cup to get my nerves back. After the shock melted, all that was left was sheer embarrassment. And slight anger - I mean, what sort of eighty-five year old has slippy wooden stairs in her house?! I made my excuses and went back towards the stairs just before we left, mainly to check that I hadn't ripped his gran's curtains down whilst I slid down the stairs on the super-notsofun-painful-slide, and I got a unanimous "Careful.." echoing from T's parents. I have never been so embarrassed in all my life! I just wanted to hide under a blanket after that! At least I know now to invest in a pair of slipper socks before I next visit. I wonder how long it will take to live that one down...
Luckily, T saw my embarrassment, kissed my bruises back to health and put a smile back on my face. He knows just how to make me smile! We're in that stage of a relationship where you begin to notice the little things about each other that you never noticed before, like T's insatiable love of mushrooms (I've never known anyone to eat them raw and enjoy them as much as he does!) and his slight jealous streak (I'll have to watch that one...). I'm beginning to introduce some of my strange habits to him, like my empathy for inanimate objects. For example...I ate the peas off his plate the other day because I felt sorry for them as the rest had been eaten...I'm certainly not "hiding the crazy" any more, I guess! And he's learnt that if he leaves my house after me, that my cuddly toys like to be tucked up into bed He also knows that I'm terrible with house plants (I have a long-suffering orchid which I can't seem to keep happy). On Wednesday, when we had decided to have a "proper" dinner date, he brought me a little miniature rose in a pot. When I joked about how I'd unfortunately probably kill it in a matter of days, he reached into his bag. "I wasn't sure if I should give you these", he said, with a knowing glint in his, "in case you were insulted, but..." and produced a bunch of roses. Fake ones that I couldn't kill!
I smiled from ear to ear at this gesture, and I love it that he's picked up on the little things that matter to me! I feel that I can tell T about anything these days, and I'm beginning to tell him many things about me that I feel he should know. In fact, I've already unleashed a few, such as the fact I joined a dating site shortly after I broke up with O to make some friends and get my confidence back (see my earlier posts; what T doesn't know is that I'm still in contact with three of them (purely on a friend basis - they all know I have a boyfriend now) and I don't know how he'll take it - see the end of this post), the scar on my back (lost my virginity on a rock in Italy with an Italian, stupid girl - I've found Italian men pretty creepy since, so it's only fate/sod's law that my boss is Italian!), and that I'm thinking about going back on the pill - when you're having more sex now you're off it than you were when you used to be on it, it's really time to start considering it again! Especially when you're still waiting for things to start being "regular" again before doing so - currently, they're every eight weeks, and the waiting period between 4 and 8 weeks with no show is a scary one! On a more sobering note, I've also opened up to T about what my dad was like - he died when I was 15, and I always spare a thought for him on the day he died, which was 7 days after the millenium. This year, I spent that day with T, so told him what the day meant to me. T started asking me all these questions about him as a person, which was nice, as no one's ever asked me things like "What was he like" before, when I've told them about him. The best side of sharing things with T and I is that we share the same work ethic (burn yourself into the ground) and have talked a lot about how we cope with it. I really appreciate that side of him, and I'm amazed to find someone who feels the same as I do about work. I thought I was alone in this! I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and it can be a real self-esteem killer if you make tiny or frequent silly mistakes in the workplace, even if they don't affect what's being aimed for in the long term (as you may have seen from my previous posts). It's good to hear his advice, and it's good to give him mine.
