Friends will always tell you that things will get better. It doesn’t matter what the reality of the situation is. It doesn’t matter how long the feeling seems to linger. It doesn’t matter that one day, these same friends may so easily become the purveyors of future grievances. They have to say it because there is nothing else to say.
Who we are now and who we were before the hurt, they may as well be two sets of people. Memories deceive, but so does anger, and with such a corrosive mixture, there really is no telling who exists where anymore.
I’ve been trying harder since month six came to pass. It didn’t feel right, spending most of my days sighing like a grieving and cuckolded widow. All those weeks lost to the sad glow and simplicity of benzodiazepines, joyless flings, and a bitter, defeated voice in my chest asking why I was never enough. Nothing helped, though it did move the time along.
I took up city bike riding as an exercise in trying something new to push the old back into a hole somewhere I hoped would be inaccessible. I moved, I quit my job, and I made some new friends.
As time goes on, though, people understand less and less. It will continue this way, as the new becomes the norm and the past appears to be left at rest. When I see something that hurts, it also comes with a sinking feeling that nothing will ever be the same again. As I get older, the same callousness that they showed me creeps up into my own persona. Having witnessed many best friends morph into bitter strangers, I knew it would always be a dangling in my life as a possibility. After all, no one with friends is such an exception. My own naivety laughed in my face when I saw it unfold, finally, in my own life. Who we were then—before all the hurt—we were different inside. Circumstance changes us beyond our control sometimes.
Riding past a near-full moon the other night, I remember how that same distant rock looked when I was in love with you. In the driver’s seat, parked with a front row view of the night sky. I never expected for you to love me in return, but somewhere in that core of me that I never seem to look at, I just wanted to be special enough.
Oh, but regrets and lamentations are for weak hearts, and mine is no longer so. I catch glimpses of you from far off, content to live a life without us in it. I do not regret the years I spent with or without you; in longing, in love or lust, always left with you halfway on board. It makes no sense to bring her into the equation. You and I were lost from the very first day. To new beginnings, I lift my empty glass to us all.
Filed under: life, writing
