Author's Chapter Notes:
Kind of a short chapter, but we're getting to the Jim/Pam conversation from Philly Jim. That's next, in fact. And even though I said that you didn't have to read Philly Jim to understand this story, I'm realizing that it sure would help. I kind of overlap the two more than I thought.
At some point I think I realized that Jim might never truly forgive me. I had broken his heart, almost married another guy, and then didn’t reach out to him for months. Five months. And even though we did eventually get together, I realized that he might never let go of that hurt.
Frankly, I was getting tired of trying to convince him. I loved him. Wasn’t that enough? Did it matter that it had taken me longer to realize that than it took him? I didn’t think that it should. He obviously did.
I did wonder sometimes… did he really love me as much as he thought he loved me? Or had I become some sort of prize he had finally won, some challenge he overcame? Some distraction from the other parts of his life? Did he love ME, the real Pam, the inner Pam, or did he love some rose-colored idea he had of me? Sometimes I wondered if he would wake up in a few years time and wonder why he had made such a fuss over me to begin with. I worried about what he’d do when he realized that Pamela Beesly was just a girl like any other. Nothing magical or perfect – just a flawed girl.
We lived day to day, going through the motions. We weren’t unhappy, exactly. We were in a holding pattern. Living inside our own heads far too much, not sharing what we were thinking or feeling. Just … waiting.
I knew things finally were over when I found the ring in his night stand. At first I thought he hadn’t asked me because he knew I wasn’t ready. But after that conversation, I realized that he hadn’t asked me because he wasn’t ready. And as hypocritical as it may sound, I was hurt that he wasn’t sure about marrying me. After all this time, all these years, now he was having second thoughts? I knew that if we weren’t ready by that point, we never would be.
Even in the end, I fought my feelings, I fought inner Pam. I asked him why we couldn’t just wait, continue on as we were, even though that’s not really what I wanted. What I really wanted was to go back in time and break up with Roy after the senior prom and go off to art school in New York. I wanted to have an exciting, successful career as an artist, to date at least a handful of different guys, and to be almost 30, with all those experiences behind me, ready to marry Jim and start a family. But I knew I couldn’t go back, couldn’t change who I had been, who I was, who I was becoming. I knew that things unfold as they should and that I was where I was supposed to be, with or without Jim.
So we broke up. TV show and fans be damned, we broke up and broke a million hearts, besides our own, in the process. The first weeks were tough. I floundered, I second guessed myself, I debated going back to Jim a hundred times a day. But each day I asked inner Pam what I should do, and she always answered, “Just wait.” So I waited. I went to work, I saw my friends, I lived my life.
After a few months I decided to make a big change and leave Scranton. The documentary had made it hard to live there, constantly a sort of celebrity, with everyone’s nose in your business. I had such happy memories of my time in New York and my friends there kept trying to lure me back, so I eventually took a job for a graphic designer who worked out of her beautiful apartment in Manhattan. She paid me fairly well because she had no overhead and didn’t offer benefits. She mentored me and needed me and trusted me in a way I had never been needed or trusted in my job before. Although I was just designing logos and advertisements, I felt like I was contributing. Like I was creating. I felt valuable.
I shared a tiny apartment with Samantha and shopped at thrift stores and dug into my wedding savings once in awhile when I was in a pinch. But I got by okay. I loved every minute of living with a female roommate, staying up late, feeling young, even going out dancing. I thought of Jim often, but not so much with longing as with a sense of relief. He was free now. I was free now. We could both live authentic lives. If we were meant to be together, that would happen some day. And if not, something else would happen. So I stopped constantly questioning if I had made the right decision. I no longer was filled with doubt.
And at some point, I actually started noticing other men, started thinking that maybe being with Jim had gotten me ready for the love of my life. Maybe I had gotten him ready for his.
Chapter End Notes:
Thanks so very much to those of you who have left me reviews. You really don't know how much that helps motivate me to finish this, knowing that there are people out there who are waiting to find out the end of the story... :-*
