She never made the time because she thought she had all the time.
It never occurred to her that every moment is a gift, or that none are permanent or even guaranteed.
It’s not her fault. Life happens. You get busy. You choose what is closest or easiest, what is fastest and less likely to introduce any unexpected factors that might disrupt well laid and considered plans.
But there is a flawed premise sitting under all of that; it is that one could ever hope to calculate all the variables to a high confidence of relevancy… most humans, frequently myself included, tend to consider only upon hitting an obsticle; even then, more to conflict with the obsticle than adjust oneself, one’s desires, and one’s intentions or interests.
Or, as someone more pith than I once said, “People make time for what matters to them.”
The unspoken inference and eventual deduction, of course, being that if you are significantly excluded from the “time” (i.e., active presence, relation, companionship, etc), you do not matter — to them.
Maybe it’s just that one doesn’t matter “enough”, but I have often seemed to find that I am difficult to be around. I’m not a bad person, I’m just living my life, my way, and not much caring if others believe they should be able to dramatically influence my choices to their preferences rather than my own.
Ironically, she would say exactly the same thing. For exactly the same reasons. And we are both completely “right” in ourselves to feel this way.
The simple truth is, I have only recently begun to actually LIVE my life in alignment with my own interests, needs, and wants. I find I am remarkably territorial over it all – to the point that I self-seclude because I just don’t think it’s fair to run about afflicting others because I am still working out where the balance is in relation to my own interpersonal boundaries and those of others.
She had a reasonable expectation that I would be a particular way; she had no way to know that it was practically impossible as I never knew that way, that reality… how could I possibly create it for her?
I tried as best I could. I navigated by opposition to all the things I knew all too well. It was an extreme navigation, like the berth a new mother gazelle gives to carnivores on the plain. Nothing elegant about survival, be one gazelle or human.
It was never good enough. How could it have been? You don’t plant in fallow ground, you can’t plant corn and expect to harvest wheat, and even getting it all “right” is demonstrably no guarantee of engendering “normalcy” in however many moments you managed it (because they are all, irrevocably, transient in nature or nurture; life and change see to that).
So, I ended it. Because I cannot be other than who I am and she cannot accept me as I am. And she ended it because she cannot change who she is and I cannot accept her as she is.
And we are both sad and suffering as we pretend not to do either and wait for the day when it’s less than a reminder seen in every glimpse at the world around us.
But I hope that’s only me. I fear it is not but I will ever hope that it is.
//obsh//