The aftermath of any intense experience is always a time for reflection, meditation, and development of understanding for me. Depending upon the type of experience, this happens at different velocity; when I’m sad or sorrowful, it’s almost immediate, same day; when I’m indifferent, it happens very late and is usually very fleeting; but when I have been angered or had anger mix with the feeling of hurt and loss, it usually happens a day or two thereafter.
It seems tonight is the night I will finally work through the lingering remnants of hurt, anger, and disappointment in relation to something that occurred late last week. Well, the finale took place then; the actual implosion was a thing that stretched out over two weeks and began with what I find to be an act of extreme dishonesty.
In mid-March, I met a most amazing man. I found him brilliantly intelligent, surprisingly communicative, and oddly gentle. It was, for me, a beautiful combination that drew me in like steel filings to a magnet. We met for coffee, then again for dinner, and I was, quite simply, hooked. The interim between those first two dates was email and phone conversations that blew away the sense of despondancy and melancholy that had been my constant companion for more years than I care to tell you. It seemed that the more we exchanged, the more we communed, the more I found we had in common and, most amazing of all, the more I felt this man was truly capable of embracing and understanding me. In fact, I felt as if I was being churlish and cynical to do anything other than open fully to him.
So I did. I gave him insight to me that no one has ever had. I shared work with him; creative efforts that no other eye or ear has ever known. I shared secrets with him; recorded efforts of personal revelation and exploration that have never been shared with anyone. Over the month that I explored with him, there was no door locked to him, no page upon any book of my life’s library that he could not have with mere asking; the entirety of myself was handed up with a quiet fearlessness that was one of the most joyous challenges I’ve risen to meet in my entire life.
I was so busy handing him myself that I failed to notice that he was not reciprocating. At first. But I suppose it becomes obvious once one notices. Funny how that works, isn’t it? You aren’t noticing at all and then, the first time you do, suddenly, every instance of it is limed in neon and strobbing:
– the silence rather than eager follow-up about that next date.
– the email that goes unanswered where once response was quick, if not immediate.
– the call that goes to voicemail and is never returned.
– the passing of days without any interaction whatever.
These few examples are silly things, there are always deeper, more wistful ones; the ones that you know mean it’s unraveling, but you think that maybe, if you don’t look right at it, it might do so a little more slowly. Who knows? Maybe it will stop. It’s like the old saying about watched pots and boiling; some strange reversed axiom or pensive effort that is doing its best to overcome the small voice whispering from the corner that it’s already over, you just haven’t reached the moment where denial is impossible. For me, that moment came when I discovered that the day he wrote me to say we should just be friends was the very day that he traveled three hours to make a committment to his new partner.
My mistake, of course, was to think he was any more sincere about an interest in friendship. The first of several mistakes that eventually led to an explosion over unfounded accusations and the discovery that almost everything he had ever said or done in relation to me was a lie. Not the kind of lie you tell with an intent to deceive, the kind of lie you tell when you want to be more and better than you are and you wake up one day and find you can no longer afford to mean it. It’s still a lie, but it’s more that unfortunate sort you get when you err in thinking your ideals are really part of you rather than comfortable dreams you recline in to feel better about all the things you never quite get around to doing.
Like loving yourself, like actually diving into life and possibility, like refusing to let the fact that you’re a human; a being of continual change and growth who lives with the human fear of what that may bring get in the way of embracing something that nourishes the process.
It would be so easy to get angry about how he couldn’t be what he said he was. But that’s rather pointless. Humans do this as a means by which to eventually say it and know it true. It’s a process. How can one be angry for that? No, that’s not what made me angry. What made me angry was that he wanted to punish me for being someone who made it clear to him that it wasn’t yet true; for something that can never be blamed.
The hurt, well that comes from other things that have very little to do with him and much more to do with me. Perhaps a small sliver of it is shared weight, but only because he allowed me to see the man he wanted to be and, I liked that man. I liked him enough to not care that he was still manifesting. I liked him enough to be willing to embrace the various stops and starts that come with personal growth and manifestation. I liked him enough to show him the woman I wanted to be, too.
The rest of the hurt is mine… because I didn’t stop liking the becoming man just because the scared one made the mistake of attacking me. I still haven’t stopped liking him. I’m just not going to let myself like him more than he is able-but-not-willing to like himself…. or me. The ultimate weight of such failed efforts is never really about blame for me, but about that bittersweet sense of loss that comes for such tragic reasons. It’s impossible to soothe a fear that is used to deny and avoid change (not to mention that change cannot be avoided; it can only be warped into increasingly more painful inevitability; I do not want to be part of that process for any human).
The progression, for me, is from anger and hurt to sorrow and the sense of loss then, on to understanding and acceptance, and through it to indifference and release.
Tonight, it’s the transition between sorrow and loss to understanding and acceptance. The last, lingering weight of loss is the reality that embracing its fullness is to fully close the door and allow all hope of fruition to wither and fade. For me, it’s the hardest and most painful part because I’m a believer in infinite possibility; that things only become impossible when we say they are… and to have to admit and accept yet another one in the world is painful to me.
It’s all saudade and solemness tonight. I miss the feeling of belief and trust. I miss the man I thought I was getting to know. I miss the sense he imparted at our beginning that he looked forward to it all the same as I.
But then, I must also admit that I am missing the man who does not exist.
Yes, truly, that is the heaviest sense of loss indeed.