I'm gearing up to have the "So how many people have you slept with?" conversation with T (I had that with my housemate last night; she had a few skeletons in her closet, but her magic number (7) was still less than mine (11..oh god! And she's older than me!)) I'd like to know T's mainly out of curiousity. Whatever it is, I'm certain it won't bother me, and I'm more bothered about what he'll think of my 11 (although apparently you're supposed to marry your 11th...) but I cannot believe how someone as good as T between the sheets would not have had a considerable amout of experience. He has a lot of female friends...are they admirers too, or past lovers? He gets about twenty pokes at any given time period on Facebook, and maybe I have a slight jealous streak too, but I'd really like to know who some of them are...I'm almost ready to tell him that his "In an Open Relationship" status on Facebook (put there to deter his ex, and for a joke) isn't that funny to me anymore, and that I wish he'd change it as it does bother me - no wonder he gets poked so much! I've even threatened games of "20 questions" or "I have never.." to find out the answers to my nosy questions, but just haven't had the guts to do so yet. If I want to know his secrets about his past, then I've got to be prepared to give him a few of my own.
On a side note, T also has no idea that I blog...according to him, he doesn't understand why people do it... Hmm, I guess I won't be telling him that I do for a while then! Not that he needs to know anyway - the amount I talk about him on here, comparing how I used to feel about him and how I feel about him now; neither would be things he'd like to hear from me. So I think that one's probably left frozen.
But the thing which has bothered me the most recently is that I can clearly see that T is unhappy about something, but is currently refusing to open up to me about whatever it is. I wish he'd break the ice on that one. Over the past week when he's come to see me, he hasn't been himself. At the weekend, he slept almost solidly, and was very quiet. He was very funny with me after our date on Wednesday, and barely wanted to hug or kiss me. We usually have no problem telling each other how we feel about each other (usually, it's too much for me!) but he wasn't responding to any of the nice things I was telling him via the medium of pillow talk after we'd gone to bed. Eventually, he seemed to snap out of it, but I could tell something was bothering him. But no matter how much I ask, he won't tell me what it is. I know he's really stressed at work at the moment (although he won't admit that "stress" is actually how he's feeling), and that's the most likely reason, but when someone's been so open to you about work issues before and it's one of the main things you talk about, it's a bit strange to keep them all to yourself all of a sudden. I wish he'd open up to me on this one. Perhaps the pea-eating and cuddly toy arranging freaked him out? In that case, this is bad...The silent treatment is a sure way to chicken out of telling someone it isn't working. Oh god, I hope it's not that. The reason for the detected jealous streak is because of a work colleague of his. A forty-year old work colleague who lives with his parents and collects train sets urm, no thank you) is apparently "flirting" with me. If it's that which is bothering T, I wish he'd just tell me, as he certainly has nothing to worry about there! T also gets annoyed about me liking actors - we've been watching Lost recently and I have/had a thing for Jack and Boon...mmmm! T does not like it at all, but it's only a silly actor! It's not as if anything's gonna happen with either actor, so I don't know what he has to feel jealous about there! But if it is jealousy, I'm sure there are ways to fix it, probably via what I say to him. Maybe I'm too open with my feelings about Jack and Boon?!
The bad thing is, that with his lack of opening up, I'm becoming a little more closed with each day it goes on as well. I'm feeling that perhaps I should start keeping my distance a bit with T. Chill the relationship back in time a little, take things slow again. Not that they're tearing along at hyperspeed, or I'm some kind of bunny boiler (because I'm certainly not - give me independence over neediness any day!) but even revert back a month or so when we weren't as close. I'm just really afraid he's going to flip if I keep pushing the situation. Or possibly even worse, I'll flip, due to sheer frustration. Or even worse that that, that he becomes a complete closed book and that will become a reason why we may not work in the long term. Is he not opening up to me on purpose? I sometimes feel at the moment as if I shouldn't be letting him find out about all my little strange habits, my past and my fears for the future; that he'll change his mind, drop me, and laugh about them and my ways behind my back afterwards. Perhaps I'm not used to such a sensitive and thoughtful guy - O certainly didn't have any troubles like this that I had to deal with, and I've never experienced jealousy from my boyfriend before.
Come on T, break the ice with me. Tell me what's wrong so we can talk it through and get you feeling better. I'm here for you!
Take care, and wish me luck!
FPB
