My Road-meeting half way

How had the girl been trapped into the relationship she did not want?  That is a little more complicated.  I said before she seduced me, but in truth I seduced her first.  Remember that we were very close, much closer than lovers, we were friends.  I did not set out to take advantage of the friendship, at least not consciously.  But in my state of virtue for the first time I was comfortable opening up with her.

I opened up about my relationship at home and my feelings towards her, but with an eye to its impossibility, it’s innocence.  But the power behind it I could not hide, the passion burned in the words I wrote, of innocent intent but written in fire.

Against this backdrop, the erosion of innocence was inevitable because the reasons to guard against it were unclear.  Gas lighting?  Yes, probably.  I can say it was unintentional, but it is also perhaps true that nothing that the high performing narcissist does is totally unintentional.  They are too clever by far for their own good.

Afterwards, we were both trapped in a way.  Both by love, of course.  Hers was a little bit more sane with more shallow roots.  Perhaps she stayed on too long because of her desire to see through what she had started, whether it be to save me or to satisfy her morbid curiosity of how I would self destruct next or perhaps the unconscious motive of how to move on without abandoning a friend.  For my part I was possessed of a strange romanticism that was a symptom of my condition perhaps.  I would always be in love.  To this day, I feel justified, not because of anything that I did, but because she was deserving of love.  I cannot be excused for the complicated way in which I approached it, but I accept that it exists.   I was now abandoned by this mercurial-minded woman who breezily moves through love affairs but was having some difficulty dealing with a friend who had been caught within the whirlwind that was her breeze.

And it was friendship that would bring us back together again.

I open a book and see these words: "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard (Katha-Upanishad)

How do we judge one another?  How do we forgive one another.  This is how she forgave me for a time.  We missed each other, it was a certainty that when we talked it was an intimate conversation which required no rules. 

And so one day, months after the breakup there was a call for me.  She asked if we had been apart long enough to see each other, to talk in the name of the long friendship we had and to make peace.

In order to avoid even the possibility of sex.  Perhaps we both knew that she was both controlled and forever in the grips of the passions that radiated from her like light waves from a sun.

We decided we would meet in a remote beach-like area, half way between us, but closer to where she was.

It was a quiet town where we could find a quiet restaurant and talk.

Of course, I would get there before her, even though she was closer.  It was, after all, the nature of our relationship that she kept me waiting.  In her defense, and I would defend her actions through everything that happened despite the obvious missteps she made, her job was all consuming and for her to make time for me in the midst of all she had to do and the continuing trail of lovers that I believed to exist after our break up whether they did or not.  I, on the other hand, after a period of several years of frenetic activity the metaphorical equivalent of swimming naked in a hurricane in the north sea for a like period of time reached a brief hiatus of the type experienced by those who are beset with legal problems, both claims against me and those against others. 

I did regularly get threatening correspondence telling me that my economic world would be brought to an end by this entity or that, but I had refocused my life, in large part.  At first love had been an enormous part of the focus, but after the whims of my lover had left me bereft of that life raft, I had turned myself to more intellectual concerns and, uncharacteristically for someone with my problems, to the problems of others and society as a whole.

 I had thoughts of sex whenever I thought of her, but in this case, they were so far-fetched as to be nothing more than background noise.  In fact, I suspected she wouldn’t show up and I prepared myself for that disappointment, uncertain why it seemed so tragic that it might happen.