I’ve done quite a bit of reflection this week in dealing with friends and family members who have troubled lives. The more I think about them, and how much I have cared for them throughout my life, the more I start to realize that the memories I hold of them aren’t real; they’re facades, they’re shams in the face of how we ourselves skew what we choose to believe and what we remember.
Take J, for example. He’s the one I’ve mentioned here a few times: the old flame that never knew the truth, etc. The real truth is – or that I’ve realized as of late – is that my opinion of him, my memories, what I believe him to be are lies. They’re fabrications my brain conjured up – and I readily grasped onto – in order to get me through heartache and loneliness, to see me through the years of wondering and questioning. But now, I see that I only I loved what I thought he was, what I once saw was possible in him: the noble J, the funny J, the smart, articulate, and charming J. But that’s a game, a charade. That’s not reality, and as much as I want to fool myself into loving someone like that, as much as the dream is agonizingly better than the real thing, I can’t fool myself any longer. He’s not real. The J I love doesn’t exist. He never did. I was just one of a million girls who bought into the act.
[And of course, WP just ate the last 2/3 of my post … ugh … okay, where was I?]
Even today, J found a way to hurt me when he wrote and asked me about all these rehearsals I go to each week, and I said that I had joined a local singing group, and he wrote that he didn’t know I sang, and was suddenly interested in all this music stuff. Offended? Yes, especially for someone who claims to ‘know me’ (his words) and who’s ‘known me’ since about 1996. Hurt? Oh, don’t you know it. [Truth be told, if you could major in something in high school, it would’ve been music for me, and I entered college as a music major but ended up minoring in vocal performance.] So he got a little dose of the Truth According to Roxy when I re-informed him about my musical past and then reminded him about how he promised to attend my final collegiate performance, in which I had a solo. It was to be my crowning achievement before graduation, but instead I performed broken-hearted.
I feel badly for having heaped such a mantle of impossibility upon people like J, or my eldest sister (another story entirely), but I’m glad to have moved back into the realm of reality instead of living the lie. It’s better for both of us in the end.
“Hold onto whatever you find, baby. Hold onto whatever will get you through. Hold onto whatever you find, baby. I can’t trust myself with loving you. Who do you love? Darling I see through, through you love. Who do you love, me or the thought of me? Me or the thought of me?” – John Mayer, “I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)”
Roxy's Proxy 
Recent Comments