Whatever I call it, the events in question have been weighing on my mind -- increasingly so as each year passes, so here's the whole story. It's long, but bear with me. I have to get it all out.
The characters, serendipitously, are "D," "E" and "F."
I fell in love with my best friend when I was in college. That was "E." He and I were inseparable... everyone thought we were an item, but I seemed to be the only woman he didn't want to be involved with. It was incredibly difficult for me.
This went on for the better part of ten years, until I'd finally had enough of daily (sometimes more than once daily) phone calls for hours, yet knowing it would never go anywhere. It hit me all at once... I was done. I took an 8-hour bus ride to give E the, "Put out or get out" speech, knowing what the answer would be but needing the closure. Predictably, he declined, and I bailed on our friendship, and we didn't exchange a single word until I sent out invitations to my wedding 3 or 4 years later, and that was the end, for good, of even a shred of romantic interest I had in him.
We're friends nowadays, but since that conversation almost 15 years ago, it still ends there, and always will (for a number of reasons).
In the course of our early friendship, however, I crossed paths occasionally with his older brother (we'll call him "F"), who I also thought was pretty adorable, but from whom I got a vibe like he didn't like me, at least the first few times we ran into each other. I can't remember when that changed, but eventually we connected on a geeky level, which of course was right up my alley. At some point, he told me how several people in the past had promised him a copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special, but that none had ever followed through, so of course I added myself to that long list of people who pledged to furnish him with a copy.
When I did the "Friend Break-Up" with E, I took a week or two to come to terms with it, but I'd basically been tired of his bullshit for long enough that I didn't have much residual baggage with which to part. However, I did remember my promise to F about the tape, and I felt like that was the last scrap of unfinished business to tidy up (plus, I really liked the guy in his own right), so I made him the copy and got in touch with him. He'd seemed so sure that I'd be yet another person who'd let him down that I was hell bent on not doing so.
While I couldn't have said so at the time with certainty, in hindsight I'm a little comforted to know that my intention really was that I wanted to be the one person who finally came through with that promise. There really was no ulterior motive, thank goodness (which I'd feared for a while I might be lying to myself about). At least I'm not a piece of shit in THAT sense.
Of course one thing, as they say, led to another, and I found myself falling for him.
And that's when things got fucked up.
Had it been me as I am nowadays, it would have been just like things were shifting into their proper order. I'd probably have happily moved back to NYC with F (or at least arranged to be in his vicinity long-term), and from there, who knows? Since it was me 15 years ago, though, trying to figure out the right thing to do was like trying to find the one lightning bug in a tree full of blinking Christmas lights.
For one thing, I'd been battling severe anxiety/depression for most of my life, and it had gotten a lot worse over time. It's a chemical thing -- it turns out the right medication (which I was put on a couple of years later) controls it beautifully, but at that time it was a real problem, and it was (emotionally) like looking through someone else's glasses, if that makes any sense. Frankly, it was a terrible existence. My base-line mood was one of looming dread, and the dial just went up from there. I was obsessive, I was socially retarded (though I'm told I hid it well), and I was ball-shrivelingly terrified of being in any kind of "real" relationship, though that last insight is one I didn't figure out until years later.
Making matters worse was at least one person in my circle of friends who I later discovered is/was just as unbalanced as I was, but in different ways. Worst for me was that she had a skewed view of the world and other people's motivations, so while I can't say she intentionally lied a lot, but let's just say she tended to muddy the waters of whatever drama was currently playing itself out, including my interaction with F.
Add to this mix the guy (who we'll call "D") who came upon the scene around the same time, and who took a shine to me, though not as much as F had.
Finally, factor in how my skill set was pretty much at zero when it came to handling this sort of thing. As a high school student in an all-girl's school, I had minimal reaction with male peers. I was never a beauty, and to this day I don't think I've ever been asked on a date. I had a couple of boyfriends before I moved to NY, but in general I was in very low demand. The only people I've ever dated were men who started out as friends, but I was always a little at sea. Little girls are taught that at some point boys will start to ask them on dates, and that passively waiting for that to happen was what one did. The fact that this never came to pass for me, plus the added confusion of being seemingly so important to E for so long with no romantic interest on his part, led me to conclude that there was something wrong with me, and I'd just have to deal with it.
It's a very complex thing to try to sum up briefly, but the net result was a total lack of a frame of reference for any kind of healthy romantic interaction. I had developed a habit of choosing men who treated me like an accessory, or as though they were doing me some big favor by being with me. As God is my witness, and by whatever other oath I can swear, when I lost my virginity the first thing the guy in question said was, "I always knew I'd be the one."
That pretty much sums it up right there... turning one of the biggest rites of passage a woman can have into it being all about him. Seemed perfectly normal to me, though, and I was head-over-heels for the guy, and thought he was with me. I also blamed myself (wondering what I did) when he suddenly did a 180 and dumped me (in Grand Central Station, at rush hour, with no warning at all) for someone else 2 weeks later.
