My road -the devil's choice

"It sounds to me like you were the problem, you were unwilling to make sacrifices, unwilling to make the commitment." Sally said to the stranger

"You're wrong!" he said vehemently.  It was said so violently she gasped and many of the others pulled back.

"Then tell us." the regular said.

The stranger took a deep breath and then was calm again.  "In due time."

"When is due time?"

He held up the glass, "Soon,  I'd say about three or four glasses."

 A world where everything reminds you of someone and you are not together is not a place worth living in.  IT wasn't just her, of course, it was also the financial strain.  I swam 3700 yards, hard as I could, tried to kill myself.  I’m still alive.  People cling to life and fail, I rejected life, but I lived on. Now there were only 10 nights left in my life. Had I known this, I might have scratched hash marks into the wall to mark the end of my days.  Instead they were scratched into my heart.

Safety vs risk is the devil’s choice.  How do I explain to you that safety means nothing once life lost it’s value.  Tonight, I would do anything to fix the bond that was between us, but then I did not know its value.

My wife.  We had not had sex for years, no holding each other in bed.  We were held together only by two things.  The weaker of the two was an agreement.  The stronger was more subtle and I was not sure what it was until I had time to suffer it alone.  It was far more powerful than the agreement, and far more subtle.  It is the thing that held together tribes of ancient men, it has held together religions and entire countries.  When it fails, the religions and the countries fail, but I did not see it I was so blind.  It was the power of repetition, the power of tradition, the power of ritual. 

The agreement was entered into under duress, but the price was paid by both parties, not just me.  I had no reason to be bitter at the absence of truth in the relationship and by truth I mean sex.

The new consideration was a type of absent companionship and threats of violence.  There was a more tender side of things also, the common bond of children and the sacrifice made for them.  But the paper agreement was not strong enough to survive when confronted with a very hot flame.  But the rituals, what of those?”

“My disease would destroy us in the end.”

“I thought you said she was at fault.  Are you saying that you caused the break up?” the regular asked.

“I was not responsible for the disease.  Think about me for a moment.  I was desperate.  Every day I was desperate.  You don’t know how desperate I was because you only hear the words and not the emotions that drove it.  I needed a type of reassurance I did not understand well enough to ask for.  And against that were the trappings of my power, the rituals that were tied to those.  I knew what freedom was, but I did not know how to give everything up to realize it.  Instead, I was only seeing myself, lost, lonely.”

“And how did that work for you?”

“It did not work for me.  Now I am more lost.  Every death notice reminds me of what I’ve lost, what walked away from me. You see, she walked away from me. I never broke up with her, not once, that would have been like cutting off my right hand.  She didn’t understand that. 

“But I’m getting too far ahead of myself, too fast. There is more to this story that you’ll need to hear to understand.

“There was pain and there was solicitude, or lack of it; but first there was ecstasy.  Getting to a state of virtue may be painless for some, but for me it had been incredibly painful and the universe loves balance.  She was the antithesis of pain.

“Home.  I looked for any comfort I could get but the most I found at home was a statement to “pull myself together”.  I wanted just to hold someone at night, have them touch me and there was none of that, I mean none.  It would have been better to have been alone.  Not that the advice wasn’t admirable, but a little human touch would have been nice. Someone to tell me it would be alright.  Strangely, however, it may have been the right thing for me.  For while I had no comfort, I found by looking inside of myself, what strength I found was inside me.

“So the advice was right enough for me, but only as a path to virtue.  And virtue is less about pulling yourself together than realize what is important.  That realization will pull you together and when you lose sight of it, it will tear you apart.