A long time ago we used to be friends.
At least, I thought we were. These days I’m not so sure. There are a lot of things I’m not so sure about anymore.
I want to throw blame around – because that’s my way. I’ve been cast aside for the beautiful people, the clever people, the far more interesting people. And maybe I have. Most likely, however, my appalling behaviour, my random extreme hatred, my angry hurtling of words, my constant verbal tantrums have once more ruined something I valued. For a studier of history I am awfully bad at learning from the past.
I continue to stab at people and situations with my words. Pretending obscurity, pretending that you’ll never know what I’m thinking, you’ll never understand what I mean. Not really. No really. How I hate this game playing girl. Walking the edge and wounding with words. How can I continue to claim that I both mean and don’t mean? Can I really be so fragmented?
And I was talking about you and got back to writing about me. Maybe I have to be so self obsessed. Maybe I’ll be the only person who is ever that interested in me. That’s not a problem you’ll be having. I’m not even jealous. At least, not in the obvious way.
I’m sure I’ve written extensively on my jealousy; that charming constant of my nature and hurdle to interaction. Hurdle to action, if truth be told. Lately it’s lodged chokingly in my throat. It remains there now while I swallow hard and try to be a better person. Better but new, I think. I don’t know that one can go back and I seem to have moved on. No, at the moment I don’t like this new person either. She frightens me too. She’s fiercer and more practical and full of righteous anger. I think she’ll get things done and make things happen like I used to be able to do.
But I was talking about you. Talking about me wanting to be the person you seemed to like – quite some time ago now. Thinking about you and things I’ll not quite have the courage to say and the handful that I will. I miss the ease, the camaraderie, and the jokes. Things that I thought were there, shared, mutually enjoyed.
I start to think that I’m wrong from start to end. That I misread every word of every phrase. That I’ve misunderstood everything every time. This is me, you know, and it’s quite possible that I have. It is equally possible that I have not and that this is the tragedy I imagine.
With some friends you can have it out. Have a drunken session or some kind of clichéd heart to heart or just flat out say ‘what the hell happened? What went wrong? I miss you.’ That I can’t find any kind of option like that with you suggests to me that it never was. Any friendship was imagined on my side. Have you any idea how good my imagination is? No. I suppose not.
4 comments:
It's heart-breaking. But you only have one heart, and you have to take care of it. The practical and righteous forward mover of "newness" is totally worth sticking to but you also may need to give it time before it feels natural - natural to do without someone who used to be vital, natural to reserve your care for other people and experiences and natural to not feel undervalued because of their disappearance act. Let go of them, and let the colour return to your knuckles. The less you quake is someone's memory the less power their memory will have to shadow your everyday humanity tolerance.
The moral is that at nearly 31 I should be used to being dumped by friends when they're in relationships. It always happens. It's totally inevitable. But, yes, I'm more than a little fed up with it. It always makes me feel inadequate for some reason. Like I am a stop-gap until someone better comes along.
It happens Nails, for sure. I find distance does the same thing. Many of the people I used to hang around with in my Adelaide days are fading from the picture as our lives take different directions. I have to take some blame for that as it was my decision to run away to pastures new and is a cost of broadening my horizons.
Distance means that you keep the keepers and lose the rest. Which, right up until Facebook, was working nicely for me. Stupid not common enough name.
It's the not having any time for friends that bothers me about relationships. But, of course, you must be there if anything goes wrong and, as a boring single person, whenever other people have time for you. I'm almost certain that great books have been written about this.
Mind you, what I'm talking about in this post may be none of those things. It may be something else entirely.
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