some months ago, i told you of a dream i had in which we were no longer in touch. i told you how, in the dream, we’d been out of touch for months, and were no longer friended in the various places online we both enjoyed.
you told me that would never happen. i knew that it would.
some months ago, we were talking. you told me you’d left word with a friend of yours; a close, personal friend, that should ever anything happen to you, they were to let me know. so i would know you had not abandoned me, had not just disappeared like so many have in my life.
and i told you that if ever there went a month that you did not at all hear from me, it was highly likely i was dead.
and here, tonight, i sit… looking at the calendar and realizing that the one month marker is but days away…
and here, tonight, i sit… realizing that you’re gone, you’ve shut me out completely, and wouldn’t care were i dead.
and here, tonight, i sit… knowing all of it, and still, i feel the temptation to send you at least a short line to say i’m still here.
because i said i would.
part of my own, special brand of insanity… to be willing to keep caring because i said i would. to keep trying because i said i would. and to continue believing the things people have said to me don’t shrivel up and die, don’t become untrue, don’t becomes lies.
i am not letting myself. instead, i remind myself that you don’t want me in your life anymore… that the things you said and promised were transient, thoughtless things… meant only in the moment uttered and perhaps not even then… just a way to keep me where and as you wanted me, when you wanted me at all.
i’m tempted to send this to you. i am tempted by memory to think the abandonment is less than total, the binary absence of you, less than complete.
i am tempted by my own hopefulness, my own willingness to believe.
but there is that part of me that knows now as it did not even so recent as 25 days ago that i am the fool; that there is nothing for it because nothing you ever said to me was real.
were it real, this could not have happened. had you been truthful, had those words, all those tender, lovely words of friendship been true — i would not be sitting here, 25 days into abandonment.
i know this. and because i do, i do not send anything. not this, not something less direct, not a wave, a smile, a ‘hope you are well’. while all of what i might say would be true, you’d never really hear it.
practice teaches that when you know that nothing you could ever do or say will be more than harmful or an impediment to someone else, then the best you can do or say is nothing.
i try to tell myself that is what you are doing for me. but i don’t believe it. regardless, it is what i am doing for you. for me as well, i suppose. it is good to break old habits, particularly when they are so poor at anything more than creating more of the same.
underneath it all, the hurt trembles and the knot rises and i let myself cry even as i am angry with myself for crying. i soothe myself by saying i make the right choice, even if i’m making it late. and that it’s alright to cry when i need to… that it’s alright to miss you and to miss the feeling that the things you said were true.
i suppose it is grieving of a sort. it is alright to grieve a thing dead and gone, the only way past something is through it.
i do grieve, and i miss you, and i wish it were different. but i am moving through.