What is it that is so awe-inspiringly beautiful about that picture? It’s so utterly hypnotic...
Ok, so, I’m an asshole. Truly, I am. A blubbering, drooling, moronic imbecile of an asshole.
I just figured out what’s wrong with my relationship with my girl. I see it so perfectly, with such clarity that I’m aghast at the idea that I didn’t see it before. It’s like a Profound Truth that has been glued to the inside of my glasses for the last week and a half, and I somehow managed to avoid it and, when necessary, subconsciously ignore it.
See, my girl and I aren’t having problems. Not the real kind, any ways. I don’t worry about infidelity on her part, and she doesn’t on mine. Well, OK, let me clarify. We both worry on it, but are trust is so complete that it’s not an issue. In relationships past, mostly when I was younger, this was an all-consuming fear of mine. It ate at my heart and my soul for hours out of every day. But not so with her, even taking into consideration the fact that I think she does have a little fling going on with someone in her part of the State (OK, so we only live two towns away, but demographically it might as well be several countries apart).
No. It’s fear. She is terrified of me, and I of her, only I have come to realize my fear, to rationalize it and to control it. She hasn’t. I doubt if she is entirely conscious of it. Just, I know that when she looks at me, and when she talks to me, it eats at her. She is so utterly terrified of being hurt again that she will do anything, whether conscious of it or not, to put a wedge between us in the hopes that I’ll break it off. I know this for two reasons; we are like the same person in two parts, and I do this too. Or I used to. I still kind of do, but I am much, much, much more aware of it and am, therefore, more in control of it. I catch myself doing it and I make myself stop.
See, my greatest fear is being hurt in this relationship. But I’m at that point in my life where I understand that everything is a risk. That even if pain and misery are the end result, the path to those two possibilities is more often then not worth it. I’ve learned to seize the occasional joys and happiness of my life as if they were a life preserver, and I were a man drowning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Now all I have to do is make her see this for what it is. What words can I use to make her understand? I fear that my failure to see this - this oh so obvious truth, this thing that I should have seen from the beginning – is going to cost me everything with her. I fear that it already has. Which puts me in the equally good and bad position of being in a position where I may have absolutely nothing to lose, but certainly have everything to gain.
It’s just that the words fail me. A man who has made his way in this world through his ability to communicate his thoughts, his ability to make people see what he’s trying to show them...well, this man finds the words failing before they leave his tongue. This doesn’t scare me anymore, as concerns her; it happens all the time. I’m not exactly tongue-tied with her, but I am something resembling that.
Oh, to be a poet at a moment like this...