Look forward

I have begun the process of releasing people from my clutches. They do not know that I am holding them. I don't see much good in making this clear to them, but held they have been, these unfortunates who crossed my path years or decades ago. I decided they belonged to me in some fashion, often slight. I haven't wanted to let go but holding them is unwholesome. They don't deserve my attention, I don't deserve the wasted resources, yet here we are by my decree.

There is a guy whom Amber barely knows who comments on photos of her posted to social media, telling her how beautiful she is (and nothing else). She has not spoken to this guy in ten years and has been with me for over eight. There was nothing even close to romance, but there he always is, letting her know that she is beautiful. I don't want to be any version of this for anyone.

There are toxic, or at least unhealthy people, whom I have kept in my orbit too long out of an obligation. I did not yet have the courage to cut them out or allow them to fade from my life.

There are wonderful people, too, and we erred by intersecting at the wrong time. I can't help this by wishing ten years later that it had been otherwise, that our lives blended more for a few months until we had had our fill. To those whom whom I had some interaction partly justifying their space in my head, I can care for us both now by releasing them.

I can't long for the friendship we missed out on two decades ago. I can't focus anymore on who we were then and who they are now. Our place in the other's life is slight and that is not going to change. I can't wait for that and I won't any longer. In out next life, we can find each other on some rocky coast in Maine, but we missed our chance in this one. We don't hate one another, and we might have. That will have to be enough.

Or we had our explosion. We were as important to the other as we could be, and then we were not. I find these harder to mourn, because we had our chance. It was at the expense of interactions I might have had, but ours was full. There was nothing left to it. If we met in any other, sooner circumstance, it is impossible to promise is would amount to anything close to what it did.

There are many people whom I at one point my life I thought were crucial. It's been twenty years, literal decades, since some of these people belonged in my life. Why am I carrying them still? They don't think about me much, I'm sure. It only drags me down. Why not put their ghosts to rest? Where exactly is the sin in this?

In Citizen Kane, one of the characters relates having seen a woman in a white dress with a white parasol. He did not speak with her. Decades later and he still thinks of her at least monthly. When I first saw that scene, it hit me like a gut-punch.

When I was in middle school, I went to a day-long program for gifted kids at Sarah Lawrence college. Much of it is hazy now. We did something theatrical. I read a book on psychic powers beneath the seat while someone gave a speech that did not seem relevant. We ate a lunch I did not find satisfying.

What I do remember is, in the final hour, meeting a girl named Skye. I remember her last name, improbably perfect. I am certain no one wants to google oneself and find me remembering you a quarter of a century later. I remember saying a goofy line about her name, and her liking me anyway in a way that was not only friendly. I had not had a first kiss, but the implication was that we might have had we spoken earlier in the day. She lived in New Jersey and we understood that it wasn't worth pursuing much. We exchanged a few handwritten letters afterward, but no more.

When I got home, I threw a fit, stomping about our concrete shed. I could have had something with this girl, someone who was like me, and now never would. More than likely, I would have had nothing with her, but there was the potential on which we missed out.

I keep an occasional eye on the woman who was nearly seventeen (while I was twenty) when we almost but didn't date. We did not even kiss -- not a mistake on her part in retrospect -- but it was enough that I am curious about her every few months. I do not think we are friends -- saying otherwise devalues the word -- but I regard her well from what I know. I will never find occasion to tell her as much. We do not know one another. We know the interaction of a few winter weeks forever ago.

And the drummer with whom I might have had an affair in college, which might not have been the worst thing. I still follow her on social media, but it has been over fifteen years since I have seen her. However cool a twenty-one-year-old version of me found who she was then, I don't know her now and I won't. As it startled me to discover her irritated housemate was her girlfriend, it could be said I did not know her then. I assume we would get along well enough if we met now, but my evidence for this claim is dusty.

I can identify a dozen others of any gender in whom I invest still a tiny hope, but we won't become friends. I will make new friends in unexpected moments, but it won't be them.

These are insubstantial flickers, attachment to near strangers, but they accumulate to a glare. I have felt frustrated that I could not contrive the way to connect, could not make them want my friendship. Feeling they were perhaps important, I experienced a slight that they did not seem to feel the same. Though, why should they reciprocate? We missed a chance and it is not going to reoccur, or the relationship ebbed and there is no point now. I am hopeful they are not likewise attached to me. Whatever chance of actual significance is as good as a story now, if even that.

