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These two unwritten chapters have been floating around in my head and I
realized last night that at least one of them really needs to be written. So
here goes.
I figured that I need to write a chapter in which I give a sense of
completion to the thread involving Sop and Syn's relationship. It
was very open; Syn insisted that there be no commitment on either end.
Sop went along with that, but felt sort of hurt when she said that she would
have no problem with him seeing other people; Sop wanted to be wanted, not
used. The relationship which Syn proposed, and to which Sop agreed out of
lonely desperation, seemed to him to be one in which he was not particularly
wanted (for if he was wanted, his being with someone else would
have meant something to Syn, wouldn't it have?) but rather merely made
use of him whenever it suited her. Now granted, that's a rather untrue few
sentences (but it's how Sop felt); not only does it take two
to tango, but Syn was not just trying to use Sop, she actually felt
something for him and just didn't want to feel trap in the relationship.
This same issue also played out in the ways in which they expressed their
feelings for each other, in that Sop was pretty much the only one doing the
"expressing". This was not because Syn was using Sop, though, but rather because
she was too shy to say anything for the most part, though the few times in which she
tentatively expressed her feelings were much appreciated by Sop.
Sop and Syn were not dating, nor were they boyfriend & girlfriend
(both found such labels distasteful); they were just friends who sometimes
became something more. Sop wasn't really sure what to think of the whole
mess. He often questioned his own motives for carrying on with Syn,
wondering if he was trying to convince himself that his feelings for Syn
went beyond their friendship. Much of the time he felt that she liked him
more than he did her and that made him feel guilty. A few times he decided
to end the non-friendship portion of their relationship only to realize that
there was nothing to end because there was nothing formal about it. Several
times Sop was determined to make no further advances towards Syn and let
things just settle back to how they'd been before, but his resolve never
seemed to last more than a day.
In the end Syn got mad at Sop for what are probably a great number of
reasons which she never explained to him. She told him that they could not
converse, then apologized and said she wanted to be friends again. But while
Syn did talk to him a little from then on, she never talked with
him and he felt as if she was never listening to him to him anymore; she
stopped visiting him and began leaving him out of group activities with their
friends, culminating in not inviting him to a dinner with her parents to which
all of their other friends were invited. Over the past two years Sop had had
too many close friends get angry at him and, despite intense attempts on Sop's
part to rectify the situations, never speak to him again. So Sop just got
turned off by the whole mess and dropped it, too cynical to try to repair the
breach, beyond caring.
Sop immensely enjoyed the small time during which his friendship with
Syn became something more and learned a great deal from it.
It pains Sop to see his prematurely gushing words of Syn included in
LG, but I refuse to take them down because they show the evolution of Sop's
view of the relationship from initial elation to rationalized abyss. Think
of John Cusack bitterly leaving the message on Diane's machine in
Say Anything when he asks her to tear up his letter because "it
hurts me to know it's out there."
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