Why am I never satisfied? Why can’t the end just be the end? Why is it that I want to have one more conversation or one more email with those last twenty things I have to say or never had the nerve to ask until it was too late? Why do I want to ask the questions I was afraid to ask before? Why am I always looking for a post-mortem?
Friendships, relationships, cyber friends, it really doesn’t matter. If there was an end to it that means I was invested enough for there to have been a beginning and middle. I don’t think that there has been any relationship of any duration that I have not beat to death after the fact. Why is it that I feel the need to examine it and flip it and rethink things when it is done?
Did they really mean that? Did they say that to spare my feelings or is that how they really felt? In my mind, I have volumes of letters/imaginary conversations/emails that are retooled in order to make me feel less pathetic. In the end, I don’t send or call but the questions linger. Deep down I know that it stems from my own insecurities. I should be able to let it go, but no matter how logical I try to be, it’s that place inside that wants the answers. In an attempt at coming clean, let’s clarify that the inside wants the questions answered in a specific way but I will bargain with myself that any answer would be better than nothing.
Breakups aren’t pretty. No matter what type of ‘ship’ is breaking it is marking the end of a chapter. A good chapter or a bad one, it is rarely without fall out of one kind or another. I find this most often with relationships with the opposite sex. Regardless of the level of ship that was attained, when it ends for whatever reason, I want the opportunity to rebut after I have had time to assimilate.
Now on the other hand, I do not want to receive that email or get that phone call or letter. I don’t want to go through it again. I try to be sensitive to other people’s feelings and do my best to not be mean or spiteful when I am the ‘breaker-upper’. Maybe in the end that’s why I never press send although I want to so badly. Would the actual answers help or just make things worse?
So I am trying to change that part of myself. In an effort to evolve, to stop the insanity so to speak, I am burning those novels, those wonderfully written eulogies and trying to let the past be what it is, the past. I am trying to acknowledge the fact that the ship is gone and if I need to look out wistfully at the ocean on occasion that’s ok, but no sending out the message in a bottle, no running to the lighthouse to guide the ship back to land. It’s over for a reason, it didn’t work or it stopped working and at least one person no longer has the desire to try to fix it. You really can’t fix a double effort with a single one.
Since they are no longer around, I should just make it work for me. It is hard for me to think that I could actually be the thing they regret, so much more like me to think that I am the only one who thinks back on it, that I am the only one with regrets. Time to make a shift in thinking, if the story is over, I can end it any way I choose, so why can’t it have my ending?
