So. I went back. I remembered what it was like to see her again. I came home. I suffer through the reasons I let myself forget. And here we go all over again.
Such a strange little chapter of my life. Everything’s ordinary as can be, comfortable with just enough excitement. And then I go travelling for June, and come home shattered and uncertain, spending July putting myself back together, piece by piece.
It starts at a party, conversations with my friends and their girlfriends, who hadn’t been around last time she was, had only heard a story or two, an offhand remark.
So I tell them, in the easy casual way you retell an old story, so codified and ritualized it hardly seems real, feels too far away to really be true, to hurt.
And eventually we get around to the question I would have dreaded, if it weren’t settled nicely in a blind spot seven years wide: “So why are you still talking to her?”
The next day I see her again, for the first time again in something like a year and a half, when we spent every night for a week staying up late talking in her room, until it’s finally too much, gets too emotional, and talking turns into everything else.
I thought I’d be over her. But it took all of 10 seconds to figure out I wasn’t, not really, and the rest is just consequences. She’s angry with me for ending the things that started happening between us last time, doesn’t want to get jerked around, but she’s not over me either. We dance around the obvious truth and when I leave we’re both asking what the hell do we do now.
…
It’s nice, you know, having those feelings for someone. It felt good to remember, for a little while. With the past so far away I can almost believe it won’t matter anymore, I can almost say to myself that she’s changed and believe it, I can almost look at all the misery objectively and move past it.
But it’s been another month, and that kind of lie doesn’t hold up quite that long.
So here I am, back almost exactly where I was before I went back.
There’s many jagged little pieces to it, scars and shrapnel that hasn’t worked itself out. There’s so much, the worst part of dealing with it has always just been trying to piece it together, to build a picture of what the damage is actually like. So I can’t say anything with confidence, but…
Well, this is the wound still bleeding after all these years:
We broke up, after she spent the night talking to the guy she kept saying she’d stop talking to. For a couple weeks after, we were trapped in this weird limbo, trying to figure out where we were now. The next day we talked about how our relationship was fucked, but that ‘we’ weren’t over, that she needed space to figure shit out on her own.
Which was fine, except that her going out with the guy she’d been cheating on me with was part of figuring her shit out. And god, the way she talked about it. Like that was normal, like of course she could do that and come back to me (in a couple years, when he was out of her college) and everything would be fine.
And I couldn’t make her hear me, that doing that would destroy us. I couldn’t reach her in the insane desperate place her mind had crawled and show her the heinous reality of what she’d rationalized herself into.
The heinous reality which then became the defining feature of my life, which forevermore lives alongside any thoughts I might have of her now.
… which is my excuse, even if I hate excuses, for pretending I didn’t have any anymore, that I didn’t have feelings for her.
Because, really, the most vicious cruelty of the whole ridiculous affair is that, horrible as everything she did was, I still care about her. I still like her, rather a lot, as a person.
I can even start to see all of it from her point of view: how her fears and insecurities about me, about how serious our relationship was, alongside the gruesome culmination of her twisted family life in the form of a messy divorce started fucking with her head. How she started confiding in a guy who seemed safe because he was pining over a recent ex, how he started playing on all her fears as every piece of her life worsened to the point of crisis. How she’d been taught by her parents to think of herself, everyone, as helpless, as needing outside help to fix internal problems. How she couldn’t believe me anymore when I said she was good, and thought he was the only way to fix herself because he was so happy to tell her everything that was wrong with her and how he could fix her.
It was a long time ago. And when I see her now… there’s still her old brightness, no worse for having been tempered by tragedy. Her eyes squint to slits when she smiles, or when she’s surprised. There’s an edge of wildness to her, an animal not quite domesticated, and it’s impossible to be sure when she’s angry with you because she’ll hide it behind just the same smile, and laugh when she inflicts it on you.
I don’t know if I love her, if I did once - when you’re young, it’s easy to confuse liking someone, appreciating who they are with a person, as the deep strangeness of love. I paid enough for that lesson to not want to learn it again. But I certainly do like her.
…
So I’m stuck, caught, torn.
We’ve been through the cycle enough times now. It needs to stop.
I like her. We get closer. The memories boil over. Swift, violent separation. I forget.
I care about her. But what’s between us… it isn’t about forgiveness, it isn’t about revenge, it isn’t about anything. It isn’t a question looking for an answer.
It’s just a fact, now. Memories. Things which happened, which by their existence… hurt. Like all the fucking torture in every layer of godsforsaken hell.
And I don’t know what to do.
I wanted to stop liking her, caring about her, having any kind of attachment to the good things about our past… but I guess those things are all just facts now too.
I’m looking for an answer, begging for a question, for something I can solve, for some way to fix this, to get past it, to stop being trapped between my affection and my misery.
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