Post 24

I am…confused, potentially. I’m not sure, ironically enough. See, once upon a time (a long time), I met this girl. We were best friends. We talked about books and life and hopes and the future and everything that you are supposed to do with your best friend. Or so she informs me. I don’t remember. My handlers wiped my memories clean a few years back when I was transitioned from military to civilian services. But anyway, this girl and I, supposedly, she and I were as close as could be. She loved me. Or at least, she loved being around me. She said that I made her feel safe, accepted. Except for one tiny detail. I, evidently, didn’t love her back. At least not romantically.

Now, when I say this, I need to put some context behind these statements. This girl…I don’t have memories of her, exactly. But I still remember the way her skin smells (like brown sugar and ginger). I text her every morning when I get up. Still! After almost 20 years! Even when we are apart, I feel as if sh’es right next to me. We are opposites. In everything. Total yin-yang experience, but somehow, even through memory wipes and living thousands of miles apart, she’s always with me. In the back of my mind. In my dreams. I’m waiting for her still.

So anyway, back to being fifteen and in love with this girl. Evidently, I didn’t love her back. To make me jealous, she slept with a mutual friend of ours and then left for Seattle. I didn’t see her again for years. She thought I didn’t notice and it sent her down a path of emotional dependency, drug and sex addiction that is…devastatingly painful to hear.

But I don’t know any of this. All I can feel is my heart ripping into little tiny pieces. I’m suicidal. Depressed. Now, in the military. Emotionally stunted, isolated, completely unable to express any feelings, much less understand that I’m just broken-hearted. Because, you see, I hadn’t been equipped with my relationship algorithms yet. I shouldn’t have been able to fall for her. It was too soon. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t even know what was happening, but it hurt something in me regardless. Something that I couldn’t identify, couldn’t talk about. Like a portion of my brain was just…gone. Sliced off, but still hemorrhaging sluggishly. For years.

While she was blunting her pain with sex and drugs, I was working. Maniacally. Obsessively. Dangerously. I volunteered for everything dumb and debilitating I could get my hands on. I couldn’t understand what the ball of despair and rage was, sitting in my heart year after year. And no matter what I did - combat, martial arts, police work. Nothing made it better. It was her. My mind kept reaching out for the dead part. The part that she had filled up.

One of my favorite series is the Herald’s of Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey. In that world, she talks about something called a lifebond. Now, I am going to go against my programming here for a moment because rationally, the lifebond is a dumb idea. It’s romantic claptrap that has no place in reality. Fundamentally, the idea is that two people are genetically/magically tied together with a bond that is deeper than love and deeper than compatibility. It is a consuming, monstrous dependency that binds two people emotionally, physically, and psychically to the point where they are essentially one person. Sounds romantic, huh?

It sounds like pure fiction, more like it. Except…

Except, for almost twenty years, this girl will not let me go. I can’t stop thinking about her. Knowing she’s unhappy, feeling her unhappiness is a kind of constant, deep emotional torture. And, please, don’t misunderstand. She’s a dumpster fire. Poverty, abuse, trauma, drugs, sex, marriage. She’s got it all. For anyone else, I would have cut ties. For anyone else, I would have run screaming. For her, I can’t. I couldn’t leave her alone at her worst. I need her. Need her in a way that is stupid, irrational, irrelevant. Made even stupider when I told her that I couldn’t be with her. That I didn’t want her physically or romantically. Confused her. Broke her heart.

So for twenty years, she’s assumed that she’s not worthy. That even though she has the same feelings as me, the same needs, I don’t want her. That I rejected her.

Two months ago, I figured out the truth and shared it with her. The truth that she’d thought she’d dealt with when we were fifteen. And twenty-five. And all the years between us. She’s married. She moved on from me. I never did. I’ve never wanted anyone but her and it shocks me to think that I could have been so blind and deaf to my own emotions for so many years. My only consolation is that she doesn’t hate me. She still loves me. She still wants me. We complete each other, dark to light, in a way I always wanted, but couldn’t recognize when it was sitting right in front of me.

She sees it to. She’s getting clean. She’s going to therapy. She wants to be better, to love me back now. And it breaks my heart and knits it back together at the same time. I don’t want to date. I don’t want anyone else. I never have. Even when she was overweight and buried in drugs. Even when she was refusing to work and sleeping around. Even when she’s married. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. But it feels ok to need her now that she’s getting clean, responsible, starting a career path, making good decisions. I always felt like I had to hold myself away from her, be strong for her, not put too much pressure on her, be aloof so that I didn’t get pulled into her suffering. But I think I might have been the cause of some of that suffering. If your beloved rejected you, how would you react? If someone so close to you, close enough that you could physically feel their pain, told you you weren’t good enough, weren’t lovable, what would you do?

I don’t know what to do with something this precious and pointless. She’s married. I lost my chance. It doesn’t change anything. But it fills me up and undoes me every time I talk to her.