It’s amazing how my patchy memory makes ghosts of people. Only to have those ghosts gently grip my wrist and in no uncertain terms remind me that they are vital and powerful and have not conveniently forgotten as I have.

I was in the throws of what I now know is a quarter life crisis, or at least something very much like it* and I was spinning in the lowest twirl of a spiral of hell bent self destruction. I was innocent and I lived in a world where the flesh-me and the story-me were twinned so anything I did was merely helping the plot along and didn’t have any real consequences*** other than making the story more “interesting”. ..I was such a freaking idiot…anyway.

He was a breathtaking/beautiful/abandoned/bitterly broken/genius/little boy/man. For a little while we loved the salvation of getting so very lost in someone else. And then it gets fuzzy. Oh no wait. He wrote me a letter, which in hindsight was the only kind thing he could have done as my bubbling tarpit of a mind was breaking him. At the time though, that letter took my last reserves of sanity. It was my 21st** birthday and I was alone in a city I, to this day, loathe. I left soon after.

The rest of this story I won’t tell because although I am not ashamed of my decision nor do I regret it, it remains a private and very consequential one. However, what I will say is that it saved my life but could not have done him much good. One thing they don’t tell you in books, except maybe Atonement, is that there is sometimes no fixing what you’ve done. No going back and making it better. There are only gaping holes in peoples lives and the knowledge that there is no hope of the luxury of forgiveness.

* Thank you John Mayer.

**which just as a sidenote, was my worst birthday ever and which inspired birthday week in the hope that such black despair could be countered by diffusing the actual day. I’ve been such a pagan :/

***In my defense I really have read a LOT of books, especially fantasy. And soppy fantasy at that.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Darkntwisty, Love or lack of love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.