I don't know where the verity is in this.

It occurs to me I have been struggling, unsuccessfully, for five years not to look pathetic, not to look like a post-divorce cadaver, moving zombie-like through the world without interaction.

I make feints at engaging—trying to “move on” as goes the popular phrase—but it seems I run into many blank walls; little incidents where my energy, time, and emotions disappear into the bland flat surface without a ripple, without apparent effect or affect.

I stare blankly at those moments and struggle against the urge to go home, close my door, and not come out.

I don't know where the verity is in this.

Forgetting Lies

How can you forget love? How can you forget someone you’ve loved? I think I can understand how you could forget someone with whom you’ve shared a brief moment, a passing fancy, a wink, maybe even a dalliance—daydreamed or real, but forgetting someone you’ve loved?

How can you forget someone you’ve trusted completely, someone from whom you’ve withheld no intimacy, someone to whom you have made yourself totally vulnerable? How can you forget someone for whom your habit of supporting, encouraging, and forgiving is so much a part of you that you find yourself—inexplicably and foolishly--forgiving them of the deepest, most fundamental, and shocking betrayal even as they are in the act of that betrayal.

Perhaps my life experience is just too limited, or I have some deeply ingrained and unrealistic concept of love, but forgetting love is outside my personal experience.

Of course such an absolute view of love also creates its own problem. One who holds this view, thinking they love and who later comes to believe they don’t love, rather than doubt the longevity of love or admit to an inconstant character may doubt the validity of their earlier feelings. The words expressing this doubt come out as nonsense.

For someone to say, “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did,” is for them to emit a collection of nearly random sounds, apparently intended to be words, but that do not make meaning. I’ve read these words so many places, heard about them as a relationship exit line so many times that I think they simply must be on someone’s top ten list of trite relationship phrases. There’s as much meaning in the phrases, “I don’t think my heart beats anymore, I’m not sure it ever has,” or “I don’t think I breathe oxygen anymore, I’m not sure I ever did.”

This of course is ephemeral nonsense. Love is the eternal verity here. Moreover, as inexplicably foolish as it seems, the very essence of eternal love includes forgiving even those who betray and reject in the very act of betrayal and rejection.