Day 3: It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn
On Monday, I spoke with a friend of mine (Jen) about the emotional fallout from the break-up. We talked about the typical stuff that is, at this point, totally irrelevant. Why did she do it? What did I think I did wrong? Blah Blah Blah. I answered her questions not because I was still unsatisfied with the answers I had received, but more to get her up to speed on things so she could provide the best advice she could.
Like the rest of the people who have generously offered their advice and support, she too came to the conclusion that this was all for the best and that I was, in fact, lucky that it happened when it did rather than a year from now when the emotions would have been exponentially stronger.
She asked me how I was holding up and I told her that I was doing fine...a lot better than each of the previous couple days. I told her that the days were easier because, even though I would see her and sit next to her in class, I had other things to distract me and occupy my thoughts. Plus, irrespective of those distractions, just interacting with her on a platonic level helped to ease any of the tumult inside me. It was the nights that were much more difficult
She understood, as she typically does, and she quoted me a line from The Sun Also Rises.
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing
If that ain't the goddamn truth. It's easy around other people, with any of the numerous activities that attend daily living, to put on your game face and confront those things and those people who, in the privacy of late-evening thought, torment you and chip away at the confident exterior you erected mere hours before. Questions and doubts you rightfully disregard at noon come charging to the fore at midnight.
She left the library earlier than usual today. It's midnight and she hasn't called like she used to just to say 'Goodnight.' Maybe there is another guy. Maybe I know him. I wonder what about him made her stop loving me.
These are the kinds of thoughts that burrow into your consciousness late at night when you've been left to your own devices. If you don't realize that this is what's happening, it can be incredibly destructive.
I am one of the fortunate ones in this regard because even as I write this I know precisely what's going on. I'm battling my hyperactive imagination. It's a fencing match inside my brain that I will almost assuredly win as long as Crown Royal doesn't stick its nose in where it doesn't belong.
My brain knows (my heart's almost there) that there isn't another guy. Even if there were another guy, I know she wasn't cheating; she didn't have the time. More to the point, if I know that we are too different to be compatible and if I truly care about her the way I tell myself I do, how can I be so self-absorbed as to let the temporary ego-bruising that a new boyfriend represents get in the way of the friendship I promised her I would never abandon?
The answer to that question is obvious, but it is still a question with which one must wrestle daily...in the quiet of the evening.
Day 4: Black and White
Jen said a couple other things Monday evening that stuck with me throughout the following day. I was describing how different my ex and I are--she's a pious conservative from Texas, I'm a moderately liberal atheist from California--when I mentioned that she carries herself rather seriously and doesn't particularly enjoy the sometimes gruff, sometimes over-the-top sarcastic sense of humor that has become a hallmark of my personality. Before I could get the next sentence out, Jen said:
"That's probably the most unexpected thing you could have said...how did you date this girl?!"
She was right. How did I date a girl who didn't really like my sense of humor? To be clear, this is not to pass any sort of judgment on her personality, it is merely to point out that I dated a girl for several months who didn't particularly appreciate elements of my sense of humor. Jen went for another minute or so longer while I sat there thinking to myself, 'did I just spend my first semester of law school believing that 1+2=green?' Maybe I did.
I couldn't shake the feeling all the next day. I walked around in a sort of daze, like I was hooked up to an emotional morphine drip. Had I lost my mind? Had I abandoned those aspect of my personality that most would say were definitive? Of course I hadn't. There was a real, deep, meaningful connection between us. Nonetheless, this wasn't the only pearl of wisdom from Jen that coursed through my psyche on Tuesday.
Right before the conversation concluded Monday night, Jen said:
"Ya know, maybe she just couldn't handle your black-and-white approach to things."
Let me be clear about one thing first. I have always been someone who has believed that everything in the human experience falls somewhere on the infinite spectrum of shades of gray. There are no absolutes. When Jen said, matter-of-factly, that I employed a black-and-white approach it threw me for a loop. I didn't know what to say exactly so I wrapped up our conversation of the break up by saying:
"I don't think it's so much that she can't handle my black-and-white approach as much as it is that when I see black, she sees white...and vice versa."
When I wasn't fighting through the haze of 1+2=green, I was grappling with the implications of both her hypothesis and my retort. Not surprisingly, we were both right. I may believe the world is made up of shades of gray, but for me it's not simply a matter of belief. I KNOW that is the way things ARE. There is no debate. Moral absolutes be damned. You're either with shades of gray or against shades of gray.
That is not a certainty my ex shared with me. To the contrary, she believed in moral absolutes that could, in rare circumstances, be effected by time and change (the two main catalysts for any number of shades of gray). To say that our worldviews did not jive at times is to assume we were always looking at the same world. That is still up for debate. In some sense, my black really was her white.
Processing this over the last day or so, I have come to realize that our break-up was perfectly reasonable and totally sensical. It didn't make it hurt any less, of course, but the knowledge that her decision to break up with me was the result of thoughtful contemplation of the realities of our situation is a far easier pill to swallow than the one my hyperactive imagination fabricates as the darkness creeps toward the dawn.
Posted by nils at 6:52 PM