disclaimer — i stopped kicking myself over things like this a long time ago. humans are fraught with contradiction and when in the process of creating new patterns to replace old ones, moreso. this moment, in which i am thinking and soon to write more of the same about something i’ve said i’m letting go of, is just this moment. like all moments, it will pass. and the thoughts become less strident each time.
this is more of the things that will remain unsaid outside this place. they are not new things, more like reiterations of old things; me reminding myself of how i tried, how you lied, and why this moment, as it is, is precisely as it should be.
it is a fact of life, learned by hard experience and no little heartache, that married men do not seek female friends. anyone who says otherwise is either lying or in denial. i think i did a little of both, myself. but no more.
the thing that irks me the most is that it wasn’t impossible. even as i sit here and know it was completely impossible. that sounds contradictory, until you realize the first statement was true until the second one was said.
it was not impossible until he decided it was impossible. it was not impossible until i saw it was for him.
i don’t suppose this will make sense to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but i didn’t love him like someone who wanted to ‘have’ him, i loved him like someone who wanted to spend my life knowing him and seeing him happy.
he, obviously, never got that, never understood it. i don’t know why i’m so surprised, because most people don’t get it and will never understand it.
i admit my being an alien. i love people and want to see them happy and it never has anything to do with tying them to my ankle or ‘having’ them or making them follow some outline of what i think or feel they should do or be.
and it just seems most people in this world don’t know how to act or react to the word ‘love’ when it doesn’t fit into their preconceived notions of ‘what that means’ or ‘how that acts’.
agapos, you know. just as you are, without any condition.
i wanted to know his family and be able to send birthday presents. anniversary presents. he never wanted that, of course.
and yes, there were times when i wanted more of and from him than i should have… he cultivated it, rewarded it, and when i realized this, i told him point blank i wasn’t willing to indulge it, that i wasn’t there to be whatever it was he felt he was missing from his wife or whatever secret lacking he held close and nourished manly grudge over…. (wry grin)… i suppose we’d still be in touch were i willing to do that.
but i wasn’t willing and once he figured out i couldn’t be budged, once i made it clear that i wasn’t willing to be the secret, the guilty sharing, the truth of it was simple enough for him to reveal…. that i was never his friend, that all the kindnesses were ploys; coy plays to pull me closer to the line he wanted me to cross.
he was no friend to me, even as there were moments in which i felt so sure he was my friend.
six months now….. six months of dead silence and there will be many months and years to follow, eventually i will stop counting. for now, there is an odd, painful pleasure in it as i prove to myself as many times as i may need to that he is not and never was my friend… i remind myself when i am tempted to think tender, missing thoughts.
i remind myself that it is six months and counting… and that married men do not seek female friends…. and that no matter how much i wanted to be a loving friend, all he ever wanted was his vapid fantasies and all he ever saw in me was a convenient form from which he might cast them.
the quiet statement that inevitably follows takes a little longer to do so, “i wish it were different.”
i look forward to the day when i no longer say it, no longer think it. i look forward to the day when i forget completely.
but it is not yet here and what is here hurts.