Reflections of You
You say you love me but I know that you don’t. In fact, you never did. You used me. You used me to recover from one relationship so you could pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and be in a better position to move on to your next relationship. You took advantage of my love and affection for you — and I let you. I did it for a reason. I did it because I loved you, and because I like to take care of other people. In the case of you, I truly believed that if I invested my heart, my soul, my money, my time and my care in you, and your healing, that you would return the favor when I needed it. But of course, you would never do that. In fact, the moment I showed the slightest need, it was the beginning of the end. You shunned me and turned your back on me. You treated me with harsh disdain. Then you began to show me that you were, and always had been, indifferent to me.
You say you are sorry, but you aren’t sorry at all. Because you got exactly what you wanted. That relationship we had was all about you getting what you wanted; what you needed. It was all about you: your needs, your pain, your healing, your fears, your everything. It was never about me, not even one little bit, for one nanosecond. So, you aren’t even a little bit sorry. Unless, by “sorry” you mean that you pity the weakness in me that believed in you; that trusted you. If that’s what you mean by “sorry”, I can believe that. But then, you’ve been “sorry” like that for a while.
The truth is that you knew what you were doing — taking from me and giving nothing in return — for a long, long time. But because you were getting what you wanted from me, you decided to stay the course. You gave me just enough hope in the form of innuendos, vague hints, little post-it notes with hearts drawn on them, to keep my fantasy of “us” alive. Those long stares that I interpreted as your loving gaze — they were not love at all. They were just blank stares, holding no thought of me and every thought of you. They were you, pitying my weakness for you, scheming about how to get more from me. They were you, laughing inside, wondering when I would realize that you didn’t really love me and never had.
And now you are moving on to another person. You say you are both committed to “seeing where it will go.” Well, I can save you the trouble of wondering about that. Because I know exactly where it will go. It is your pattern. You are using her to move on from me, just as you used me to move on from that previous her. You are taking advantage of her fantasies about having a caring husband, lover and a family — you are leading her on, just like you led me on. You are stealing her last gasp of hope for having what she wants when you know you cannot, and will not, ever fulfill those desires. She will revel, as I did, as the many previous hers did, in her own fantasy world of what could be. And you will bask, gloriously, in her reflected fantasy of you. You will provide her with just enough of you to keep her fantasy alive.
And when the moment comes that she is no longer satisfied by the fantasy alone, when she is making moves to turn her fantasy into a reality, you will begin your slow retreat. Your responses will take longer to arrive. Your body will stay facing her, but your soul will be backing slowly out the door. Your compliments will be fewer and farther between. Your professions of “love” will only be in response to her willingness to accept your retreat gracefully. It will happen so slowly at first, she will not even notice it. When she begins to notice it, she will think she is imagining it, because it can’t possibly be true. She will question her view of reality. Then she will begin making excuses for you. She will give you the benefit of the doubt with her loving heart. She will forgive you over and over again. And you will begin to pity her in her abject, wretched weakness for you.
Then, some day, she will confront you. And you will reflect back to her the excuses she has already built inside her own mind. She will chastise herself for confronting you, and then she will forgive you again, and rebuild her fantasy, perhaps with lower expectations this time. And the cycle will begin again. You will throw little scraps of things that resemble love and care toward her now and then, just to keep her on the hook. Because, even though you know it is over, and you are done, you will want to keep her heart in your back pocket. You will set about waiting for something better to come along. You will conjure those shiny, new fantasy reflections of you to come hither — to define who you are. You won’t be willing to bear the thought of not having them, so you will wait patiently for either her fantasy to dissolve, or the new and improved fantasy reflection of you to come along. Whichever comes first is of no consequence to you, you will let fate take care of that. And it will slowly, painfully, dissolve from there. The more self-assured she is the more painful it will be. The more she builds, the more you will move away. The more the fantasy dissolves, if there is not an improved one on offer for you yet, the more scraps you will toss her direction. The more you move away, the more she will grasp. She will continue to reach for her fantasy of what never was, and never will be. She will run at breakneck speed, chasing desperately after something that never existed in the first place. What a pathetic, weak woman, you will think.
Increasingly, your mind will be consumed with work. You will dive into a workaholic frenzy to distract yourself from her fading fantasy of you. You will be busy, busy, busy — so many demands on you. You can’t possibly be expected to be there for her. How inconvenient and annoying that she expects you to take a few moments to understand her pain, to meet her on equal ground, to communicate, to invest a bit of your time to hold her and care for her heart. That is out of the question. You have many, many more important things to do. And, of course, she will understand. She will wait for you to be done with your important things. But what she won’t see is that that her heart is not, and never has been, one of your important things. In fact, the only important thing about her was her fantasy reflection of you. She, herself, was never anything to you and she never will be. She will be waiting forever.
She will become frustrated and pull back from giving, just a little bit, because something doesn’t feel quite right anymore. She won’t be able to put her finger on it, but she will slowly have the dawning realization that she’s not getting much of a return on her investment of love and care for you. Still, she’s won’t be sure, because it is so subtle. And when she pulls back, you will sigh with relief. Because now maybe, you hope, she will let go of you and you can move on to your next target. So you don’t return her calls, because you are busy. And you don’t respond to her pleas for connection, for information, for anything, because those pleas are pitiful signs of her weakness and it disgusts you. That neediness is what you abhor. Never mind that it is you who created and nurtured those needs by allowing her fantasy to grow like a wild rose on a garden fence in summer. Now, it is winter, and what were once wild, beautiful roses, have become nothing more than a thorny, withered tangle of branches that are barbed wire to both of your hearts.
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