Yearly Archives: 2007

A Test Of Love

So I delet­ed your num­bers off my speed dial. I took down your pic­tures. It was an in-the-moment thing.

I’m calm now, see­ing things objec­tive­ly, yet still unde­cid­ed.

Part of me wants to believe we can still be friends. That we can still hang out with­out me depend­ing on you for any­thing. But I’m not like that, and I don’t stay friends with those on whom I can’t depend.

I put aside my issues for my friends, and I need­ed you to do the same for me.

I cried, not only because you weren’t there when I need­ed you, not only because you had a respon­si­bil­i­ty to my friends as well, but because I nev­er allow those who hurt me so much to be a part of my life. Our friend­ship may be lost, and this is what upsets me the most. Perhaps it hurts so much because you were so impor­tant to me. I don’t want to lose that, but I’ll nev­er for­get what you did and I’ll nev­er trust you again.

And if I can for­give you, you’ll know that I tru­ly love you.

Pat's Bachelor Party

The best part of the bach­e­lor par­ty was­n’t the fact that it was Pat’s first time being drunk1. Or the fact that he was break danc­ing next to street musi­cians down­town (the video of which shall not be shown).

It was the fact that he was com­plete­ly off his guard, too drunk to remem­ber what hap­pened the next day, but he was the same old Pat: fun, friend­ly, and con­sid­er­ate2.

Imbibed by the great truth serum, when all the bad and angry thoughts have a chance to come out, we dis­cov­ered that there isn’t a spot of dark­ness in his soul.

He also said two affect­ing things, lucid in his drunk­en state.

The first, in slurred speech, he advised us bach­e­lors, “Find the right one. Just make sure you find the right one. She might not be the per­fect match, but she is the right one. Just remem­ber that. If you look for your per­fect match all your life, you might not find it. Just find the right one.”

The sec­ond was when he was going around the room, and he came to me: “Jeff, you too. You’re going to live a hap­py life. Sometimes it’s rough on the edges, but you know what’s good for you. You know what’s good for you, you know peo­ple will take care of you. Don’t wor­ry, man. You’re going to live a hap­py life.”

“Life is rough on the edges”, he said. Not that my life is par­tic­u­lar­ly bad, I just don’t han­dle things very well, and this is often when I turn to him. It’s nice to hear from some­one — whose opin­ion which I respect great­ly — that things are going to be alright for me, that peo­ple will take care of me when things get bad.

Because I knew in my heart that when Pat said “peo­ple”, that includ­ed him­self.

  1. Not that Pat has any­thing against drink­ing, as he some­times has a beer with din­ner, he sim­ply does­n’t see the point to drink­ing to get drunk [↩]
  2. About throw­ing up on Mike’s “nat­ur­al-oak, nat­ur­al-stain lam­i­nate floor”, or “wast­ing mon­ey” I spent for his hal­ibut din­ner [↩]

The Cut-Off Defence

Through all this, I’ve come to real­ize that I cut peo­ple out of my life as a defence mech­a­nism.

When some­one hurts me, I dis­tance myself from them so they mean noth­ing to me.

And if some­one means noth­ing to me, they can’t hurt me.

Often it’s an easy choice — just one wrong word or action — but not all the time. Cutting off my mom was by no means a rash deci­sion; it took years of con­sid­er­a­tion and plen­ty of chances before she final­ly went too far.

What sur­pris­es me the most is that even though I now know that I have this defence mech­a­nism, I don’t see a prob­lem with it.

I’ve been hurt by enough peo­ple, and I don’t want to be hurt any more.