Perspective is a funny thing. This, a statement reiterated of old, is my way to working to come to grips with the inevitable reactions of encountering people I once felt a closeness to in circumstances after the “break” or change.
I thought I was over the feeling that they had been so deceitful and selfish. But to sit in the same room, in proximity, and see them laugh and joke and be so utterly unconcerned, unaffected, uncaring when my stomach was hard as rock and memories of how it felt to discover lies where I had trusted and expected truth were rushing over me like reliving… I wasn’t expecting to feel hurt all over again. I wasn’t expecting to still care about any of it.
I feel like a fool. I feel betrayed and validated as an idiot. The comments and reactions of those around us making it so very clear that discretion is hardly a trait exercised by them, I felt as if they were all watching to see “the show” and the hurt of that combining with the experience of care and loss were like daggers in my mind.
Why? I ask myself. Why does it still matter? I know the answer of course; It is the ancient wound, throbbing in the far corner. It is the whispering woman in the attic reminding me with a certain, savage glee, cackling with the angry glee of the “I told you so”; the hissing reminder of more things than I care to put on the page, though most of them are known to anyone with more than casual knowledge of me.
I am crying and I am angry for it. I don’t want to hurt for them. They don’t deserve even my tears. I think about them laughing and joking and being so completely unaffected and unconcerned and the realization of just how unimportant I was, just how uncaring they were… gnaws at me.
I suppose grieving takes time, but I am angry for the sense that I have no recourse or control but to bite it all back and do my best to pretend that it never mattered to me and it doesn’t matter now.
Worst of all, I’m angry at myself for having that flicker of a thought in a direction I know all too well is pointless delusion and futility. What is it about the things we hoped existed that makes them so hard to let go? Clinging to what one wished and suffering for its lacking is the ultimate foolishness. Self-inflicted pain.
They were never what they presented themselves as, they will never be so, and the reminder of it all is all I find whenever I see them. It hurts. I don’t want to remember believing. I don’t want to remember trusting. Not with them. I don’t want to remember in the face of that smirking, casual presence that has already recovered and reminds me in every moment just how ridiculous I was to believe by proving just how easy it was for them to let go, move on, and forget.
There are some roles I never wanted to play. The roleplay entendre is a sharp and ugly thing.