Conflicted Ramblings

For the first time in about four years, I received an email from an ex friend/lover.

Honesty is hard; especially when you can’t find the strength to be honest with yourself.

The email stirred up so many memories, good and bad and I found out, once again, how easy it is to feel that old familiar hurt again.

He wants to talk on the phone and be friends once more. Am I ready for this? Can I just let it go? More so, can I really bring myself to talk about our past and then to write about it for the entire world to see? That’s what I asked for right? So why is this so hard?

Maybe I didn’t think he, of all people, would write me back. Why should he? Not that I was the one who broke his heart…he broke mine. But why would he even remember little ole me and the crazy, unstable person I was back then?

Funny how it seems that’s not how he remembers me at all. We were both in a bad place at that time and for one brief shining moment, we allowed ourselves to get caught up in each other.

I still want to call him an asshole…

Which makes me feel guilty because I know he’s not really an asshole but in order to be sincere with this part of my story, I need to be able to portray what I was feeling at the time…which was anything but happy.

I’m conflicted.

If I choose to pursue this friendship and make amends, what happens when he reads the book and finds out how I really felt? Does it even really matter? I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings but in some cases in order to succeed in this endeavor, I will need to write everything out in order to get the whole story across. And this means I have to include the bad parts too.

It’s not as if I didn’t realize this in the beginning, but now it’s a reality because someone of who I shared more than a friendship with actually wrote me back.

He says he wants to be in the book as long as I keep his name out of it which is fine. I understand wanting to keep things private in some respect. But in turn that makes me feel even more guilty for having to portray my anger, hurt and sensitivity to the situation. I don’t want to jeopardize any friendship with any person in my life. I don’t want to hurt anybody either. That’s not what this is about. It’s about finding the truth within myself and journeying back to understand more clearly a time in my life when nothing was easy to understand.

I care too much about what people think and I am highly aware of this. Another dear friend of mine, whose opinion I hold very highly, recently wrote me about this. She told me, and I quote:  “Not everybody is going to like the things we do, say, write, etc.  What matters is that there are plenty of people who will and do”…In other words, many people probably can empathize with my struggle in wanting to be sensitive to other peoples feelings but also in wanting to be true to myself and how I am feeling.

I suppose this is what truly matters. It still doesn’t make it any easier…but no passage in life comes to us freely.  


"You were looking for an orchid. And I will always be...a dandelion."
Antje Duvekot