“I am not the only traveler who has not repaid his debt.”
Sometimes you hurt people when you are actually doing everything you can not to hurt them.
Strangers. I can have sex with them and walk away. I don’t feel bad about ghosting or just leaving it alone as a one time thing. Maybe that’s wrong but I just think it’s a low risk situation where no one gets hurt.
Then there are people I know well and care about. I can’t just have sex with them outside of a defined relationship. Once I know them, the line is crossed and I am responsible for how I make them feel. I need accountability. I don’t usually make them feel good. The more I care about and respect them, the more distance I need to put between us when I know they are interested in more from me – any kind of more. These are people I do not want to hurt and I am a hurtful person in relationships. At least, historically.
Sometimes I know I am not at my best or not at the level of what I think they deserve. So I do everything I can to avoid doing with them what they know I will do with strangers. That hurts them anyway.
“I had all of and then most of you, some and now none of you.”
I crossed these lines once. He’s dead.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do haunted by the ghost of you.”
I can’t take anything back. I can only be who I am. I know how not to hurt people presently. I can have the conversations I used to hide from. But I can’t treat them like strangers and remove the intimacy of our friendships/relationships in order to be icily intimate and walk away. I can’t fabricate the time when I catch up or lag behind.
Sometimes I am a wounded bird, sometimes I am a Phoenix. I can’t pick the one most attractive to the audience and play that out just as I can’t expect them to meet me at the pile of ashes I am soaring out of if they only want to save me.
Poor timing. I can save myself. I should be the one saving myself. I have lost so much, so often and so immensely. And, yes, I hurt too.
“When you had not touched me yet, oh take me back to the night we met.”