Take care (part 3)

The art of saying goodbye

This is part 3 of a series. If you would like to read the other parts, click below.

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I see your face when I hear your name

Familiar reminders of uncommon traits

I called you special, lost to never agains

Yet if it were unique I could forget

You wouldn't appear everywhere in my head

So I look at her as if it meant you aren't gone forever

A someone I'll never see again

Unchained, unchanged

Free, still the same

Without these eyes it wouldn't be your face

How could you be you without me there

To see it special, some care to take

We snow-blind, behind obsidian eyes, emotion's mess

What is left

Leaving me to guess

Someplace unfelt

Feeling someone

Someone else

“Someone who loves you wouldn’t put themselves in a position to lose you.”

Someone who trusts you is in a position to lose everything.

Two someones will always strategize themselves into an early goodbye. United there are no positions, we become of the same place, outside of time.

There is no losing when we've found ourselves, even if the memory is us in someone else.

The beginning of a relationship is inclusively mystical, the middle confusingly practical, and the end so abstract it feels unexplainable. It is a representation of the human experience within a human experience, making it so complex and painfully difficult that many don’t take responsibility for their involvement. Scorched earth is an easy policy when hiding who did the worst damage.

How much art has been lost to the fires of insecure tyrants?

The end isn’t always volatile, sometimes it just piddles out as people lose interest. Volatile endings are simply downstream consequences of an already decaying connection. Often we need blaring indications to re-enter the uncertainty of finding someone new.

In any case, we are crafting a final statement in our least optimal operant state.

“Take care…”

Whose care? It doesn’t seem like you did at all, or you wouldn’t have said… or not said… all those things.

Neither choice can be taken back. What are we to say when the improper expression leads to so much turmoil while saying nothing at all creates more downstream separation? Whether quiet or loud we become agents of outcomes we wished to avoid.

“Nothing pays off like the restraint of tongue and pen.”

When the payback of silence is a lonely world where everyone is left wondering if you ever cared at all, it becomes challenging to determine if your protest was worth the consequence.

If only we could more effectively teach each other how to communicate by universal means.

We cannot expect every expression to be physically and obviously validated. Trust is trained in time, connection solidified, and signals identified. Reactive emotional behavior is predictable, and only takes willing observance to caress. Outbursts are childish assertions of individuality, and must be treated as we would a toddler’s tantrum. If neither party is able to take a step back, the situation devolves into pouting or fighting. All of this is better practiced than taught as everyone becomes sacrificial students in the struggle.

In youth it is all too easy to discard each other, being naively convinced that life will always be this way: filled with opportunity to sort through new interactions and find the "best" connection. As we age our refinement makes all noise annoying and the comfort of a timid validation—solidified by ugly or beautiful expressions—convinces us to hide our most fringe manerisms, for we may be risking exposing our own naggy nature. In addition, we assert intentional blindness, rationalizing warning signs of sometimes the exact same traits we nitpicked in our last failure. Ever more standardized, we become less aware of what makes us art-like.

I fell for faults, failures, and frailties, not a promise that you would appear like this again

every day withers us lightly as we forget appearance.

Sensitivity has muted expression, reinforced by the delusion that there are so many others who can replace the nagging idiosyncrasies which are inevitable in any relationship.

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

“When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.”

If the time comes when we learn how to stop pointing at all…

an embrace is all we need.

The amount of people who chose to wage war on an already broken me, displaying their faux empowerment, makes me wonder if we’ve forgotten how to love. When connection degenerates into a power struggle, everybody loses.

Last chance, take some swings

stomping on the powerless, cruelty cannot describe.

Despite popular opinion, humans seem to not want vulnerability in their partner, rather they desire a display of that ability and a simultaneous strength to not succumb to it. How to accomplish such a thing… I may never know. The most vulnerable always becomes the most hurt, making it unsurprising that many of us build intricate defense systems.

Pain has lost its purpose in the comforts of today.

The best defense system is knowing pain so well that when someone does take a swing, you know exactly how to move with it. When you can laugh at all the “secrets” you’ve told, having already taken ownership for all your shameful traits, fights become fits of laughter instead of angry fists.

