18 February, 2002 - 11:30 p.m.

So a little more to this allegation that my boyfriend is cheating on me, okay.

I mean, I've spent my day trying to persuade myself that it's nothing more than an insecure girlfriend's rampant imagination - but if that's the case, then I think that I, as the objective person that I know I am, would be able to come up with some easy way to allay my fears, and not give it another seconds consideration.

As it is, I tossed and turned like crazy last night after a friend said something to me as I dropped her off at home after our weekly sunday session beachfront pub/club crawl, and I don't particularly want to spend another night like that.

I don't know if getting the thoughts out in black and white print will do me any more good than saying it aloud to a friend. But right now I guess anything seems like a more appealing option than sitting alone with my thoughts swimming in and out like schools of fish in some tank. All these gorgeous living, breathing things stuck behind panes of glass. It's like I think I'm finally getting somewhere with my thoughts, and then WHAM! I end up slamming into that goddamn proverbial brick wall. Sure, it all sounds romantic and all, but in the end, that's all that my thoughts seem to be. And it kind of blows, if you don't mind me coining a much loved phrase from my highschool years.

Let me delve a little further into how I came to my conclusion, and you can see for yourself why I think that things are as they are. Or might be. I'm still giving him the benefit of the doubt until I can speak to him. I'm not entirely sure if I believe in the whole "innocent until proven guilty" frame of life, but I guess I don't want to ruin something that could be great with some girlish bad judgement.

I was hanging out at his place late Saturday night with him and his friends, and I passed a general query around the group to see if one of them had this particular text message on their phone that I was after. One of them said that, indeed, he did, and started randomly scrolling through his messages to find it for me.

He alighted on what he probably thought was the right message, and handed me the phone. I look down at the little blue screen and read the short, but bitterly-sweet message.

"hey jason, can you please ask marty if he's found my earring next to his bed. I think I lost it go [sic] the tumble last night ;-)"

.. for those not in the know, the "go" was obviously just a mis-placed automated word completion on a mobile phone.

Anyway, I've read the message several times .. and I have what I've been told as a fairly expressive face - at least when my guard is down, and it was certainly down at 2am on a Sunday - so if the look on my face even managed to convey half of what I was thinking, then I'm fairly certain I must've looked like quite the shocked little girl. His friend must have seen my expression, and grabbed the phone back off me with a quiet, but oh-so-audible-to-me "fuck!" before scrabbling through for the right message, double checking it, and then handing the phone back to me, and walking quickly away.

The whirring inside my head hasn't stopped since that moment, and try as I might, I can't come up with an excuse that sounds plausible enough to my ears that I would want to hear it from him.

It doesn't help matters any that I won't get to see him until Friday night, and even then it won't be until late as we both have plans with different sets of people. As the plans were made, I wouldn't even be seeing him until Saturday afternoon, but I don't think I could bare to spend the first half of my weekend wondering if he's rolling around in bed with some other girl.

And as juvenile as it all sounds, I don't think it's fair.

I don't want it plaguing my mind when I have so much other stuff to do. I don't want to be the girlfriend who doesn't/can't trust her partner. I don't want to be the one who didn't see it coming. I don't want to be the one who falsely accused her boyfriend with no justification behind it.

I want to have my facts straight. I want to be able to trust him. I want to be the girlfriend who laughs off somebody implying that her boyfriend is cheating on her, and be certain that I have no need to worry. I want to know that when he looks at me, I'm the one he wants to be looking at.

But I think most of all, I don't want to be the girlfriend who got cheated on .. because then I'd have to come up with a reason as to where I had failed him and fallen short of what he wanted.