the one that got away

alright, first of all I'd like to note I am sitting in the dark in my room typing this because my brain is holding my consciousness hostage until I deal with the emotions I'm feeling, and I am not in the mood to drug up to avoid feeling my feelings. It's not that I don't approve of the method, it's that it interferes with my sleep wake cycle in a way that ruins several days of work. And I need to be GOOD at work tomorrow.
So what I want to talk about is rules and guidelines, I set them for my brain, and today it has become official, I apparently can't follow them. For reasons that I'll get further into I have/had a rule established, a simple dating rule that has changed my whole approach to dating. This is it: chase girls that want me, avoid girls that dont.
Now that may seem logical in and of itself, but for various reasons in my late teens it wasn't, which led to the event I usually label: Max goes crazy over a girl. I don't mean crazy in a sweet way. I mean literally, obsessively crazy. Let's actually break down how crazy. I met my wife in the backlash of that crazy and it sort of led me to being stupid enough to marry her. THAT is how crazy. I was dealing with the backlash for over a year afterwards. And, here is the crazy part, the girl that inspired the feelings never had any idea, and when she did find out she rejected me. Again, life changing stuff.
But the point of today isn't just rehashing how bad that was, it's considering what is going on with me. I am single right now, for various reasons this is meaning I'm starting to slow down for the first time in a little over a year. At one point that made me realize I had loved my wife and I missed her. Today it made me realize in a way more real than ever that I do love someone else. I love the girl that got away.
So I won't name names, we can keep calling her the one that got away. But I realized, as I have several times and tried to beat it back into submission, that I love the girl that got away. I met the girl that got away one year ago. We had a one night stand, and it was clearly implied that was all it was ever to be. I felt amazing afterwards. I still don't know why, but I did. Then I didn't talk to her for three months, because shortly after the event she fell hard for another guy. I don't share women and I don't chase women who don't want me, those are the rules. Makes my life simpler. Then we started talking again, online. I started really opening up to her, I don't know why, I'm pretty easy to read if you want the truth. quite alot of things happened. She ended up pregnant. at one point she suggested we date, I had never thought of her that way, but once she acted interested, well it just made me think alot. In the end she ended up moving in. She became my best friend, though we never had sex, I never had felt that close with a woman, intellectually. We cohabitated very well. Then I had to louse it up. I started dating a girl who got jealous of her and I let that come between us, and she moved out and moved away. before she moved out the girl I was dating and I broke up, because the girl I was dating told me, quite explicitly, that I loved the girl that got away. How could I deny that I had feelings for the girl that got away? of course I did. I tried to stop her leaving, but I couldn't. So I dated another girl just to not be alone. that didn't work out. Now the girl that got away is dating another man, as she always has been. I feel like I'm last on her list of priorities.  Once or twice I've tried to talk to her about how I feel. She never tells me how she feels about me. I want her. I daydream about her. I think I might be in love with this girl who is my best friend, and I don't know how to tell her, because how could I? What if that ruins any chance of me having her in my life as a friend? How can I tell her that it makes me ache seeing her chase other men, when all I want is to be the man she wants? How can I talk about how much I care about her, and I don't care about sex, or any of that, all I care about is that she's my best friend, and I trust her with everything. Except this. I'm so full of contradictions right now. I promised I'd never want someone I couldn't have. Yet I want her. It seems many of the things I want I can't have. I don't know. I'm lifting it up to God, because heck if I know what to do with it.