STL (**not about you**)

[mrissa]

The thing is, sometimes you don't notice that someone has moved categories from "friend" to "former friend" until you look up and realize it happened years ago -- not as a figure of speech but actual years ago -- and you didn't notice. They do something that would have deeply hurt your feelings, that would probably have provoked real live tears, if they'd done it years ago, and the shrug you give isn't even the hurt-but-coping, what're-you-gonna-do kind. It's the shrug that really, honestly doesn't care, because there are so many better things occupying your time and attention.

So it's not sad in the sense of feelings being hurt, and it's not even sad in the sense of having lost a friend. Because it was years ago, and the news has just reached you, far too late to make any difference, like a concert poster for a band that broke up decades ago and two of the members are already dead. It's a memory of something that might have been sad once, but it didn't work out that way, and now here you are. The ground would have shaken beneath your feet years ago, and now you seem to be on another planet.

I think relativistic speeds of travel will not be nearly the emotional revolution we sometimes might imagine them to be.

Comments

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is so true, and so clearly stated.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

I wound up with my husband in part because of a similar phenomenon.

There was this fellow I had a godawful crush on for the longest time. He wasn't particularly interested in me in any way. I lost touch with that circle of friends for a few years, then came back and had a crush on him again, heaven help me. He seemed interested, and then for whatever reason, he lost that interest. It was all fairly unpleasant and dramatic for me, and I rolled around in feelings of unrequited love for a while. Time went on.

We have "reading parties" in which we all bring some piece of prose or poetry to read to each other. At one of these parties, my old crush chose a poem that would have broken my heart for him years before. Instead, I sat there and watched my heart remain entirely unbroken. Not even dented. It's not that I didn't care, exactly, but... I didn't care. A window had closed.

One way to look at that is healing, I guess, but another way is this: he lost his chance. I sat there and thought, "Chances get lost. Windows close." And then I thought, "Oh crap. Oh crap. Move, Cam!"

See, I knew that rjl20 had a crush on me. I was flattered and intrigued and all but had basically put this knowledge aside, as if I could get around to considering the possibilities whenever I pleased. I was acting as if his interest were a jar of fancy jam in my pantry that looked pretty good and I'd get around to trying it one of these days. But my nonresponse to that poem poleaxed me. It swung my attention around to rjl20 and I took a hard look at what I knew about him.

What I recognized is that while he is superficially pretty nifty, on closer inspection he is absolutely fantastic, one of the kindest and most interesting people I've ever met, and I would be a complete idiot to let that chance go by. Was being a complete idiot. Had been a complete idiot for a while now... Oh crap!

I wrote to him the next day. We were engaged a year later, and our fourth wedding anniversary was a couple of months ago.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's a really good story. Some diems are best carped.