I really don’t miss you at all actually. I thought I would miss you terribly but that honestly isn’t the case. I feel like I said goodbye to a child, like your object permanence is so weak that to miss you would just be an enormous folly on my part. I ask myself every day “how the hell did I fall in love with that person?” How did I not immediately see through you? All other people seem so obvious now in the aftermath. Every slight, every backhanded compliment, every unnerving request of my attention and desperate attempt to get Too Close Too Soon throws up a neon sign over a person’s head. “Beware” it reads, where before it might have said “Potential Friend” or “Hottest Person Here.”
I feel like you’re a third season villain in the NBC sitcom of my life. Someone who felt so vastly important during the course of events you pertained to and then utterly forgotten after the credits rolled on the finale. I started season four shaken by your impact but ready to venture forth into a fresh, barely-related plotline.
If I’m being completely honest I wish I missed you. How terribly entertaining that would be. To pine and yearn for someone so beautiful, so distant, it would be the subject of every conversation I was involved in and every piece of art I attempted to make to capture the sheer volume of my feeling. How fun to experience such a tidal wave of emotion, even if it feels like it’s tearing you apart in its wake.
The heights of my sensitivity haven’t extended so far since. I feel dull in comparison; the acuteness of my feelings dampened by time and extended contemplation of myself. What I do miss is the energy of love; exploding me out of bed in the morning and fueling an art-making extravaganza that was social and fun, both things I feel like I’ve been missing out on enormously lately.
I feel like I became more afraid of other people than before because of you. I don’t think you’re evil, but I do think I’ve been terribly naive my entire life. How can I trust myself not to approach people who are just toying with me? In truth I have more information to spot them than ever, so I’m technically safer now than I was. But the awareness of the iceberg beneath human behavior is so vast and staggering that it’s frozen me in place for months. In truth, none of us have any reason to trust one another entirely. It’s just a choice we invest in each other. And something about not knowing but doing it anyway is both frightening and alluring. The piece of someone’s mind that you’ll never be able to see into, no matter how well you know them, is the part that lets them choose you back.
I remember talking to you and feeling like we weren’t quite aligned on the same plane, that there was a wall of glass between us and I wasn’t truly connecting with you as neatly as it appeared. The tugging on my heart that said it was all playacting. I brushed it off as a lack of self-confidence but I see in hindsight that it was valuable information my brain was trying to make sense of. It felt like playacting because it was playacting. Now it all seems so obvious to me when other people do it and I have to actively choose to let it slide, address it, or avoid it entirely. It certainly is a more mature awareness I’ve been gifted but it sure does make the mystery way less fabulous.
So this is what it feels like to be “jaded.” But I can’t truly be jaded if I’m optimistic. You can’t wish for true love your entire life just to give up on it because of some dork. I need to be more self-assured than before, more upright and stubborn. I know for a fact that I have true love to offer in return, because that’s what I gently offered you.
You didn’t want it of course but at least now I know I have it to give. I just need to buck up, and luckily for me it’s finally as simple as that.