Unsent: A Letter of Goodbye

We’ve had a shallow end relationship for so long.  What is it?  Five years?  Seven?

After all this time, we only know the skin of each other.  The microbial pieces of our selves that we like the most.  The tidy stuff we want each other to see.  Why?  To elevate?  To empathize?  To offer no nugget capable of sending a jolt through that impression we’ve created of ourselves?

We wouldn’t have met where we did if you didn’t do it, too.  Play in the shallow end.  At least with me and others like me.  But you don’t like that part of yourself.  The part that hides.  So you won’t own it.  You won’t admit it.  You won’t accept it.

Few people do.  Own those selves, those traits we somehow defined along the way as “bad”.  Instead, we make disgusted noises when we see it in others and assign it a foul name.

I don’t fault you for it.  I understand you far better than you think.

But I want to say goodbye to you.  I wouldn’t have said anything at all, but I thought something would be gained.  Either my closure. Or your understanding.  Or more fodder for you to amuse you and others like you.  Mostly likely, just the latter.  But then, that’s all I ever wanted.

I don’t want to be a part of your world anymore.  A world where it’s okay to prey, to pounce, to devour the innocent.  (I’m not innocent.)  Where commiseration supersedes action as a therapeutic device.  Where people cheat themselves of the goals they’ve set.  Where gossiping among your own about others is the cost of entry.  Where emotions are trapped in a combustible can sitting blindly in the hot equatorial sun.

I don’t work well in a world like that.  I don’t accommodate.  I don’t follow the rules.  I don’t guide myself from the same part of the body – the heart.  My head calls the shots.  I was nothing but a disappointment to you, pounding on a drum that looked altogether foreign and ugly and frightening.  And loud, for the love.  So very painfully deafeningly loud.

I won’t apologize.

I will thank you.  I enjoyed the time we spent together.  The things I learned from you.  The times you made me laugh.  The times you’ve given truly exceptional advice.  I will miss your unique knowledge of nearly everything.  You were a unique acquaintance and I have no regrets for having known you.

But I didn’t enjoy seeing your behavior at times.  That predatory thing.  The way you attack people with such self hatred that it makes the less prickly cry or scream or die.  The way you whine about how terrible your life is when you have life and health and family and enough money to feed and clothe and shelter yourself.  In time, the things that disgusted me smothered the things I enjoyed. 

You’ve been a good friend in as many ways as you’ve been a terrible one.  And sometimes, people just change so much that the world they knew before seems foreign.  And they want to break away from those chains.

Goodbye.  I don’t expect to miss you.