Kirkegaard

It is as close as a direct quote as I can get. Heard it in a movie.

No suffering is as painful as remembering the future, especially one that can never be.

I think that is what all grief invariably really is. We never miss the past we have with someone special to us so much as all the things that never will come to pass.

Someone told people he was going to ask me out. Some of those people told me his plans. I got excited. Counted the eggs in my basket as chickens and got egg on my face. And now I am left with him insisting that I misread everything, that it was all in my head and I took things more seriously than he meant them. Really? Cause I am not the only one who took him seriously. He told no less than 4 people he was going to ask me out before I ever knew anything of the sort was possible. While he may joke around with a lot of people, his behavior with me was still different. So what I am left with is the following:
a profound mistrust of my own senses
a profound distaste for the concept of dating
a profound sense of embarrassment
deep abiding distrust of anyone who would tell me that I am special
the inability to release my self defense mechanisms


What does this mean?
My sense of embarrassment has lead me to shut down with everyone. I have ignored facebook. I do not engage my coworkers. And my muse and I are having a screaming match the result of which I am begrudgingly putting my pain into a new piece. I don't want to paint. I want to create the perfect monologue which combines a Perry Mason styled list of evidence as to his culpability and Anne Shirley styled insults toward his capacity for humane behavior. But the muse says paint. "Put the pain into something that lets you transform darkness to light." I'd rather throw a lamp at him.
That deep, abiding distrust of anyone who would call me special? That means that I am reliving part of my past that I thought was healed. This isn't the first time I've been yanked around. But I had thought a 50 year old man would be less like the 10, 11 and 12 year old boys who spent three years tormenting me. That story will follow later. The only person who will ever know how awesome I am is me. I saw my future differently. That vision created a memory (dreams and visions repeated become memories). And now I get to grieve that memory.
The way in which I was told to forget any idea caused my senses to shut down. All of my defense mechanisms slammed shut around me. I cannot override them. And yes, I want to override them.Those defense mechanisms protect me from pain, true. But when they slam shut like that they keep out the good things that can happen. He isn't a monster. His past created perceptions and as an empath I know, I think I know, that something in his thinking got twisted around. If I can not find compassion for him I will never find to capacity to participate in my life again. That is the way of the defenses I set up. But I can't override them. Its like being trapped in the engine room on the Enterprise during a containment field breach. The ship slams the doors shut, sucks out the atmosphere to keep the breach form contaminating the rest of engineering and the whole ship. Great. Problem is that when there is a lowly red-shirted yeoman stuck near the containment unit when the breach occurs, the safety protocols end up sacrificing the unlucky schlub. I'm the schlub. I can't get out. And Geordie can't get me out with his superior code authorizations. I've been trying. I've been punching buttons on the Okuda grams, throwing tools at the door and trying to pry open the barriers with my bare hands to no avail. The thing is... the internal sensors are reading a breach. But the containment field is intact. The atmosphere is getting sucked out of the room for no reason and it is going to kill me.

So how does that relate to Kirkegaard? Simple. I have remembered a future where I am not alone and all the cool awesome things about me are used in a partnership. It will not happen now. Not with him. And, if the words given me when I sought comfort from spiritual advisors is any indication, it will not happen with anyone.
I don't have the capacity to hate enough for revenge so all I can do is keep my head down and not get noticed. Since my part in the problem was having ever spoken of a hope, I can do nothing now but remain silent as can be. Cursed as I am as an empath, all I can do is hope that he doesn't keep tossing away opportunities to be with awesome women. Something in him keeps telling him he doesn't deserve anyone cool. And there are enough people who have told me that he is beneath my consideration who reinforce that thought; I cannot bear the idea of being counted among them because I know that they are wrong. He is wrong to think that he deserves only pain and vengence and disappointment.
He has been reprimanded. I do not know to what degree. But he must know I had nothing to do with that. I bear as much responsibility and should shoulder as much of the burden as he. It won't work that way. Whoever told on him made sure to make it seem as though he/she had done it with the best of intentions and made him the sole guilty party with enough plausibility that no one would consider any other options when the quick and easy answer is to punish him and be done with it.