Have you ever seen Spider-Man 2? The one with Alfred Molina as Doctor Otto Octavius, AKA Doctor Octopus? In the movie he is working on building a fusion reactor that will provide clean and renewable energy from a globule of matter as powerful as the sun. This glowing ball of light hovers in a machine with magnetized arms that sustain it, keeping it in balance. If you can't picture it, I shall provide you will an image. Exhibit A:
Ignore Doc Ock. So you can kind of tell by the picture but like the sun, the reactor has these bursts of light coming out. They end up getting pretty large and in charge until they consequently destroy everything around them. Since you're going with me so willingly on this, I'd like to interject that I am viewing that orb as one of my relationships with one of my "bests." Observe.
You meet a person and a spark ignites inside of you; not all the time, but with the people you find interesting. Y'all know what I'm talking about because it is the driving force behind most of your relationships or it was at some point. That sparks grows and grows with the relationship, and in my eyes it grows into a bubble of sorts. Invisible, of course, but always there like a beating heart. Maybe I just look at it this way because I'm sentimental, but if I wasn't, then I wouldn't cry at superhero movies. Shouldn't have written that.
Eventually, like the good Doctor's nuclear reactor, the relationship becomes self-sustaining. You don't have to keep adding new information to help it grow, because you have established a base that it can reside on. This comes after an indeterminate amount of time but that all depends on the person. Sooner or later you come to see the flaws in the other half of the relationship, I know I do. Usually the flaws aren't necessarily "flaws" as they are the bits and pieces of potential problems that could arise sometime down the line but ones you ignore. Like the small arcs in the above picture.
Within every relationship there is something like a seam, usually buried beneath the smiles but one that can be exposed as something ugly. Something unnecessary. Unnecessary because it would take a cold day in hell for those problems in the seam to rear their ugly heads in the daylight. But like the fusion reactor, sometimes a problem explodes outward from the core of the relationship and it destroys everything in its wake. And it's a scary thing to realize how quickly something so great can go to utter shit, but it happens.
Just did, in fact.
Mrs. S and I have cut off the ties. To (kinda) quote Pirates of the Caribbean, we were "released from our human bonds." And it sucks, really... I can make light of it as much as I want but a relationship of 7 years is gone now, and from here, there won't be any going back. Not on my part. I had planned on writing this big lament to the things that were but somehow I have lost any drive to do so. I'm still so angry over it that there aren't really any kind words to write.
I think when you have someone offer to pay you to stay out of their life, a part of you withers up and falls away. The bubble of our relationship suddenly and quite effectively has burst wide open. That statement of course coming at the tail-end of a conversation that involved me asking for an apology three times and her failing to deliver on even one. I'd get more specific but that isn't really the point. It's the precise reason I choose not to name names in these, because WERE something like this ever to happen, I wouldn't have to throw anyone under the proverbial bus.
I don't wish her ill, nor do I wish any negativity to come her way. In a lot of ways the relationship ended with a sigh and not a bang, and that is a luxury I'm rarely if ever afforded. The dreaded-ex ended in quite the bang (him banging someone else, natch.) What I do wish is that egos could have been put aside, on one of our parts if not both, and that this could have slid away like so many squabbles before. But it didn't happen like that, and with the "seam" of the relationship exposed it allowed all sorts of horrors to come through.
Without trying to give myself too much credit, I came to realize this past year that by labeling a select few of my friends (five of them) as the "bests" it meant they were untouchable. It meant they were the only people I surrounded myself with to create a shield of sorts, and that would never change. @caitcd even asked once if there would be an audition process each year to stay as one of the bests. I said no, with a laugh, not really thinking about the thought too seriously. The bests were there because I needed them to be; they had grown increasingly close to me over time and I figured such a label was fitting if not finite.
I didn't realize that over time I would start to feel regret over the labels, because like an oceans tide, friendships ebb and flow.
While some stay my side no matter what (I like to think it's because they are too bored to branch out away from me (haha (sad panda))) others tend to wander away. And that's alright, really, because if you can't grow separately without growing apart then what is the use in being friends in the first place? That being said, it's difficult to categorize someone as a "best" when you hardly if ever see them. If you ever even talk to them... and in a way that played a part in all of this. Too many broken promises, to many illusions of grandeur fallen by the wayside. It is what it is.
There is something to be said about the demise of a friendship, and that is the will and desire to push yourself so far beyond what they knew you as. That way, should you ever reconnect, you will (hopefully) have changed into someone even more impressive. I suppose I cemented over the big-brother-esque nature of our lives by deleting her from Facebook and Twitter and all of the various other channels of which we as a society have become silent purveyors to our friends and family.
Will we reconnect someday? Maybe. Do I want to? Not especially. It is what it is and maybe it is how it always should have been. People come into our lives to push us in a direction we hadn't noticed before, and she certainly did that for me. Now I just need to make use of it.
Next blog is a happy one, lol, I promise. Weddings and speeches and smiles, oh my! And feel free to hit "like" on the new fanpage. What a self-promotor I've become!
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