Looks like this cycle of drama has likely run its course, so I can post something less cryptic than my previous post... and, since there's popular demand for such, why not.
First, some back story... back in high school, like most guys, I "fell in lust" with my share of ladies, but never really went any further than that until my senior year. That's when a fetching young lady, who I'll just call F for this story, transferred in. Not only was she pretty, she was smart (I believe I met her in my calculus-based Physics class), and she was a Trekkie. What more could a growing geek ask for, right? Still, it's not like she was perfect... F always struck me as being a bit "scattered", but that didn't bother me at all. We became friends and, in time, something like boyfriend and girlfriend... again, it wasn't perfect, but it was more than just lust.
Things went astray at our senior prom... I invited F, and drove a close friend of mine and his date (a junior whom I'd never met before) there. After a while, F and my friend went off on their own, leaving me with the stranger. Let's just say that I didn't handle that well, and I made quite certain that all involved knew that I was hurt by it. No, hurt would be an understatement... it strongly shaped my outlook on life, and it took the better part of fifteen years for me to get back to a point in my life where I could truly forgive F and move on with my life. It never occurred to me that any of the other participants in that incident could still be weighted down by it.
Fast forward to this past October, when I received a call from F from out of the blue. She needed a little liquid courage to make the call, so she may well have said more than she intended... while I make no claim to being a gentleman, there's still much she said that it wouldn't be right to repeat. The main highlights, then: F was truly and terribly sorry for the grief she had caused, she had been recovering for several years from a nervous breakdown brought on in part by the 9/11 attacks (she had been in the greater New York area at the time), she's working to get into grad school (a process complicated by how long she had been out of, well, everything), but she would also like a relationship with me... that and much more, she laid at my feet.
Like I posted before, she mostly talked and I mostly listened... the fact was, it was obvious that she had a decision to make, and had likely called me, consciously or not, hoping to get the proverbial door slammed in her face, so she could concentrate on the path she really wanted to follow. More's the pity for her, I had forgiven her some years back, so I didn't have that lash-out instinct at play... instead, I was intrigued. I could still see the bits that attracted me all those years ago, and got reminded of things I'd forgotten (like her voice... it still has the power to coil around my brain stem and give it a nice squeeze), and, layered on top of that, was a couple of decades of change, paths she took that I never went near. There's no way I could just "dive in" the way she wanted, but sniffing around the edges couldn't hurt much...
There was a problem, though... it became apparent, the more we talked, that she had a lingering image of me as a good/nice guy, perfect in too many ways. If we were going to pursue any sort of relationship outside of Facebook-friendship, that needed corrected. Since I also needed to get my thoughts and feelings straight, I tried to kill two birds with one stone... since she was extremely open and honest with me during her call, I composed an honest telling of my own experiences for the same general time-frame. It took me the better part of four nights to get everything down, and I ended up with about six pages of prose, which I promptly emailed off to her.
Writing has many good things to say about it, but it also has one major downside... if you're not careful to understand your audience, and write in a way that works for them, you can get results you never intended. F read my manuscript, and it was like I walked into her home, dropped trou, and crapped on her carpet. It necessarily included a section surrounding the events of that long-ago prom, and, for all I had told her on the phone, and written in the manuscript, that I had forgiven her long ago, she took it as an indictment of her behavior. A flurry of emails and text messages followed, as I tried to convince her that, truly, I wasn't trying to dredge up the past in a damning way... and she seemed to be somewhat mollified.
Thereafter... well, we texted a very little bit, but we never got on the phone again. F kept herself quite busy with studying for tests and the like, so my hopes for getting to re-know her dwindled and faded. Finally, I sent her an email last night (a mere four paragraphs, how's that for brevity? ;) ), putting the ball firmly in her court for initiating further contact, once she's not so busy... she didn't take well to that one, either. Still, I think it was the right thing to do... it lets me get back to my normal state of serenity and contentment, and there's no sense in both of us being miserable. Besides, if she does get back to me in a few weeks' time, it'll be a (possibly) pleasant surprise.
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