FLASHBACK TO AN ANCIENT BREAK-UP
We’re on the phone, long-distance. She’s crying, I’m not saying very much and I want very badly to hang up. Once I hang up I won’t have to deal with her and I can go on with my life. She kept saying she was disappointed in me and that its not fair because we hadn’t even been dating for that long, that I didn’t even give “us” a chance. I saw it a different way, I didn’t get why it was such a big deal, we’d only been together for a few months and its not like we’ve been through a lot, in my head I understood it to mean her being in love with the potential of being in a relationship with me, or with anyone really…I thought she’d be grateful that I was honest, that I didn’t waste my time. I don’t remember if I said I was sorry; if I did, I know for a fact I didn’t mean it. I felt bad but I also felt annoyed. I wanted something else entirely. She knew I wasn’t sorry and throughout the span of our friendship afterwards, she continually found cause to remind me, however awkward the result.
Today we no longer speak but that’s not what this post is about. Whether I miss her is irrelevant and obviously emphasized by my reluctuctance to reach out to her, which is as simple as an email or facebook search. I don’t regret what I did. And I believe we are better off without a friendship. But since that break-up phone call to now, I have somewhere along that timeline apologized—not to her but nonetheless, I have recognized that I do owe her an apology. And she did teach me a very important lesson about people and how awkward situations can be, how delicate and fragile; how much a mistake it can be to respond lightly to that which others take heavily, struggling with the weight. I wasted her time, no doubt about that—I went in with the intention of wasting my time, of seeing she was available as was I and she was pleasant enough so why not? I never thought that she’d have time of her own, or I did see that but it didn’t matter to me. I enjoyed some of our moments together but all in all it wasn’t from a sincere origin.
That awkward phone call, that silence at my end of the line which had nothing to say but “I don’t know what to tell you”, that discomfort and all its echoing moments were nothing compared to the observation of one truth: I should not have gotten involved with her in the first place. I don’t regret how or why I broke up with her but if not for what I learned about relationships, I would’ve regretted ever having lead her on and no doubt playing accomplice in the reason we started dating. I never want to experience that again, the feeling of knowing I purposely wasted another person’s time, because I didn’t consider what was viewably present and thought it wouldn’t matter later. I’ve been in different sorts of relationships since then but I feel I stepped into them sincerely, I’ve wanted every girlfriend since then, exceptionally more so, thats the difference—at least for me.
Anyway, just something I was thinking about this morning during my train commute. Its so strange what people see, as well as what we display unknowingly—Is any of it real or created by the observer based on what they see and know themselves to display, without knowing what they themselves display unknowingly?
