Elvis Costello wrote, “you can’t trust a promise or a guarantee.” That’s what relationships are. They’re promises. They’re guarantees. And when the promise breaks, we’re left with a cold feeling of arbitrary betrayal. We didn’t know the person would do this. But yet, why didn’t we? These feelings we have are all subconscious, uncontrolled and unsaid. We seldom think of the consequences of our actions with regards to the perceived reality of others. We never seem to care that other people’s thoughts and feelings and emotions and passions are just as valid as our own. We feel better, more enlightened, than the majority. And those that we’ve let into our hearts at an early age may grow and twist and become something other than what we expected them to be. They are not trying to live up to our expectations. They are simply trying to find themselves. Unfortunately, we’ve been given no road map, no coordinate axis points, no quadrant, no astrolabe. We rely on trial and error. And sometimes we try and err and the people we love start to fade into the background. And the foreground is filled with pictures of what we want to become and the means we use to become what we want to become. And we step on the flowers and we throw the stones until we eventually settle on something. Anything. And we come back around. And perhaps our slowly dwindling reality has all but escaped us. And perhaps the people we loved have faded so far into the background that we can barely make out their translucent outlines. But we strive for the divinity of rehashing the cycle. We try again, hoping our flask doesn’t explode in our hands. Sometimes the translucent outlines become clearer. They fade back in the same manner and with the same casual ease with which they faded away. But somehow, they’re different. Somehow, something has changed. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know it’s there. That little thing that bugs you. The flecks of spit on their upper lip. Their low gargling noise in the night. Their histrionics. Their bouts of depression and anxiety. Their trembling fingers and fidgety feet. Their relaxed stupor. Their constant need for attention. Their reserved embrace. You wonder if they changed or if you just never noticed it. Perhaps you were too concerned with your own laboratory experiments that you neglected to see theirs. Or perhaps their transition was smoother, with less trials and less errors. Or perhaps your methods were different. Or they erred just as much as you, but refused to let it show. They bottled it up like a ship sailing towards the new continent as the north star became lower in the sky. A transitory sense of longing just out of reach. You feel it. Then it fades to the background with the translucent spectres. And you want to scream at the top of your lungs, “What has happened to us? What has happened to the blissful perfection I envisioned for our lives?” But you just breathe out the memories of forgotten and fading friends and wonder silently, “do we change?” |