I'm not trying to make excuses for being an asshole... I'm just pointing out ways in which one can be an unintentional asshole, by lacking any frame of reference to be otherwise.
It's also relevant that, at that time (and to be honest, even now to some extent), it was extremely difficult for me to buy into the thought of someone loving me. I couldn't imagine why that would ever happen, since to my knowledge it never had. I was even sort of okay with it... it was just the way the world worked.
So, anyway, there I was, in a nebulous "thing" with F, and D was at my heels whenever I was with him.
On one occasion, and I cringe admitting this, I treated F like absolute shit one day when I was with both of them at the same time. At least I know it wasn't intentional or out of malice. It was that F lived in L.A. or N.Y. and both D and I were in San Francisco, and as fucked up as it sounds, I was looking for a reason to avoid the better option, mostly because of distance. F seemed to be getting more intense, and that definitely confused the hell out of me.
I just... I'd had my heart shattered to pieces so many times at that point. To choose F would have been to invest heavily in something that mattered so much more than I could stand to lose. I'd have had to either travel a lot to see him, or pick up roots (less than a year after I'd moved across the country) and move to where he was, or he'd have to move to be near me and I couldn't handle that kind of pressure. It was seriously the worst timing ever to be faced with that choice.
Keep in mind that I look back and cringe at my internal logic about all of this back then. You know, hindsight and all that. Stupid. Fucking. Hindsight.
Alas, in the end I decided to start dating D, the guy nearby, and it didn't start out as a serious thing at all, which suited me fine. F and I remained friends, but he knew I'd started seeing D, so it was just platonic with us at that point.
Now, I don't know what was happening for sure with F's thought process, because I find it hard to get into other people's heads, but from the available evidence I have reason to conclude that he still had feelings for me throughout the couple of months during which I'd started dating D, and which led up to Christmas vacation. I'd planned to stay in NYC for a few nights before heading to Maine for the holidays, and I was going to stay at F's place. Me = Totally Oblivious.
What followed was like something from a script, except that no one would ever put it in a movie because the timing was just too hard to believe.
I remember that first night I lay awake on the sofa, and actually knocked around the idea of creeping into F's bedroom. He'd been so sweet to me, and was so much more of a grown-up than D was, but I didn't want to act rashly. Plenty of time to think it over before starting something (again) that I still might not be ready to finish.
Anyway, the water went out in F's building the next day, which meant there was no way to brush one's teeth, and the commode only had a single flush in it. We waited it out for several hours, but finally I decided I should stay with another friend in Brooklyn for the rest of my time there, so I called her and made arrangements.
Before I left, F had 2 gifts for me. The first was a book, and my sluggish brain can't recall the title, but I remember liking it.
The second was a poem he'd written about us, and even now I feel like my ego is inflated when I say it became clear he loved me, or at least thought he did. How was THAT possible? Me??? It's the only conclusion I reached at the time, though, and I completely freaked out. There's just no other way to say it. It was just so far off the bell curve from anything anyone's ever given me in my life that I totally shut down. I'd have reacted more gracefully if he'd handed me a live adolescent gibbon.
I still was headed to Brooklyn because of the water issue, and the worst -- the WORST thing -- was that the water went on literally as I was on my way out the door. Ba-WHOOSH, it just came on in the sink as my foot hit the threshold. Nevertheless, my friend in Brooklyn was expecting me, and I was determined at that point to head over there.
F protested, understandably feeling cosmically screwed in the backside by the timing of the water pipes, but I left anyway, needing some time to mull all of this over now that I knew, or at least suspected, where things stood.
Much to my shame, that was the last time we saw or spoke to each other, and that's entirely my fault.
Again, I'd freaked out, not because his sentiment was unwanted (far from it), but because I had no idea how to deal with it. Did he do stuff like that for all women with whom he got involved? I had no idea. What if I decided to trust that I was special, only to get dumped two weeks later? I'd been told bigger lies than that in the past (by other guys), and it seemed to me not that F was lying at all, but that maybe I was just an intense passing thing. At least, that's what I told myself. That a fire that hot was likely to burn out fast, probably just as soon as I'd thrown myself into it completely and had positioned myself to get hurt badly. Again.
So, I did what I'd never done at times in the past when I SHOULD have.
I bailed.
F called me for about a month after that. He never left a message, but he called every day, and I never picked up, which was a really shitty thing for me to do.
I started to convince myself that he was calling to tell me what a piece of shit I was, and that, more than anything, was what I didn't want to hear (ironically, of course, since that's exactly what I was being at the moment).
I rationalized that I was doing him a favor by making him hate me. Hate and resentment are much easier to deal with than love, I reasoned, so I just waited him out, and eventually he stopped calling.
The following years were a comedy of disasters for me.
