Okay, so I had a really great idea for an entry for today, but I knew I couldn't post it without first running it by Schleprock, since he was one of the people I'd be mentioning. Schelprock is a very dear friend, and a pretty private person. In our discussion, the logistics became so complicated I decided to save writing it for another time... Since Schleprock asked me not to identify him, I'm writing this preface for him specifically:
Dear Schleprock, THIS IS NOT the post you and I discussed. THIS IS NOT YOU. I care about the two people I'm writing about in this one, but I'm not worried about protecting their privacy as I was yours. Besides, if you read this post thinking you were going to be in it, you'd read it, lean back and say "HUH? How did I miss all that?" Ya didn't miss anything, it ain't you. While I care about the people in this post, they don't warrant a pre-contact. Heck, I doubt either of them will ever see it.Onward! To the real post!
As I was looking back through some old blogs from Myspace to change them to "private" (On Schleprock's advice) I came across something I wrote privately and decided to write around that instead.
The piece I'm including in this post is something I actually originally wrote for one person, but as I re-read it again today, I realized it really belonged to someone I met AFTER I wrote it. With that in mind, I adjusted it a bit to fit the guy it really belonged to, to a later time frame, but one still well before now:
Her WorldI originally wrote this in a "private" blog for an old friend (something of an old spark from my college days actually) who came back into my life a few months after Deat died (July of last year). "Kirk" and I made a joke during that time about my being "Miss Unrequited Love, 1993", but he made it plain that he was still very attracted to me.
She was hurt, broken, when she dropped into your world, though she believed she hid it well. She was wandering in and out of a dangerous ravine where pain grabbed her without warning. She would often wonder if she'd ever find her way out. She'd been told she'd have to work her way out slowly, to learn to be patient, some of the ropes holding her fast would eventually slacken on their own.
But, she knew better. She knew she'd found the short-cut, the escape route. She saw your kindness, and ran to it. For a time, her injuries are numbed. For a time, she thinks she's healed, that the cruelty of Mourning's Valley is behind her... She's free to go on her way, as long as you've got her by the hand.
You warned her, she'd have to go back there, that she couldn't keep running. Eventually, she'd have to face that terrain again, and again, and then again; and you tell her you can't go with her.
You see cords that still hold her, ones she doesn't want to feel. You know, you can't untie the binds for her, much as she would beg you to. Only time and her willingness to endure can bring the liberation she so desperately craves: slowly, so slowly, she's learning to loosen one knot after another. You tell her you can't pull her free of them. You only hint of your dread: they'll
pull her in tighter, maim you both.
So for now, you walk near her, but keep your distance; you can only watch helplessly as she's pulled back to that chasm where she's so afraid. You tell her she has to go alone. You cringe while she's there, but won't let her run back to you, won't coddle her with a place to hide. You suspect; sometimes know better than she does, what she'll find.
You wait.
She emerges again, bruised, bleeding. You console her while she attends to her wounds, re-opened each time she's dragged back to that hollow. You can't tend them for her... only listen to her anguish.
You say you can't feel it for her, but I know you feel it through her. I'm sorry for that, but grateful. You cared for her. You teach her patience despite her protests, and reassure her that one day she'll return yet again from the vale, this time, healthy and whole.
For those "getting reacquainted" months, I wouldn't write about Kirk and my interactions publicly because I believed there was something of a romance there, and I thought I would be judged harshly because it was "too soon". No one but my closest friends even knew about it.
I was frustrated with Kirk during that time, because I wanted to "move forward," to spend time together, to see each other more. Kirk kept pushing me back. When wrote the original of the (poem, essay, horribly melodramatic allegory, just weird ode-like thingy...?) in September of 2008, I mistakenly believed, as Kirk said, he pushed me back to protect me in the ways I mention in it.
Since then, much of that early fog of grief has lifted. I was no more ready for a "relationship" with Kirk, or anyone for that matter, than the man in the moon.
A key component of major grief: When you hurt to the point you can't relay it to anyone because you're too afraid of opening it up and looking at it yourself, you will grab on to ANYTHING that looks like happy. You'll latch on to ANYTHING that lets you think pleasant thoughts and will fight tooth-and-nail to get away from the pain. The ache is still there, and although it doesn't work, you tell yourself you can quiet the ache with "this thing", whatever it might be, to drown it out.
Some go to drugs and alcohol, I went back to those old romanticized feelings I had for Kirk way back when we met. About a month after I wrote the original to this piece, and the fog began lifting a bit more, and I realized that that Kirk's enigmatic actions were less about the protecting the fragility of a potential relationship, more about trying to conceal his own demons. I was finally able to view Kirk, "as is" not "as was".
