a half-remembered dream

Last time I sat on this patio, I was on the verge of moving down to Cincinnati. My biggest anxiety: “What’ll happen with Jessica and me?” The answer, as obvious then as it is now: nothing. It’s been far more than a month since we’ve last talked. My feelings for her died—as feelings unreciprocated tend to do—but discovering that she’s “with” someone else has brought a quiet and confusing pain. I’m happy where I’m at, but the fleeting thought, almost an ambient echo, “She’s with someone else,” makes my little koala heart hurt for but a moment. This pain, it’s surprising. To be honest, I was suspicious of this turn-of-events, and in my heart I expected it; but knowing it’s taken place reaches to a deeper plane where even eucalyptus can’t thrive. This pain creatures a triangle of sorts, each point as critical as the last, creating an object which has been (quite ironically) a weapon for centuries. Arrowheads, spears, tridents, you name it.

(1) The Potential of Us. Really, everyone has potential. But Jess and I, we had LOTS of potential. She admitted, I admitted it. As we wrestled through our feelings, the knowledge of this welled up within my an artesian spring of hopeful imagination. I imagined what we could have. I saw us falling in love, sharing life, growing up and old together. Foolish koala. A romanticized view of the whole ordeal, to be sure (and that’s putting it mildly; we are creatures of inconsistency). Now I know she’s with someone else, and the memories of us that never happened are altered, and now instead of seeing me with her I see him. Oh, these nostalgic and failed prophetic memories of what we could’ve had, fading out to what she now has with him instead of me. Ironic, isn’t it, that these fantasies fueling my hope have now become poisons turning my stomach sour and my heart rancid? (Addendum. And all the while knowing, as an aside, that (as has become clear), our potential wasn’t as top-notch as we once assumed. Chemistry? We had great chemistry, and everyone saw it. But potential? That’s a different bear. There’re lots of things in our social, emotional, and daily lives that would create drama. Our personalities and modus vivendi clashed at times, and we have different priorities in life. There were lots of things we’d have to wrestle through, different perspectives on life (and our equal stubbornness to cling blindly to them) that could very well have been the straw breaking the camel’s back.)

(2) The Loss of Hope (coupled with a deepening cynicism). How this turned out only goes to reinforce that old mantra of mine: “What you want, you can’t have; what you have, you can’t keep; and that which you love will, eventually, be taken from you.” Not too long ago I wrote out the Life Cycle of Hope. Hope leads to disillusionment, which leads to despair, which leads to resignation, which leads to hope. Or something along those lines. Everything that’s happened validates my cynicism, and my overall hope is weakened. Not snuffed out, just grown dim: there’s always hope, because once hope dies, there’s only one thing to be done. Suicide. And, no, I’m not at all in that place.

(3) Finally, there’s the selfish pain of seeing her advance in her career, finding a connection, and enjoying it. Not that I have nothing to be thankful for—quite the opposite, really—but thanklessness and envy—craving with an insatiable desire something that someone else possesses—is a hallmark of the human creature, and I am no exception. Luther was right: homo incurvatus en se. Selfishness aside—and we’re all selfish, let’s just be honest about it—there’s some element of pain in watching someone move two steps forward as I continually *seem* to take two steps back.

There are, of course, The Usual Suspects. Those old pals popping out from their hiding places to steal a quick “Hello.” Self-doubt, self-flagellation, the gauntlet of self-criticism, seeking to find an answer, a reason, for why things panned out the way they did. We as humans seek to endow most everything with meaning, and the reality is that sometimes—quite often, if not most of the time—these things have no meaning. It’s life, and much of life is meaningless. What happened with us, there’s no over-arching reason transcending the mere events themselves, nothing to make the chaos and stress and empty hopes rise like a phoenix from the ashes. The way I see it, what happened isn’t the product of fate or destiny, or even of God, but of the consequences of our choices driven by fear and selfishness. And while all of this is front-and-center in my mind, I know that soon this will be but a half-remembered dream fading to nothing with the breaking dawn.