No matter how well we are trained, however, there are always sore spots to find. The deeper you become intertwined with another soul, the easier it becomes for them to find places to poke.

Hurting someone you love feels worse than harming yourself, as now two people feel the pain. For two who feel intensely connected, the pain seems to multiply on itself as each person witnesses the other feeling worse. Anger is easier, for it allows us to label opposition as enemy and fling any entrusted details back in their face.

Ah so clever we become when friends turn foe.

The fear of saying the wrong thing fades in the final moments of a relationship as our worst thoughts explode on each other, triggering more repressed outbursts. In most endings I wish I could have left a letter so the worst of me doesn’t tarnish the memory of a beautiful experience. But only after I’ve distanced from the emotion can I construct anything worth reading.

An end always feels like a betrayal when we aren’t in control of it. The mind then attempts to provide medicine for itself with reason to quiet all the endless questioning. Most medicine, however, only treats symptoms. Logic is not always truth, and we only have one very distorted half of a story to rely upon. There could be many reasons that someone took deleterious actions, but we will never know them all, and that other person will never have accurate hindsight to understand it either. We’re all quite blind to it. It takes time to process, however as time progresses the memory becomes distorted. So we fill the confusion with a look-a-like to pass that time, hoping they will have slightly different behavioral manifestations.

How can one love never be enough?

Even if we do come to some realization, it's too late, and the mind convinces us that the efforts of reconciliation are futile. Plus... apparently talking to an ex is a red flag. Great… another silly reason to not pursue a relationship with another inevitably flawed human. If staying open to continued communication is a bad sign, I’ll stay guilty of brandishing the banner, waving that flag like a confused and conflicted Confederate sympathizer. I often see red flags as indications of insecurity in the person identifying the flag.

Take that down, it’s offensive.

Tread on what you think is me… I don’t give a fuck anymore.

Do we live faulty lives so we'll have a chance at compassion? 

Did we come here to test if we could find each other's way home?

I do very much despise how we’ve further stratified an already convoluted sorting system. Even at my own detriment I continue with the “should nots” of every interaction, reliant on principle and practice instead of reactive emotional popularity. Society advises in generalities based on the trending association. The masses consume and share what sounds nice rather than what is true. I stay ignorant to it all intentionally because shallow advice never worked for me, and I sense there is more to every living being than appearance or trendy word play. People are far more than qualities, and deeper than the personalities we hoist proudly. Character, it seems, is much harder to find and even more laborious to develop.

Become a character, not a caricature

Goodbyes are easier when we assume we’ll see someone again. As friends we know that not everything has to be expressed. There’s more to spread those thoughts to when we haven’t burdened them as “the one.” The easiest goodbyes are those of shallow expectation, ones which we had predetermined wouldn’t stay for long. Acquaintances have little emotional influence on our world. The difficulty of the goodbye is proportional to the depth of connection that was felt, a depth that isn’t always equivalent on both sides.

In all cases there are always things left unsaid. If the relationship had been transparent the entire time, it wouldn’t be so, but relationships aren't that simple. We interact as egoic representations, predicting what someone else wants while taking care not to assert our wants on top of theirs. Even with perfect compatibility, people change unpredictably and wants morph with them. Conflict is inevitable and egos are so delicate. The only way to hold them together is to keep from saying too much, too fast, and too emotionally. Once the ego is exposed it has no choice: fight, hide, or be annihilated.

Although we cling to the biggest non-negotiable errors, most deconstructions are invested in time. Little occurrences build to unpredictable explosions. Nuanced mistakes have more to do with timing than the particular actions taken. It appears that people have a saturation point for our dysfunction, and rarely communicate how poorly they are regulating their reactivity. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s usually too late when we realize how irritated we really are. Regretful action is the strongest indication of our difficulty.

Regardless of the brief mistakes myself or another person makes, I choose not to harbor resentment. There are many reasons why resentment should be avoided, especially for ourselves.

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

But even knowing that, now sitting here, I can’t name the reasons. The more recent the failure, the more difficult it becomes to distance ourselves from justifying our hate. There are just so many more obvious and graspable events to identify with. Evidence of the lingering toxicity is enough for me to know.