The Kirk I knew in 1993 had so much going for him, wrote the most wonderful letters... I spent hours back then imagining what life with him would be like. (To his credit, he really is an intelligent guy). But I was a 22 year-old girl crazy about a 22 year-old guy who had all this potential. Now I was a 38 year-old woman looking at a 38 year-old man and figuring out that he allowed (and, sadly, continues to allow) his demons to get the better of him. The potential, while it may still be there, hadn't moved him forward. And... the prospects of his ever pushing that potential to build a bigger life for himself didn't look so good.
I'll always care about Kirk. I still try to be a friend to him. I won't "judge him" for the things he allows to hold him back; but neither will I accept them; nor will I pussyfoot around by pretending I will, not even in the context of simple friendship. (Climbing down off the soapbox again.)
When I went back and re-read that September post today, I reminded just how vivid my imagination was, (and just how cheesy my writing is when it takes a turn toward the romantic) imposing on Kirk, motives that I only imagined were there. However, I was struck by some strange parallels.
The person who came closer to having the protective nature described in the (uh, allegory?) was C.T.! (see Stressing on the Buildup, One Letter and a Bear) Not only that, but he did it, not out of hopes for some romantic relationship with me, or some other selfish reason, but because he's was a good guy, he simply cared. (Well, okay, maybe he just wanted another care package with Mingua Brother's beef jerky, his buddies in his hometown can't get it for him... ha ha.) Even more strangely, when I looked at the date, I realized that the day I wrote it was the same day I had my first contact with C.T. Further, C.T. was the one who later gave "Way-Too-Nice Kelly" the guts to tell Kirk that I wouldn't be tolerating his demons any longer.
C.T. and I chatted for hours on Yahoo or MSN about everything. If he subscribed to an old Gant-family saying: "If we never give you a hard time, it means we probably don't like you," then, dang, he must have loved me to death! We laughed, argued, debated... He thrived on being a jerk... But he was the one I turned to during some of the roughest "down" nights... He'd sit at his monitor in Iraq, reading, commenting here and there and offering his own observations and encouragement. (I told him once he was a great cheerleader, then got completely cracked up at the idea of him with that bald head and probably hairy legs in the uniform, complete with the pleated skirt and pom-poms.)
However, even with close friends, C.T. prefers to "compartmentalize" different aspects of his life... he doesn't like the lines to cross. (I wonder if he's one of those people who doesn't like the different foods on his plate to touch? I digress...) In my continuing (and mostly subconscious) push to "latch-on" to anything that made me feel better, I over-stepped, a lot. Being the naturally way-too-nosy (It's okay to be nosy if you admit it) person I am, I was constantly pushing the limits on his comfort zone.
Messing with C.T.'s comfort zone was a BIG no-no. He'd mentioned before that in other relationships, when pushed, he walked away.... completely. Several times when I went too far, crossed those lines, C.T. would push me away again... but he always let me come back.
Until the last time.
Starting right after Christmas, some of those irrational grief-things were eating me again. (More fog, God I love grief-fog, :rolleyes:) I knew I had been internally over-reacting to some of the things C.T. and I had talked about... I was becoming way too "clingy'. I realized I was "smothering" him (electronically, ha ha) but I couldn't figure out why. It was like watching a train wreck and being unable to stop it, even sitting in the engineer's seat.
I tried to dismiss it and go back to the casual friendship we had enjoyed, but it just kept eating at me, keeping me on this up-and-down roller coaster. I wondered if maybe something weird was going on from his end, and I was just reacting to that. I wondered if he was becoming exhausted with my increasing "neediness" and wished he could "walk away" from me, but was at a loss as to how because he didn't want to hurt me.
When he was getting ready to come home on for a nearly 3-week leave in March, I was really anxious about it. He had planned to come visit (a 6-hour drive) to finally "meet" in person... and I tried several times to "let him off the hook." from the visit. Looking back I wonder if subconsciously I knew something unfortunate was bound to happen, or if perhaps little tingly "bad premonitions" are real. I don't know.
I thought the day of his visit went very well. We laughed and joked, had some serious conversations. We both remarked on how interesting it was that it felt like we really "knew" each other despite that all our previous contact (except for some text messages and a couple phone calls in his first week home) had been online.
Earlier that week I had seen a post to his (public, not private) myspace status message and curiosity got the best of me... I did a little research and filled in some blanks, and during the course of his visit mentioned it... we even talked about it a bit.
C.T. has some kind of delayed-reaction mechanism in him for things that bother him. Online, he rarely reacted immediately if I said something that truly aggravated him. Sometimes he wouldn't say anything about it for a couple days, even if we had talked in the meantime. Apparently the same is true in person. I didn't realize I'd over-stepped again. He never flinched. The afternoon went on as it had been.
But I didn't talk to him for the rest of his leave... I was hurt but I tried to write it off as simply being busy with his friends from home. Then, a day or two after he got back to Iraq, I noticed he wasn't on my Facebook friends-list anymore, and wasn't showing up in a search. "Gee, wonder why he'd delete his account?" Later that night, while talking to a friend on the phone, she searched and his picture came right up on her screen. He had blocked me.
