Dice Rolls and Ice Cold Shoulders

I should know as well as any other sad sap set out to scrawl their thoughts on paper just how unpredictably turbulent human connection can be. Especially when we throw the “love” label on our relationship with another soul. Regardless of that word having romantic or familial implications, it’s a nasty witches pot full of dice rolls and ice cold shoulders. We have a tendency to serve the stew with whipped cream and sprinkles, but these sweet things eventually dissolve and become one with the festering sludge. Some people search desperately for a way to restore the old garnish that was once kept lovely with nothing but compressed gasses and dreams. Others simply run to the store every time their sweetness dissolves, adding new excitement and love endlessly while ignoring the past ingredients dissolved in their being. Those memories which will never be sifted free again. Something as lovely as ice cream toppings can easily be turned to trauma. Call me jaded, or maybe compare me to something a little more fitting than jade. Call me faded. Call me exhausted and exasperated. I’m no fucking gem and should never be described as such.

Anyways, to get to the actual story…
With all this in mind I still reached out across a stable separation and tried to initiate a reignition. I thought myself strong enough to turn a past romance into a rewarding and rational friendship.
A fucking fool I am..

It went like this, I reached out. We both thought it was a good idea for me to come over and help her move into her new apartment and put up decorations while we caught up. Things started as good as they possibly could have, she told me about her new relationship with a man who sounded truly “good”. I really mean that too, the quotation marks are present simply to imply that “good” is a relative term and can not accurately be assigned to a being born as complex as humans. Perhaps it would be better to simply say he seemed like a kind person.
To my relief, though certainly not my surprise, she was equally accepting and supportive of my recent developments in gender expression and hormone intake. Without even a second of hesitation she accepted my new reality. Seeming to already know somewhere in her being who I really was all along. Everything seemed peachy, smooth sailing with no need for bailing, a grand ol’ wholesome time…

I still don’t know why she told me what she did next, why she would be so spontaneously honest with her feelings and plunge us back into the muck we were so carefully trapezing above. To our credit, we lasted all of about an hour as friends that night. Up until that ol’ “I love you” was uttered with me responding predictably.
Then to somehow make things even worse, a proclamation was made. Apparently she couldn’t stop rolling the thought around in her head that I was “the one” for her. Someone she could spend the rest of her life with. These words work as a kind of carrot that, when dangled before the starving such as I, could make the mild mannered go mad. Turn calm and consolable to crazed frenzy and fire. I fell for it all, carrot, hook, line, and sinker.

Fast forward to morning, I awake in an unfamiliar bed. For a moment convinced that nothing I have experienced was real. Her voice, talking on the phone in the other room, quickly verifies my location and all recollections from the night before. There’s an odd air of deja-vu as she repeats the worst three of the words she told me. Only this time speaking to the “good” man whose voice was but a faint hiss to my ears as it echoed out of the phone pressed to her face. This is all I remember of the morning, the rest was a confused haze as I kept a smile on my face and hid my freshly amputated hopes under a mask of merriment. There was a hug goodbye and that was it. She picked her path and left most of her motivations a mystery to me.

It’s pretty perplexing just how heavily unanswered questions can eat away at our existence.
So, here I am. Hollow. Trying to excuse my anxious attachment to anyone who will latch on and listen. Not quite knowing just what part of me pushes them away, and therefore doubting everything. Somehow I’m synchronously aware that my own radiating doubt itself is what fills them with dread and discomfort. An awareness which only serves to stupefy me further.
Not a very pretty existence if you ask me.