The Confession of the Worst Thing I've Ever Done
Patrick was so far away, and I had never actually told him I loved him, but he knew my feelings for him were more powerful than my intellect. I shudder when I recall the joy of that summer on the phone. Drinking red wine, all alone, falling deeper and deeper into the sofa cushions and willing myself across the thousand-miles expanse that kept me from my invisible soul-mate. It was such a fantastic relationship (in the sense of "like a fantasy") that I didn't care I'd never seen his face, nor a photograph.
Then it came.
I sat on the picnic table on my front porch. Late August. My last sememster of college had just begun and my hands trembled.
The card was overtly romantic. I could taste adrenaline in my mouth. When I turned the photographs towards me, I slumped forward, then heaved a painful breath upright, before slumping forward again.
"We don't match."
It was so clear we weren't alike. Not fashion - his was non-descript - and not his face - I am not fickle. But his physical evidences of what lies inside him. His posture and expression. Forgive me for allowing a photograph - I know they lie - to dictate my feelings, but everything in my gut. Everything I've ever trusted. The ONLY thing I trust! My gut said no.
Later I handed the card to Dr. Melton while we worked on the year-book. He analyzes handwriting, and gives advice, but I think he's a bit of a puppeteer, so I didn't tell him anything about me (that he didn't already know for years of being his student); I just asked for a reading.
Run, he said. Don't walk.
For thirty minutes he expounded on what he saw encoded in his penmanship. Each word he said proved all early doubts I had in some way dismissed.
I didn't write him back. I sent impersonal little emails saying I was monumentally busy. Which was true. School, waitressing, internship, practicum, senior projects, and peer-instructing honestly did keep me from anyone who wasn't RIGHT THERE.
There was no good way to describe that my heart had changed. Before starting school I was telling my friends what high odds exsisted for me being married by the summer of 2002. It even went so far as me having a discussion with a professor about Catholicism becuase I would have to convert for him. I would have done so, too. But after that semester of school I knew that my heart needed more than even what the dream of Patrick had offered me. How do you make that sound benevolent?
I graduated in December and still didn't write to him. He tried. I told him his pictures were fine, and I never mentioned the analysis, of course. A year later I spoke with him for the last time, and told him I would send him a letter, which I never did.
Six months ago I moved and all my information changed, and his name was taken from the up-date-email list.
I'm now a day's drive away from him, and I fear that some foolish internet mistake that I made might have sent him my current email address. If he has it, and if he writes, there's no escaping the necessity of me coming clean.
Here's the most fucked up part: while I told my friend Tylere about the seriousness of my relationship with Patrick he spent an hour listening and asking questions. His attention was intense. Then we walked down my street towards town and I said, "I don't know why it felt difficult to tell you that." He didn't reply for some time, but when he spoke he simply said, "It would never have worked between us."
Steady, slowly, incrementally, and exponentially since that moment of him uttering those words my entire being has been overturned with his existence. We've always been good friends, and always will be.
But he'll never love me back.
Patrick did (but Patrick wasn't my fate).
What is my fucking problem?
