Last night he started to increase the pressure on me to get back together. He claimed he just wanted me to "keep an open mind" and "not shut him out", but even when I agreed to those things, it wasn't enough. He kept trying to get me to remember all the good parts about our relationship, and I'm not kidding, I had a really hard time remembering even one day where we didn't have some awful fight. Then he accused me of "focusing on the negative"... and so on.

Finally he was so upset, he asked me to just hug him so he'd feel ok, and like the sucker I am, I agreed. It felt wrong, though. I squirmed out of the hug pretty fast and went back to trying to find a wifi signal. But after a second all these memories came flooding back to me about the past, and something came out of me that I've never felt before.

This is the only time I've ever raised my voice at him, or anyone, completely unprovoked. I turned to him with fire in my eyes and said:

"You do NOT want to bring up these memories with me! You want a hug and I give it to you, because I'm a nice person. Do you have ANY FUCKING IDEA how many times you were mad at me, and I BEGGED you to hug me, and you wouldn't TOUCH me, you wouldn't even LOOK at me! You better be careful what you ask for, because you NEVER fucking gave that to me."

I guess I shocked both of us -- by the end of that, my voice was louder than I realized it could be, I was out of breath, and he was cowering a few feet away from me. "Sorry. I'm not trying to be mean. It just brings up a lot of memories."

I'll give him one thing, though: persistence in the face of a completely impossible situation. Brian, I don't love you. I don't want to love you. Give me one good reason why I should even try to feel something like what I felt before. But he won't give up. It's kind of sad to see him so weak, when what attracted me in the first place was his strength. Now I'm the strong one. I may not be happy, at all, and I could sure use someone to sweep me away and make my life happy, but he is no longer the one for that, the way he used to be.

I'm not afraid anymore and I never give in. It's a nice feeling. "We're not having this conversation." What a beautiful thing to be able to say.

In other news, San Francisco is still cold as fuck, but I love it here. The people fascinate me. I don't know if it's really the people, or if it's the stories I make about them in my head. Whenever I'm here, I can't stop thinking "These people LIVE HERE!" I've tried to live here so many times, so it amazes me that it works for some people.