It's never the time
Why would I spoil a perfect evening?
She doesn't need me anymore.
I know that should hurt. It does, a little. Not as much as I would have expected ten years ago.
I'm in the transitive stage out of adolescence and into adulthood. I have... ambivalent feelings about that. As I mentioned to Brian recently, I constantly find myself checking my own assumptions and actions against what I believed when I was thirteen, fifteen, sixteen - constantly asking myself, "If who I was could see me now, would I hate me?" I'm never quite certain of the answer. I can already feel myself justifying, rationalizing, settling even. As a teenager I was a creature of infinite passion and conviction... but then again, which one of us was not. I abhorred beyond all else the willingness to accept, to bend, to compromise. Of course, that doesn't survive childhood. It can't possibly - unless that too is just something I tell myself. Nevermind.
I can't be certain of anything anymore. I miss that. People say that teenagers think they know everything. I think the reason it bothers adults is because they're envious. I would give anything to be as perfectly, unshakably assured of the right path, of my own place on it, of the right thing to say and the things I wanted. There was a time when I would have said proudly that I had no regrets in my life, no guilt, and no sins. I remember understanding my own internal logic and morals and believing with flawless clarity that I had never violated them. I might make mistakes, or hurt others, but at the age of sixteen I had never done a thing in my life that I had thought was wrong.
My mother would laugh. I probably would too, in another mood. But I do miss that peace of mind. I cried myself to sleep more often than not in those days, sure, but I never had trouble sleeping. I never worried. I had grief and passion aplenty, but no stress. I had the answers I needed, and the ones I didn't have, I knew for certain I could figure out between me and Katrina.
That was it, wasn't it. Even as I got older and started to find things to feel guilty about, even when I made mistakes that I couldn't take back and hurt people in ways I couldn't fix, I still could tell myself that there was one thing I had always, always done well: I had always been her friend, and always done right by her. I never lied to her and never knowingly hurt her.
The trouble, I guess... is that those distinctions no longer have meaning. Hurting someone by accident doesn't make it okay. Sometimes even "sorry" doesn't. Sometimes nothing makes it okay, no matter what you do. I spent my adolescence never regretting or knowing what it meant to live with guilt, and to this day I have no idea how to absorb it. Something in me still expects a flawless record, still expects me to acquit myself with unfaltering righteousness at least by my own standards. When asked to accept that I have done wrong and cannot ever, ever repair the damage, it seems to go into some kind of grim loop. It can't begin to live with that. It can't even understand the premise.
So I got older and up until I was nineteen I still believed, at least in this one thing, I had never broken faith. And of course, when doubt came to that, it came to everything else. I don't have answers anymore. I'm no longer certain that I've ever done the right thing, because I have no idea what that might be. And there's guilt here, where there never was before.
This place we've come to now, this unhappy, rather frozen place between us, is so strange and yet, in hindsight, so inevitable that I can't help but wonder what would have become of us if she had stayed here, if we hadn't been separated. If I had been able to share that time with her, able to involve her in every tiny loss of confidence, and vice versa... what would we be now? Can anything so rarefied and pure as that bond survive the corruption, the corrosion of conviction that comes with growth? I am not the person I was, no. Nor she. But as I wonder whether these two people we are now will ever find common ground again, I'm forced to wonder whether, under any circumstances, we could have. Was this unavoidable? Is it worse if it was, or better? If I had spent the last five years in her constant company, as I spent the five before them, would we have found some way to preserve one another's sanguinity, or would it just have meant being forced to watch an inexorable erosion up close?
She doesn't need me anymore, not the way she used to. That would hurt more if I didn't know that it's been years since I needed her the way I did. It's been years since I cried myself to sleep because I didn't know how to help her. Years since she was the only one who knew me well, the only one I trusted, the only one I would kill or die for.
That betrayal, at the very least, was inevitable. I'm not fool enough to think otherwise. Unless I was to live alone forever, waiting on her time - which itself would eventually poison any relationship - at some point I had to find someone else to depend upon. I know that that didn't make it any less painful for her, and it doesn't make me feel less guilty. Every other infinitesimal act of neglect sprung from that, I believe. The last five years of numbly, nervously struggling to make things fit again like they used to... all of that came from that point, somewhere between when I was tormented by wondering what I would do if she moved away and when I found a way to live with it. Just that... finding a way to live without her.
I'm not the only one. She's found a way too, I believe. Trouble is, I'm no longer certain. Not certain of anything in general, and not certain of her in particular. We're not honest with one another the way we were... that excruciating, unflinching honesty that was the centerpoint of everything we shared. It's not the same. I omit things out of fear of judgement, she omits them out of... what? By definition, I don't know. I no longer know her mind. No longer grok her, as it were.
I'm coming to terms with the fact that it won't be fixed this way. Won't be fixed by bi-weekly phone calls where she talks about work and her boyfriend and I listen and try to find ways to share in it all, phone calls where I struggle to find things to tell her about a life she doesn't understand and I'm afraid to try to explain, a life whose particulars are so powerful to me and so mundane to her that, for the first time, the things that bring me bliss and pain and passion and power are completely and utterly trivial to her, and I am silenced by that knowledge. Without her here, with me and willing to devote real time to starting over, to retracing our paths to find where it was we went astray and bring one another up to speed, there's nothing we can do.
So here I am. Half of me trying, as it always has, to carry on pragmatically. To live without her and to live with my mistakes, to swallow doubt and regret and be glad of the joy in my life and try not to remember what I've lost. Half of me looking at myself from ten years ago and railing against my compromises, raging at myself for being lazy and fat and complacent and content, constantly tugging at everything I've messed up and can't repair, certain - always so certain! - that somewhere there are the right words to make everything right again.
I wish I knew them. I wish I could believe they exist.
I wish love was enough.
Labels: Introspection, Katrina, Love, Missing You, Stress
posted by Rivaine # 6:00 PM 
