It’s a strange thing. Despite everything, there’s still a part of me that cares about how she’s doing these days. Why her? Of all the people in the world, why is it that I worry about how she feels now?
I love my wife very much, but I also know exactly how she’s doing now, so it doesn’t bother me like it does with this person. This person who for all intents and purposes abandoned me as a friend a decade ago. Any sane person would have long ago given up hope to reconcile. Like, I know that events in your twenties supposedly leave a deeper impression or something. Maybe that’s it?
Or maybe I feel residual responsibility for not representing what I believed in well, and so I worry she learned the wrong lessons and came to the wrong conclusions because I failed as an example. That seems, kinda arrogant though, to think that my small failures would leave much of an impression on someone who I knew to be strong-willed and principled in her outlook.
Or maybe it’s the strange things I’ve heard that suggest she took it particularly badly. Of course, every attempt I’ve made to reach out has only made things worse, so I don’t even know if there’s anything I can reasonably do to alleviate things.
And… I don’t trust myself to read the tea leaves in an unbiased way. I have a history of reading too much into small signs that in truth meant nothing.
So, I’m left with just a sense of loss and guilt. It’s my fault that things got this way in the first place. Ultimately, I must bear the consequences of my foolish youth. I won’t say that the feelings are all gone, but at this point, I mostly just miss my friends. Technically both of them, though they are not sisters. It’s a long story, and not one I think is worth bringing up in any sort of detail on a post like this.
I guess I also have a nagging worry about certain other people who may have had ill intentions and could have contributed to things, though I can’t confirm with certainty whether this was the case. Regardless, it was my fault that I handled the whole situation poorly.
I suppose that’s the thing. An apology never properly spoken. A wish to at least let her know what she perhaps fears isn’t true. A way to clear the air and fix possible misunderstandings. This is what I want. But I know I don’t deserve it.
Or maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I was wrong about her. That could explain a lot. But for some reason I cling to the faith in my former friends, that they are decent people and wouldn’t go that far. Honestly though, I can’t know for certain. I can only hope it’s a misunderstanding that’s just spiralled out of control.
A misunderstanding I enabled by being unreliable and inconsistent in the first place. I can’t control what others think or do, but I should have done better than I did. I lost her trust. That was my fault. If that didn’t happen, everything could have been figured out better. I could have asked about the thing that made me paranoid, and found out the probably mundane reason for it. Regrettably, I let things spiral into chaos and confusion instead.
And then I continued to do some really dumb things that just made things worse. The rest is history.
So, what does it mean? It means I get hung up on past regrets easily. It means sometimes there’s no way forward. Life can be painfully indifferent in that way. And people suffer for your mistakes, and you can do nothing to help them. This is a dark reality. The truth of the brutality of the universe.
I normally try to somehow turn this around to say something I think is inspiring, but sometimes it’s just impossible. You’re put in impossible situations with no good way out. Except to let go and move on, I guess. The universe is not a wish granting machine. It is a pile of stuff that occasionally moves and fights you for the limited amount of energy present. That we are able to push together a remotely satisfactory life out of this struggle is to be applauded I suppose. But we can’t always get what we want.
Sometimes problems evolve to the point where there is just no solution. In which case, one should focus on other problems instead. But it doesn’t feel great.