You shouldn't date your coworkers. I didn't want to write another daylog but I thought the bad nights would be long gone by now and I'm running out of ideas. Dating someone you work with seems like a natural progression because you've already forged a bond through teamwork, you have a common goal, interests, all of that. I should have considered what would happen when it didn't work out.
I guess it didn't matter at the time.
It's been five months. I should be done with this by now. We started to build our machine that summer. The tubes. We clicked immediately. We became Team A. We worked on everything together. But I was content with Michael, I didn't see the spark. We were both physics majors, typically clueless about unspoken signals and tension. The day I told him about Michael was the day he was going to ask me out. Brilliant.
This is a good job. It's challenging, rewarding, relaxed atmosphere. I used to dream of working in an astrophysics lab. Our machine was successful in the end. A record-setting balloon flight around the bottom of the world. Who would have thought the tubes would get that far? I did. I knew they were built with love. Congratulations all around, but he's not here to share them.
I fell in love with him after Michael and I technically fell apart, though after such a run we didn't call it quits until long after the fact. I still didn't get it, no one else would actually like me absurd. He didn't get it either, never having a girlfriend though it's not as if the girls didn't like him, he just didn't know how. We worked together for over a year until we really couldn't avoid it the issue anymore. At that moment I felt as if I had no control over my fate. Maybe I was just looking for a way out of being responsible for my own future broken heart. It didn't work.
Shortly afterwards he took a position in another lab for a change of pace. I'd never felt so good.
I'd been graduated and he was in his senior year. He applied to graduate schools and was turned down. I waited around, enjoying my job and him and not knowing what to do next. My time with him was so intense, everything. I didn't know what to do and neither did he. It was a stressful time. I freaked out on a trip to California during spring break. How do you carry on a relationship you know will end? We should have broken up after that, instead he hid in his work and I waited. We reconciled eventually but only because we knew it would be ending soon anyway. After he left, well I got a one line email with a link to fark.com when the NASA press release came out. I did the same for Michael though, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
So it's not like I run into him in the street. There are just the artifacts left from our projects. The tubes. The tape on the ground where we mapped out the magnetic field. The foam cutter 3000, I used it yesterday. I'll leave this summer, and maybe then the nights will get better. Until then, hopefully this will help. Time to get some sleep.