The coincidence of timing is so tidy, so tight, so tailor-made, that I wonder if there isn't a bit of cosmic string-pulling that's jerking everything into place.

Dancing Brave turned two years old on Saturday, the same day yet another door closed loudly, painfully, maybe even wrongfully behind me and forced me to face forward again.

This time last year, I wrote that I my goal was to find a measure of peace and happiness before my diary's next birthday, and I've both succeeded and failed in that regard. I found a guy who magically was everything I could've hoped to find, and he fell hard for me. We were an addiction for each other, and unfortunately, it's one he's chosen to try and kick.

We spoke this weekend, with the goal of ejecting the giant elephant from the room before it ate all my peanuts. He admitted to being in love with me, but feeling unable to be with me. He admitted to horrible behavior and even a measure of cowardice. He admitted he's confused. He admitted it killed him to come to California and not see me, and it hurt him unspeakably to reach for the phone to call me and then heed his compulsion to put it back down and not dial. He's a gun-shy guy with a broken heart that hasn't healed in the roughly two years since it shattered, and it's keeping him from pursuing something that could heal his scars. Because he's scared. He's even scared to fully explain to me his reasons, because he's scared to say things he can't take back, should he choose to do so. There was a time when I would have waited through anything to allay his fears, but that time has passed. We're on my time now, and it's long past time for me to put my feelings for him away and try and move on, and try to pretend that it doesn't sear my soul to know we have a mutual need for each other that's going unfulfilled because he's an emotional coward.

So we're done. Which I knew. The call wasn't about trying to save anything but our friendship, and we're on pace to do that. It wasn't acrimonious. It was just painful.

I found that peace I sought with him, and then I lost it. But while that was happening, I got comfortable. I realized my friends were bringing me a different kind of peace and happiness that is the only thing that's gotten me through this ordeal. They've all listened to countless questioning, pointless monologues from me about what to do, how to cope, how I hurt. They've distracted me with laughter. When the loving, drunk voice mails started coming in Saturday night from him, Lauren leapt out of her seat in our populated living room to come sit with me and let me cry it out. She stayed up until 3 a.m., unprompted, simply waiting for me to get off the phone, both because she knew I'd need her and because knowing I was in the other room having my heart torn out left her restless and unable to fall asleep. Michael put his arms around me and let me literally sob on his shoulder, and if I'd asked him to stand there all night, he would have. Carrie and Jessica joined him in a group hug/pile-on that made me smile on a night when I didn't think anything else could. Just the cadence of Dr. No's voice cheers me up, but how lucky am I that he's also the kind of delightful person who cracks me up seemingly without effort.

They're the people who can put aside their own problems because they want to make me feel better, the people who believe with all their hearts that I'll heal and meet people and feel important to someone again. They're the people who hate Hunky Cameraman for making what they think is the biggest mistake of his life. They, and my sister Julie, are my best friends in the entire world. I honestly don't know how I got so lucky, how I got to be the greedy girl that hoards the world's best and most remarkable people in her living room, but I did.

Not only that, but I've gotten some inspiring and touching messages from people who've gone through something in their lives quite similar to the Hunky Cameraman situation -- one such experience was so eerily similar, down to the phrasing of the verbal daggers, that I shivered while reading it. I'm in awe that people read this in the first place; doubly so that they'd be so selfless as to share their own pain on the off-chance that it helps me understand my own. People are truly amazing.

When I began this site, it was to cope with beginnings. Thrown into a new city with a roommate and an extra thousand-plus miles between me and my then-boyfriend, I was living out the aftermath of my gut instinct to move to Los Angeles, and I desperately sought to define myself within these foreign parameters.

A year later, my story changed. The beginnings morphed into an ending: The anticipated collapse of my relationship, the one constant in six-and-a-half years of moving and changing and trying to adapt. My journey went from starting anew to starting over, dealing with the death of the show I'd loved for three years, the demise of Doug and I, and the ensuing daily battle to figure out who I was beyond being someone's girlfriend. Before I could do that, I fell hard for someone else, and that carried me to the big ending of this past weekend. The one that might've crushed me even harder.

So May 31, 2003, is a date I choose to mark as another beginning -- the start of a time when, comfortable with my wonderful friends and loving the new people we're meeting, I can shrug off the loneliness that so often shrouds me. It's time to figure out who I am and what I want, irrespective of a guy or a city or a current job. It's time to define myself not as a girlfriend, but as a girl.

I'll fail at some of this. As I'm learning, that's life. The guy doesn't always come back. The mental strength doesn't always hold up. The actual decision to put myself first, to be me above all else rather than someone seeking somebody, won't always be as easy as it is to type the words.

But for the first time, I won't feel alone in trying. And that means everything.

Someone got here by searching for: When you're not there the color goes out of my life Reading: The almost uncomfortably familiar story of felicityp, who is eloquently and classily struggling with the kind of hurt I've been dealing with, so if you have the chance, give her a read or just give her some love. She deserves it. Thanking: Everyone who's ever read a word here and not been nauseated by it. Everyone who's ever e-mailed me to respond to something in this journal. And the good people who make Jif peanut butter. I tried the natural stuff, and everyone said I wouldn't go back, but I did. I love you, Jif. Sniffe.