It’s not your fault, but now knowing all you are, it is your responsibility.

I consider myself mostly healed when my memories turn fond and warm, after the sad and angry eruptions have subsided. Forgiveness is a powerful remedy. Each piece of a broken heart holds the strongest medicine for its counterpart. Healing each other develops a stronger connection than ever before.

Cooperative resolution is not always possible, especially when the end was so damaging. Some people aren’t willing or able to face the difficulty of staying raw when vulnerability brought them to such recent and intense pain. I still make every effort to keep the door open. If I didn’t I would have even fewer connections, and this life is lonesome enough as it is. Most of all I hold on for that slim chance that we could transcend the pain. You’d be amazed at the transformations a broken human is capable of.

These could be pathetic justifications for weakness, when I'd rather have the remedy I thought was you.

If I could choose between having a great story to tell and having you back, I'd give up every word I've ever written.

I’m a hypocrite in all of it because I too have to choose between holding onto something that isn’t quite right or letting it go for the chance for whatever that special feeling is. No matter how terrible that person was, the feeling that kept us together is enough for me to want it back.

There are more people like me out there, that will love the parts that you never liked.

What I really search for is the feeling of who I was when I felt that connected. But not everyone is searching for that feeling. We all have different life plans. Two people have a choice in these instances, and neither can know how the other will choose.

As if life wasn’t a wild gamble already.

Cave and forgive, allowing the other to take advantage, or harden in the face of details and stand strong in righteousness. The decision deals judgement and places us on either side to feel inferior or superior, validated or invalidated, in a choice that was hardly ours to make.

The "best" of us give and the "worst" of us take. 

Who's in the middle? 

Did we exist too late, too fake, somewhere less for more?

Could there be a give if there was no-one to take?

Despite how sensationalized it has become to point around at all the takers, we are all givers and receivers at some point, it is never all one-sided. Honoring that often means that someone with a tendency to assert their benevolent nature should spend some time receiving, and those who tend to shamelessly receive should spend some energy generously. We are all lop-sided that way, and finding others to consciously pad our deficiencies is the best way to grow a circle.

It’s not so easy admitting that we aren’t smooth and whole

and there are some empty places, betting on lumpiness

…are we there yet…

Dismissing the communal nature of humanity is a failure of everyone. Each individual lost to individuality is failure to incorporate uniqueness—the only way we innovate. For as long as we’ve been human, we’ve relied on each other, and that isn’t going anywhere. Everyone has a place here, no matter how weird.

Being alone can feel like freedom, there's no limitation so every direction is an option. Freedom can also mean we don't know where to go. It’s deceptively debilitating and can inspire inaction because we fear the decision may take away something we cherish so deeply. Often the decision (or indecision) brings a result we were most aggressively avoiding. Then we wish we had a time machine.

I don’t care what it would take, I just…

Can I take it all back?

Courage is the assertion that no matter what is taken, we will emerge through the difficulty, better than we’ve ever been. We can’t take things back and we won't get anything that has already passed. Things were said and done, and you were responsible for instantiating them. At first glance, being aware of all of this could increase the weight of making decisions. Owning that responsibility and the consequences which accompany it doesn’t mean the weight is lifted, but that we are ready to take the next step. By distributing our load it can be carried farther with grace. The weight holds lessons that will be useful for many more. One could allow the resurrection of emotions we were too weak to face to inspire of debilitation; or if filed appropriately, the remembrance could become a fond pointer to greener pastures, for ourselves and someone else.

Authenticity is an interactive filter, those vibrationally aligned will be magnetized, while those with opposing constitution are repelled. Trusting authenticity can make us appear callous, dismissive, and cruel. The alternative panders to all the traits we don’t wish to be, and the other person becomes more and more convinced that is who we are. Most times it’s best to assert what we wish to become and let those actions do the sorting for us.

When evaluation fails, we are left to be without means, and must trust that everything was done as a me, not somebody else

crafted as the masterpiece.

Nobody is worth being someone else.

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Wherever you go, whoever you lose, whatever you gave, remember you can always walk away…

as you.

Take care.