I thought I could get over this, but I can’t. It seems I relearn every day that emotions weigh more than logic and that the brain is an emotional machine. I drove to see you with a stone in my gut and a lump in my throat, and I started to remember the apprehension I felt last time. The unformed disturbance. The dangerous emotion creeping underneath my conscious logic. My conscious logic says, Yes, this is behind me. We can still be friends. Forgive and move on. My conscious logic is a fool because in the moment it does not realize that it is a thin guise masking the irrational, emotional beast. It’s like a matador who thinks he has the bull under control. The bull will only be patient for a little while until it has enough, and suddenly the confident bull fighter has a horn through his chest.
Consciously, I ignored the patient warnings of the bull. It was saying to me, You need to stop immediately. This is dangerous. I am starting to fall in love again. I said, How can that be. With her? Impossible. After what happened last time, I can’t fall in love with her again.
See, time makes you forget what you once learned, what you once felt. What once was horrible, dramatic, and gut-wrenching doesn’t seem so bad after a while. Your scars heal, and you get over it. I saw you after months without contact, and all the fear I had evaporated. You didn’t turn into the faceless shadow monster I’d conjured in my nightmares. Suddenly, you weren’t so scary after all, and I forgot about the violence and the pain. Instead of the monster I’d made you, I saw the human being again. A human, just like myself, with all my same fears and struggles.
When I saw you, I was terrified at first, then relieved when you embraced me. We caught up. We smiled. My emotional sirens died down, and I remembered what made you so special to me in the first place. When I left, I said to myself, Everything went better than expected. I’m going to be okay.
But my emotions were starting to whisper an impossible scenario: I love her. I tried to ignore this, but I thought of you for the rest of the day. And then, I made plans to see you again. I adjusted my route for this explicit purpose and then told myself I was going to go that way anyway. I saw you again and we laughed and made jokes, and this time it was more difficult to argue logic against my tumultuous emotions. This time, I caught myself enraptured by you and gazing too long, and I hoped you didn’t notice, but then I hoped you did, and my God, how can we be friends if I act like this around you?
This time, I left beaming, unable to control my grins. I continued this way for the rest of the day, but I woke up sober. The matador was beginning to doubt his position, thinking, I need to be more careful. Emotions can’t be trusted.
So, the next week, I thought about seeing you. I thought about how you would react, what you would say. I remembered when we were friends. I remembered what happened when I wanted more. And, as the storm clouds rolled in overhead, I just went home.
This morning, I figured enough time had passed for it to be safe. As I planned my day in my head, I scheduled a slot for you right after work. I thought about you as I picked out my clothes. I wore this suit last time. I’ll wear a different tie. As much as I wouldn’t admit it, I wanted you to think about how great I looked when I showed up. I wanted you to love me.
The closer I got to you, the more sick I felt, so I blasted my music to shoo the doubts away, an ineffective but comforting technique. But the lyrics of the song only compounded my fears: You make me feel like I am worth nothing.
When I pulled into the parking lot, I knew I couldn’t do this anymore. It was time to jump out of the way before the bull trampled me. Then, I knew that as long as we’re together, I will always fall in love with you, and I will always end up bleeding because you’ll never feel the same. As much as I would like to get over this logically, I have to remember that my conscious logic only conducts the emotional engine on set tracks, and the path that leads me to you ends in a trainwreck. I drove in circles. My emotions screamed over the music: Something wicked this way comes! And this time I couldn’t ignore it; I turned the car around and drove away.
So, I’m sorry. We can’t be friends. You see, when someone bares their heart to you, and you rip it to shreds, it can never be fully repaired. It just becomes a patchwork of fragments held together by scars that tremor and bleed with each new injury.
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