I saw him on MSN a couple days later and angrily confronted him. (Why hadn't he TOLD me?) He referred to the aforementioned part of our conversation from his visit and said that temptation to be nosy was too much for me and he was just taking away a temptation... that we could still talk on Yahoo and MSN, and that I was over-reacting. (Funny to me now: I didn't get ANY of what I'd mentioned to him from Facebook, yet that's where he blocked me.)
In my hurt, anger, and quite frankly, exhaustion, I decided that I had had enough of the "up-and-down" feelings over our friendship from the past month. I blocked him from everything: Myspace, Facebook, MSN, Yahoo. I wrote him an email telling him that while I appreciated the things he'd done and been for me, I just didn't see me ever fitting correctly into one of his "compartments" and I was worn out from trying.
I deleted every contact we'd had: every e-mail, every message sent on Myspace and Facebook, the archived conversations from MSN and Yahoo, the text messages and voicemail from his visit home, his cell number. If I was going to get off the roller-coaster, I had get rid of everything, clear my head. The only thing I kept were the blog entries.
It took me more than 2 weeks to realize what had really been going on with me, where all the anxiety leading to this point had come from. It took distancing myself from everything about our contact to get perspective.
C.T's personality is nothing like Deat's was, so I suppose that's what took me so long to catch it: I wasn't trying to "replace" Deat with him, but without realizing it, I had been trying (unsuccessfully) to "shove" him into some of the roles Deat used to play. I so missed having that one person to tell "everything" to, that one person who told me everything... that one person whose life I knew inside out. That's a role a spouse plays, a role that someone who is legitimately sharing your life with you plays, not the role of a platonic friend.
I wrote him a long, rambling snail-mail trying to explain this discovery, to tell him that I had needed the time away to clear my head... but I made a point not to ask him to respond, much as I wanted to. I purposely chose snail-mail so I wouldn't "know" when he'd receive it.
He never responded. I gave it some more time... then I emailed. No response. I tried emailing again sporadically since then. I guess I kept hoping I could "fix" it somehow. I'm all about the "courage to change the things I can" part of the prayer, not so good at the "serenity to accept the things I can't" or the "wisdom to know the difference" parts.
Losing my friendship with C.T. has bothered me... a lot. If I've had another friendship completely end this way, I certainly don't remember it. I have no idea if he read any of the emails, or even the snail-mail for that matter. The only subsequent response was back in May when I tried to "re-connect" on Yahoo Messenger: declined. Although I doubt I'll never know "the rest of the story," if there is one, the gist of C.T.'s silent message is pretty clear, "You called it off, and I am DONE."
After the adjustments to the original (and still ridiculously melodramatic) allegory... life imitated the art created even before the incident: it happened just as the hero feared.
Hmmm...
When I started this blog earlier today, I planned to completely skip over "how" it ended and only mention that it had. I started this one only to give C.T. credit for how much his friendship really did help me on my grief journey. I never meant to go into as much as I did, but then again, maybe I needed to.
Over the past couple weeks, I've started writing a blog about losing his friendship in my head a dozen times. I always stopped myself, thinking how pathetic and sad the whole thing would seem to a reader, and thinking that I just needed to let it go. A little over a week ago, I thought "Say bye, dammit" would be enough. We had a bunch of stupid "phrases" that nobody else would get. I miss those too.
So maybe starting this one this morning was a way to get it out. Over-done as that "piece" is, I still think C.T. "deserves" the credit it offers far more than Kirk did. At least Kirk got to read the deluded original, but C.T. will likely never see this. Even if he did, I doubt I'd ever know.
Did C.T. see this coming and try to prevent it? I don't know... that's just a nice way for my imagination to wrap it. He's a really sharp person, he may have... then again he may just be the self-centered jerk he told me he was. Maybe I "thought" I meant more to him than I did; maybe I just finally gave him the "out" he was looking for.
Maybe I gave him more credit than he deserved when we were still talking, too. (Doubt it, but makes the loss easier.) Fact remains, whatever the answer: for that period of time, he really helped me.
Of one thing I am certain, that my clarity and discernment in all relationships, (working, friendship, whatever) was, and may still be, "off" for a long time. (Have I mentioned how much I love grief-fog?)
As I type, I'm still anxious about posting this, "Do you really want people reading your blog to know all this? Do you really want to give people a chance to view this part of your life and think "Dang, that chick is NUTS!"?
But as I said before: maybe later, that reader, when experiencing his or her own major grief, will remember something I wrote. Maybe when he or she sits back after being confounded by his or her own insane-but-seemingly-un-grief-related thoughts and actions, will remember reading my crazy passages and realize that grief-fog, grief-insanity, isn't permanent. Albeit mind-numbingly slowly, it does get better. If one person finds some comfort later, realizing that grief-insanity is normal, who cares what the rest think.
I know I'm not crazy... at least not as crazy as I was.
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