01
One year, six months, eight days
Gwen emailed me yesterday. I email her a lot, or at least I used to. I emailed her comments, questions, entreaties, and random philosophical musings. I have no confirmation that she ever actually read any of them. Yesterday I received an email from her for the first time in one year, six months and eight days.
And it hurts. I think it always hurt, I just never really thought about it before today. It really hurts my feelings that I am so unimportant to her, that none of the nearly one hundred emails that I sent her in that time, long emails in which I poured out my heart and soul, merited, in her esteem, a reply. It hurts that she has effectively excluded me from her life entirely. That she has moved on without allowing me to keep up.
Sometimes I think that I deserve it. I imagine that I put her through a bit of agony, an emotional roller coaster, with the flood of email that I sent her in the weeks after she dumped me, each one attempting to burrow into her heart and twist this string and that. I conjecture that she turned away from me to protect herself from the onslaught, that she drew back. I assume that she wants to forget me, now that her life has taken a turn for the better. And I was not a good influence in her life, I think. I think I was too controlling; I think I always tried to be, at least, without ever noticing.
I read Steve Martin's Shopgirl yesterday. It was bitter sweet in the extreme. Reading it, I became depressed, though little in the book was depressing in-it-of-itself. This puzzled me; I couldn't put my finger on why it depressed me so. Reading the last page, I found the answer. This book was the story of my relationship with Penny. Not the specifics, though some of them were eerily resonant (Ray Porter, the gentleman romantic interest, thinks in code), but the overall themes.
On the last page, Ray finally realizes why it is that he still cares about her, why he still helps her out and thinks about her while he's forgotten his other exes. And I've wondered that about myself, about Gwen. And reading it, I knew that here was my answer too. He was attracted not to her, but to her seemingly helplessness. He responded to her as a father would to a child, attempting to guide her and care for her.
And that's my answer. And that's why the book depressed me so. I wanted to help her. I had the presumption to think that I could, that I should, that any of it was up to me. I played everything magnanimously on the surface, even being dumped by her, but beneath that I was a seething mess of manipulation and passive aggressiveness. First I tried to twist her into a pretzel of guilt because she'd hurt me and then I tried to keep her under my thumb. I sent her email after email, attempting to ferret out the slightest details of her life so that I could continue to hold her under my sway. I wanted to help. I wanted to guide. I wanted to control. She needed me, after all. She had to.
And, wisely, she chose to turn her back on me. Whether she realizes it consciously or not. Her silence just made me try harder. My focus shifted from getting her to open up to me to getting her to just reply to me, to say anything at all in response. My emails to her got longer, got increasingly stranger. My confessions became more intimate; my musings more personal and weightier. I lobbed emotional warheads into the void between us, hoping that the sound of the explosion would return to me. I teased her. I brought up the past. I apologize for thing I'd done and said. I tried to keep her from forgetting. I tried to keep her from forgetting me.
I am not part of her life. I have not been for some time. When last I was, it had room for only a select few people at any one time. When it was over, I was quickly replaced in the priority queue.
I look back upon the time spent with that group of friends with balanced nostalgia. For all the ills that befell me, those were really great times. It was… like one of those really good movies about a group of friends and the fun times they had before parting ways to go off to college, only we were college students having fun times before parting ways to ranks of the gainfully employed. And she doesn't really think of those times anymore.
And part of me wants to say, "Bah. She wasn't that big a part of those times anyway." But that's not true. Granted that she was never forceful in her presence, but by her too-giving, ingénue nature she indelibly coloured the whole experience. A period that she doesn't really think about much anymore. And which I do.
Gwen was always so devoted to him, to the guy she dumped me for, her ex thrice over by the end of it all. She had only room for so many people in her life, and he was one of them. And I saw how she revolved around him. And I wanted that. I wanted her to pay attention to me. I thought I would be better for her; that I was better equipped to help her. I saw what made her tick; I thought I knew what she needed to hear. She had these behavioral quirks that annoyed me, and I was determined to cure her of them whether she wanted to be or not. I wanted her under my thumb. And then after we broke up, it just got worse. I wanted her to pay attention to me. I wanted her to stop ignoring me. I wanted her to acknowledge that I was still there. I wanted her to reply.
And one day, a year and a half removed from her most recent email to me, on the day before I read the book that finally explained it all to me, she did. She finally replied. And she says she doesn't really think about those times anymore, and that most of our friends would also prefer not to. I knew that we would drift apart after graduating; I did not expect that I would be the only one to mourn the ending of that era. And that is the most staggering blow, the saddest truth to confront. Because I had a time that I'll never forget.
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