There's this tendency to collect people, no one who is relevant to you. No one who is going to help you experience your life. It's curated jealousy at anniversary trips to Aruba and promotions to senior partner, glimpses you have no business seeing. No one needs that in their lives, not matter how those who monetize our attention tell us otherwise. It speaks of a hunger on my part, a dissatisfaction with how my life is.

I want to let it go. People in my life are important, and I'm unfair to them by looking over my shoulder at those who have forgotten me. If they wanted to be in better contact with me, they would be in contact with me. I am not a hard man to reach or know.

To these people I am releasing, am I frozen in place as the last time they saw me, pupal or years-vacant carapace? I don't know and shouldn't. What they think of me belongs to them alone.

They have frozen for me. I think on them not as people in their late thirties but as impetuous college students. I hide most of them on social media now as a therapy. I don't care to see their babies and divorces.

Yet I still want them to understand who and what I have become. There is, I admit, a small part of me who wants to show them up. I am a recognized author with a good job at which I excel beyond the necessity of state work, a spritely and brilliant wife on my arm. I want them to know what they missed by abandoning me, if they realized they had, if they did. I want them to regret that we are no longer confidantes, if we ever were. I want this and know it is near the last thing I need, so I must let that go as well.

I am a part of more pasts than I will ever know, so people who carry our interactions, even if I didn't know they were significant. There are some whom I treasured, who vanished from my life. That is on them and I don't have to mourn them.

Years ago, I had a dear friend whom I saw infrequently on account of his mental illness. (I realize it was mental illness now, but thought it was blasted eccentricity at the time.) One day, he stopped responding to me. As he could go for months out of contact, I didn't think anything of it until I did. I never got an answer why he cut me out of his life, but that is his problem. I had never done anything against him, so I can't hold onto the idea that his leaving hurts me now, though it did at the time. I thought I was owed closure, but it is rare that we are owed anything.

I felt lack and I manifested lack. I took it personally. I felt alone and lonely, even spending every night with my favorite people and feeling no lack of their love.

This is not meant as a judgment on their current character, or even their character then, but one on how I have clung. If I could keep them in my life, I would not lose the part of myself I had shared with them. I am not finite. What I gave to them was lost long ago and other things have grown from the absent spaces.

To fall on the cliche of KonMari, these micro-relationships, the hope one-sided, do not spark joy. I hold them to my chest one last time, thank them for their service and I remove them.

I have also come to a place where I do not put more effort into relationships than I seem to be getting back. I put in a few jolts, and invitation or two met with no responses. I once would have pestered them, but I cannot care so much anymore. They decided, even if they lacked the guts to say it. Why wouldn't I respect it and leave them alone? Why waste myself on them?

I need to lighten myself, not for the people I may meet (I do not expect to meet them), but for myself. I can't carry people who are strangers to me now, ones who do not care either way. I was last year's beloved fashion that doesn't go with their current style. They would rather pretend they never went through that phase.

Amber brings up moving in a few years, so that she can pursue greater academic and career horizons. The idea is not a comfortable one, but I cannot deny the charm of actually new people. I would have the opportunity to meet people I've never encountered before.

This is are shards of nostalgia and wishing that I taped together so that I could divine a picture. It could be commonplace, hoarding these snapshots, but most don't mention it. Social media makes the process too easy to have thousands of decimals for want of a whole. I must be merciless in taking myself back from these.

I have had people look askance when I said I was friends with people I had dated. They ask, "Oh, but she left you?" or "Oh, but she has babies now?" Yes, and I am happy for them. We would not have made one another happy in the long term. I loved them, how much I could love then, and I want them happy now. People take "I don't want this to be a romantic relationship" as a condemnation every moment they spent with this person. It is usually "This isn't going to work." If it isn't working for one person, it isn't going to work for the other for long, or in a healthy way. One woman said that she considered suicide as a valid alternative to leaving me. I told her that I was glad she wasn't dead. We get so trapped and fearful.

It is possible that they needed to abandon me to find their own fulfillment. This is something about which I ought to be more magnanimous. Not everyone needs to have low grade codependence for fifty people. But that still hurts, thinking, "Wasn't I enough to fulfill you? Why do you have to leave?" Even though we can't ever be, and they do have to.

The relationship I crave with them existed in a limited space. It wouldn't be the same if it happened again. Neither of us would be the same. But I remain one half of what made that magic. It is still in me. The joy stayed in me, even if the person left.

Soon in Xenology: Writing. The Sheet.

last watched: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
reading: Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates