The Sixth Day
It has been five entire days since I've had a cigarette. My sleep pattern is way off and I've been having weird dreams. Like, last night I dreamt I was walking around in the airport and all these weird things kept happening. At one terminal, the hallway turned in to like a mining pit and we slid and slid and sild down the gray rubble to the bottom. In order to get back up we had to roll over a bunch of snakes, (I didn't even see the stupid movie), like you roll on the grass as a kid because walking on them would have just pissed them off. They were black and skinny.
Then other things kept happening and at one point some little kid was asking his dad for black Bible....black seemed to be a recurring color; one I've never really dreamt about. (There was, of course, a lot of blue in this dream....a color I always dream about.) Then I was at the American Airlines terminal and a whole crap load of military friends were there in their Class As and they looked so young and so many of them had braces...very, shiny braces that flashed as I passed them and they smiled at me. I was smiling at them of course because hey, they're military and they deserve the recognition.
Then I had to find my way to my flight and the entire time I was carrying a pack of cigarettes in my hand and I remember really, really, really wanting to smoke but I was meeting someone and didn't want to fail but kept thinking of sneaking off to just go have a quick one....I never did though. Then I got on the plane, and as in all my dreams about planes, I get on the plane and either panic so hard in my dream that I wake up, or panic so hard that in my dream we crash. I hate flying. This time the cat woke me up before we took off.
But I figured it was a good sign that I could make it through the fricken airport, get on a plane and still not smoke because that is one of the most stressful things that I would have to do.
Really? I think it's quite the opposite. I think when you give up expecting someone to do things the way you want them to do them is when you ADD value to yourself as a person. Sure, no one wants to be cheated on and you do take vows when you get married where the other person promises to honor you, love you, cherish you, respect you, etc. You hope they hold those vows, you put trust in them that they will but you cannot expect them to honor them. "I expect you to do this and that and not do this and that!" No. You don't get to do that. Maybe in time they change their minds. Maybe in time they do go out and cross that boundary. Or maybe they never did but you never gave them the chance because you've been sitting there expecting them to act a certain way, do certain things, say certain things. "I think he's cheating on me because lately he's been. (not acting how you want him to)!" Ask them. If they say they have? Well, frankly, the choice is, you can either accept that they did this and work on it or you can say, "You crossed a boundary, I cannot accept that and I will now move on with my life without you in it." But you do not get to control another human being by placing expectations on them. You do not get to control how another person thinks or feels and any actions they may take. We all hope that if something isn't right the other person will approach us and TALK about it first before just going off making such decisions but you can't expect them to do it.
Now I work on day six.