Dredging things:
As part of the whole de-accumulation of stuff around here, I’ve been going through some of the built-up papers and files, trying to off-load stuff. One small pile was a chunk of messages back and forth to my ex when we were separated in the winter of 1990-91, and it was the first time I’d seen them in years.
Looking at them now, with the distance of many years, one thing is obvious to me now that wasn’t then – how terribly ill suited we really were to each other. And how things were falling apart for years prior to that, and that a mutual blindness to parts of the situation drove it all along further. In a sense, I think she was the first person to see that it wasn’t going to work out, but she perhaps couldn’t see a good way to get out without problems with me or her family. None of that happened. It got bitter and ugly.
My blindness was in not seeing the wall ahead and not seeing that the life she wanted was waaaay too very different from what I was after. Two years of spending six hours a day commuting from home to work didn’t help my mental state, but in the end, I didn’t open my eyes to see how to avoid the unavoidable. And I was a terrible mess for a long time after, rolling in my anguish and upset and hurt from the breakup.
If I had it to do all over again, I simply would never been more than a friend to her; I have friends who freely do all sorts of outrageous things that I would have never been able to deal with as a roomie or a spouse. It would have saved both of us a lot of heartache. And so, the letters go into the shredder and then into the recycling bin.
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