My road- profiling

***

“You talk about your problems, but you don’t think about mine.  You are very selfish.”

“Me?  You go home to a family every night.  I go home to my work.”

“I’ve lived alone too.  I go home to responsibilities I have and a shattered marriage.  You should try it some time.”

“I will.”

“You’ve done it before.”

“And when I do, you don’t care.”

“Don’t care?  You don’t think I check my phone and my email when we’re apart hoping to get some word from you.  I’m not saying that any of this is right.  A relationship should make you feel better about yourself, but with my condition, it is unlikely to happen.  But you want to fit me into some category.”  When I said this I was not thinking of character as a deviant necessary for the survival of the species, but instead was thinking of myself as a cheater.  They correctly point out that when it comes to relationships we deviants are doomed by our own insecurity to never have normal relationships.  I suppose it would be something like pathological insecurity.  But maybe no everyone else is ready for a normal relationship.  

Whether you have normal relationships or just relationships with yourself to varying degrees, as the psychologists would argue for me, your partner should make you something better.  While faults are important, it is also important to recognize accomplishments.  There is no need to dwell on the past and therefore  failures should be treated as lessons of the past and not sources of shame and denigration. 

“I know you have your problems, but you didn’t have to make them my problems.”

“I didn’t mean to make them your problems.  I’m not ready to give you up, however.  You can leave me, but how am I supposed to live the rest of my life being in love with one person and living with another?”

“That isn’t my problem.  You want to talk about what a relationship should be.  It should enhance the natural feeling we so often miss that every moment is about living and not the past, nor the future.  Both of those time periods may play into it, but the future is the only one of the two that truly matters except to the extent that you want to live with your memories.  Our relationship is just a nightmare.  I wish I’d never met you.”

That made me feel great.  I sat then, contemplating how we had arrived at this point.  Neither of us had the personality for the role we were playing.  Not in a million years would she have played the part of the mistress.  I had no interest in a long term relationship outside of a marriage.  The problem was I had no interest in the marriage I was in.  And if that was the case, why didn’t I walk away.

Fade in, back to the bar.  “It was a long time ago.  I didn’t know I suffered from the type of insecurity that accompanies, that is hidden by narcissism.  It is funny, that we come across so brash, but inside we are like children.    The sound of the slushy rain hitting the window marking the change in the clock. 

None of my relationships have ever calmed my fears.  I can see that now.  I wish I could have told her then, so she would have understood why I was what I had become and would have understood it had nothing to do with my valuing her against anything else.

Fear is the greatest harm in the world, the source of doubt.  Fear of change, fear to love given the dangers involved.  Fear of loneliness.  Fear is the opposite of companionship.  You can be with someone and scared of them and there is little value in it.  If the relationship doesn't calm your fears, it is the wire frame with the food, but without the reassurance.

Looking back on it, I would have thought this was the last conversation we would have ever had, at least the last one as a couple.  We didn’t have sex afterwards, she left me unable to tell her what was happening to me, unable to explain what had happened to her.

We would talk again, however.  For almost year she was gone and I dealt with my problems and solved my physics.  I took rough ideas and played them against observations.  I used logic to make connections and I used arguments and wisdom to buy time with my creditors, the fear giving me a superhuman strength which was supplemented by my increasing interest in doing the right thing.  I tried to hold things together at home, while I did not feel like I was at home.  Even more than I had been lost my whole life, I was especially lost now, because I thought I knew what I wanted, but didn’t know why I couldn’t reach out and get it.  I had planned my escape so carefully and with the door standing open, the car outside with the keys in it, I was unable to cross the threshhold, like a dog who couldn't go out the door without a leash on.

And every day I wrote something to her, a poem, a short story, whatever was in my physics.  She never answered and I never expected her to.  But it was important to me to let her know that she was the most important thing in the world to me, even though I didn’t know then why we were not together.