essays on love, part 5

What alcohol will do is allow for an ex-girlfriend to speak to me when really both of us would rather inhabit opposite sides of the planet. An obituary on my 79th birthday would be enough contact for her to make with me. When I'm sober. Somewhere where we don't have the same favorite bar and mutual friends. But I'll admit, as a product of forgiveness, I enjoyed talking with her. Today I can see many of her intentions in ways I wasn't privy to when we were dating.

She came up to me between turns playing pool with her friends. She had an "I know I don't belong here - and neither do you" look on her face. She asked me a favor. She asked me to not write about her in my blog anymore. I paused for a moment to think about what she could've been referencing. Beers hadn't blinded me to remembering what I'd possibly said about her. I just didn't care anymore. In the past several months I had moved on, and thoughts of her had dwindled down to nothing, or turned themselves into self-observation. I didn't hate her. I hated the person I had become when I was with her. Her presence in my mind was only an afterimage of the mistakes I had made and needed to learn from. When she began calling and texting me, only hours after we'd broken up, I knew that all I could've gained from her attention was far, far behind me.

Such a calm distaste I felt then. I wanted so badly to trust her smile and kind words, but some things even the blind can see when they're willing. Here is someone who claimed to have let me know them. Here is someone I'd convinced myself I loved. Here is love's potential for illusion, and illusion's potential for persuasion, and persuasion's potential for faith, and faith's potential for fear.

A vacation gave me insight to forgiveness: loving even the things that hurt you and knowing they cannot cause you pain unless you let them. When I read back over the blog post which had sent her over to me, I laughed and knew that she couldn't have read into the meaning with which I wrote. The only thing I can do for us now is the opposite of what she asked. I am writing about her. I am thinking aloud to the world with an absence of fear. Choose hate if you must, because there's certainly meaning in a strong emotion like that, and it's nothing that comes from someone else. It always comes from within.