I wound up marrying D, though in the back of my mind at the time I knew I probably shouldn't.
My marriage is impossible to sum up briefly, but he was not a very good husband to me. He abandoned me every time I needed him most (for instance, when I went into surgery for 5.5 hours, he didn't even so much as drive me to or from the hospital. He certainly wasn't at my bedside at any point, but was instead playing video games at home throughout my surgery and recovery, and when a complication prompted me to ask that he dial 911, he refused, on the grounds that he was nervous about what the neighbors would think).
That marriage beat me down. After more than 8 years with him, I suggested a separation, but he begged me to stay, so I did, and we went into counseling. 6 months later, he cheated on me and eventually left me for his current wife.
I moved back to the east coast, but since I had no job prospects in NY I had to move back to be near family in Maine, where I remain to this day.
I lost the "divorce weight" I'd gained, and I still plan on moving back to NY, but it's going to take some career work.
Even while I was married, though, I never stopped thinking about F. Had I done the right thing? The more things nose-dived with D, the more I suspected I'd been an idiot. When I finally got on the right medication for my anxiety, that's when I had the clarity of knowing that yup, I was an idiot.
I'd chosen... poorly.
Of course, I could do nothing about it by then, and I had to clean up my business with D before working on anything else anyway. When I got back east, though, I sent out an overture to F, hoping that at least we could strike up a friendship again.
I wasn't really surprised to get the cold shoulder. I deserved it for being a dick back then.
I hoped, though, that enough time had passed that we could start anew. I soon found out he was dating someone, which was not unexpected, but I still hoped we could bury the hatchet and re-connect (and by that I mean a friendship. Regardless of my own feelings, I don't try to get between people).
Years passed, and I think my assorted messages and e-mails go back 4 or 5 years now, and he hasn't replied to a single one. His girlfriend (now ex) wrote to me once, to tell me to never try and contact him again, but of course I ignored this completely, for now I was totally puzzled.
There are so many possible reasons for this reaction, and I haven't the slightest clue which it is.
Does he hate me with a passion, still, after all these years? I could understand carrying a grudge for a while, but this long? And why? I clearly admit to acting like a middle-schooler over the whole thing, but it wasn't as though I threw anything back in his face out of anger or scorn (neither of which I felt in the slightest at the time, anyway). He didn't deserve my vanishing act, but what had I done to fuel such a lasting grudge... one that was strong enough that his partner, who didn't know me from a hole in the wall, would go so far as to write to me?
What's going on there???
Did some third party say something to him back then that put me in a worse light than I already was (something untrue)? Is he making assumptions about my own feelings and motivations, and he's way off base?
I can't help feeling like there's some massive gap in communication going on, and it's driving me batty wondering where and how that disconnect is happening.
It's exactly like when a parent punishes you, declaring, "You know what you did!" but you honestly don't know what it is to which they're specifically referring.
The possible answers running through my head include, but are not limited to:
- He's still angry about me freaking out and disappearing.
- He thinks I only got involved with him in some ham-handed attempt to influence E (God, I HOPE that's not it, because I may have been a douche in some ways, but not in THAT way).
- I'm way overestimating how much he liked me back then, and he's not enough of a gentleman to give me a polite reply to that effect.
- I'm way UNDERestimating how he felt back then, and he's afraid of the possibility of falling back into those feelings.
- He always thought I was crap, and is now getting off on my obvious frustration and confusion.
If he really did love me back then, then am I not worth a second chance?
If he's just super angry, I wish I knew how to dispel it.
Since E and I have never discussed F at all, I have no idea WHAT happened immediately following that fateful night in NY when the water came back on, nor in the weeks that followed.
For all I know, F wrote me off as a bitch and moved on within weeks, if not sooner. I just don't know, and I wish I did.
All I know is that here's this guy who's good-lookin', gainfully employed, the same level of geek that I am, he lives in the city I call home, and has a whole bunch of other stuff going for him, who for at least a short time showed strong evidence of genuine affection for me, and I managed to fuck it up.
I'm going to be in NYC for New Year's Eve in a few weeks, and I'll be with E and some other friends at a bar party.
I have this absurd, fantasy daydream of that night, in which F shows up and we finally hash out all the shit. It could be a good night (it could be a really good night), but I suppose the odds of him turning up are slim to none at this point. Maybe these words will change those odds, but he's a stubborn lot, and they may not. I'm at least sending him (you) a link to this treatise, because... well, I guess because it's an old wound for me, too, though one I inflicted on myself.
Did I have the perfect guy and let him go?
(Perfect guy as a friend OR as more... it applies to either. I still hesitate to make assumptions).
Yeah, true to form, I may well have done.
There is no facepalm big enough.
There have been so many times in my life where I've given second chances, yet I never seem to get one myself.
If I could only choose one, though, this would be it.
Addendum (12•02•14) -
I saw this meme today that sums it up nicely. :)
