When will I be done with you?

My excuse? I am impelled to write this by virtual visits from the ex-wife, and the discovery of one by the current girlfriend in another venue.  Again, I play the ingenue.  I suppose I AM, with respect to other people's motives and behavior, suited only for that part.


Dipping my virtual pen in blood, I write....


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When you told me you wanted to be free to date others, as though I had you in my iron claws
 (perhaps mistaking me for many others), and I accepted without question (jealousy is not in my nature)....

I was not done with you.

When you came to my house for dinner, head buried in the baseball scores, and chided me for purchasing the wrong beer, sitting at my dinner table and exchanging workplace stories with another friend while I sat silent and stunned...

I was not done with you.

When you told me, in words that echoed eerily,  that I wasn't attractive enough for you...

I could see the pattern, and though I tried mightily, I wasn't done with you.

Forgiving, understanding, patient...my blessings and my wounds.

Silent, hoping for the healing distance and forgiveness can bring, I waited.  Even when you deleted my name from your list of Facebook friends for no misbehavior of mine...

I wasn't done with you.

Months passed.  Hopes for friendship ebbed and flowed.

Recently, I discovered that your girlfriend had tracked you, and me down on another social media site - to see if we were still, somehow, connected?  Possessiveness and fear so far from my native language, I wonder -- what concerns her, after all these months?

I am SO not her.

And still, against the advice of pretty much all my friends, I am not, finally, done with you.

Somewhere, buried in the ruins of the honest, open and kind friendship we had, is a person capable of creating a better ending, if ending there need be to the affection we shared (even if Plato be our guide).

Forgotten, perhaps, like a melody half-remembered, is a man of principle and warmth.  I knew that man. I gave him something I had not given any man in decades, and in spite of the many others who have auditioned for that role, have not given since -- my trust.

A precious thing, trust.

I want to be done with the man who is, now, the man he was before I met him.  I don't live in that place of shadows.

But to give up on the hope that someday (though impossible, impossible, impossible now) that someday words will heal as they have hurt is to give up on part of myself -- and the goodness I saw in him.

Not yet.

Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, and wild for to hunt, though I seem tame.