(Originally posted on MySpace 11/8/2006)
You might be wondering why exactly I’m writing with so much reflection and passion about someone I haven’t seen or talked to in the past decade, someone who can’t possibly be described as anything more significant to me than my favorite plaything. It’s something that’s been on my mind a lot, and for weeks before I started to write these entries; my hope has been that, as usually happens for me, the writing itself will help me to process my thoughts and then get them the hell out of my head.
My last post summed up the end of whatever relationship I had with this man, but it is the postscript to my story that has had me flummoxed for months now, since I first heard his name on my local news. He has been charged, and is as far as I know awaiting trial, in a horrible crime. No one believes in the concept of presumed innocence more than me, and he is still in that process, but that hasn’t stopped me from questioning not just my perception of the person I used to know, but things I believed about myself.
I have done reckless things in my life, and by and large I have not only gotten away with them, but had a damned good time. A lot of it was dumb luck, but I always thought that I was a decent judge of character, too. I don’t trust easily or well, but I trusted him–with my home, my body…my life, really. What does that say about me? If he is capable of what he’s been accused, was he always? When he was in my life, in my bed–for god’s sake, in my mouth–was there something I should have seen? Felt? Is there some alarm bell that didn’t get installed in me? How is it that I managed to run off any number of perfectly good men over the years, but the one guy I think of the most often, and fondly, might be facing life in prison? Why do memories and fantasies of the two of us together still rock my little boat like nothing else (not even Jack Bauer, dammit), knowing what I know now?
While the way I behaved toward him was certainly within the bounds of our…whatever it was, I also wonder: what if I’d been nicer to him? Do I think, somehow, that it was the loss of me that, years later, led him to this point? No–I don’t think that much of myself; my ego’s not that oversized. Still, ‘what ifs’ are my specialty, particularly in the middle of a sleepless night when I’m lonely and frustrated and trying to figure out just how I got to this place, or imagining what little changes might have put me on a different path. I could have asked for more from him in the beginning–it really wouldn’t have been too much to ask to know where he lived–or stuck to my guns the first time around with the idiot I now refer to as W.W.B., and the course of our lives may have been completely altered. Not that we would have lived happily ever after, but maybe he wouldn’t be facing prison and I wouldn’t be facing life in my wheelchair. Or maybe we would–no amount of midnight navel gazing can answer what thousands of years of philosophy and religion still can’t tackle.
I just wish he would get out of my head.
