THE PATHS OF FREIGHT TRAINS

So I've been sitting here watching everything roll over the top of me and feeling as though it's all being rubbed right into my face with each revolution of the wheel. Standing loyally is one thing, but standing to be forgotten and ignored is not the same thing. Time to think has become time to be ignored. Time to find herself has gone back to time with what she had. Not the same thing and hardly what I was led to believe. Not even enough time to tell me how she is thinking or enough care to see how I am. Just left to pick up pieces and rely on people who simply can't even comprehend the enormity of the loss. Like being left to bleed in a subway while the rest of the city walks on by. It is a mental desolation that I never expected I would be left to endure alone. Never. There are those who sympathize, but simply can not relate to the level of loss without having it happen to themselves. Most of it is beyond the limits of a human being. All it takes to realize that is the understanding that most people would rather ignore it completely and turn to what they know is stable. Not better. Just stable. What I have been forced to deal with is worse because there is nowhere left to turn. Any comfort in family that lessens the blow is unavailable to me now, and friends are, more often than not, a very painful reminder that under the exact same circumstances, with far less communication, they were rewarded with exactly what it is I lost. My communication to the people who mattered understand it completely, but can do nothing to help it. Hardly a viable consolation and makes me feel as though anything I wished for another is simply not worth it to anyone.
A few of my friends have found themselves in the exact same situation for exactly the same desire to add to their lives what has been missing for so long. The realization that these are the very friends who I have always been impressed with their understanding of what it is to be wanted and to want to give it to the people they love makes for miserable company. Loved and appreciated, yes, but there is nothing we can say to each other that we don't already feel. Nothing we can explain away as a bad mistake. We made the right decisions for the right reasons and life saw fit to reward us with the exact opposite of what it implied we would receive for being those kinds of people. So much for the road less traveled making all the difference. People all walk their own path. Each persons path wends its way through life. And while they are on it they begin to be able to alter the path to allow another to follow alongside theirs. Many people find the paths of others and confuse themselves with the belief that, while it may look as though they are sharing the path, they have instead, stopped walking their own and are now following someone else entirely. Their path becoming vague underneath what they now travel over the top of. Not their own, but someone else. The odds of finding your own path, or ever getting close enough to another becoming less and less of a possibility as time goes on. Every once in a while though, a path comes very close to the one they travel on. Completely different from what they have become accustomed to, it reminds them of what their path once looked like and how badly they wanted it to go where this one led. They wanted it so badly that the new path stretched out before them with each step until it matched the tempo of their lives and made walking the path effortless. But still, there are two paths. The only difference between the new path, and the one being walked at the moment, is that there is always enough room for yours to travel along the other without it having to overlap and become indiscernible again. It is the promise of two paths ,side by side, that travel in the same direction, but always two paths. The paths can not be walked on at the same time, but for a brief time can be straddled. Each path being followed by separate feet. At that point, there is the opportunity to cross over and rediscover your own path traveling alongside the new one.
Paths rarely come close to others, and the odds that they would travel in the same direction even less so. It is a one in a million chance that, even if they did, that they would be the type to allow space for two. That is a chance that most have never even heard of....but it happens. Walking with one foot on two paths can't go on forever, and a choice has to be made. Walking with each foot on a different path is not easy. Usually it is by the desire of one person to continually offer to support the needs of the other by bending their own path to be as close to the other and make it as easy as possible to simply step off their path and next to yours, if they want to. It isn't easy, but a path that follows where you want to go is a much easier thing to walk than living on a path that is no longer going where you wished
I have been going through my journals over the last twenty years trying to find a point in my life where I wasn't so destroyed emotionally to be able to get a better point of reference for what I feel now. I am angry with being forgotten and ignored. I am jealous for being told I am worth everything, but traded for what has always been explained to me as so much less. I am frustrated with being appreciated for love in the way I could give it, while it is given away to someone else without any regard for how much it hurts to be left. I am overwhelmed with the need for comfort and compassion and intimacy that I refuse to give to anyone else but need so badly from her. Most of all, it is the feeling I get that I am the one who should feel like I am breaking my promises, and to assume the failure of my loyalty when it was rejected so quickly in me. Am I to feel every bit of guilt for indiscretion when it is me who refused to falter with a single one?
As much as I love my friends and value their opinions, I find, quite often, that I am my own best advice. Who knows me better than myself, right? So when I am broken and defeated and need a hero, I look to my own words when I was in stronger times and use what I wrote for myself. I knew then that I may need them in the future, and the future is here.
I found something that I wrote about a woman when I was eighteen. She had decided that I simply was not the type of personality that she needed in her life. That while she no doubt appreciated the love I had for her, she was seeking someone more forceful and pragmatic. She admired people who were forceful and could get what they wanted from others if they had to, and I was simply not that kind of person. She needed someone who would take care of her. Safety and protection is necessary and as long as she could answer to his demands, it was assured. No matter I was never given the opportunity. So sorry.
Now I made a mistake in this relationship. I made the mistake of telling her that if she ever needed me, I would be there. That as far as I was concerned, I still believed in her and what she was. She said "No, I know where I belong and it's with Dave". So I pined for two years groping miserably with the desire to be with her, and, feeling I owed it to her kept away from the places we had been together, or doing things I found pleasurable with her. Places I had showed her and things we had done. Most of all I shied away from people feeling an obligation to a person who had no intention of ever returning, but also couldn't deal with the idea that I might be able to give it to someone else. My greatest fault was admitting to her that I couldn't. Because in saying that I couldn't, it allowed her to do what she wanted somewhere else and always have the option of returning to me. An ace up the sleeve she never intended to use. And all the while she could stay where she was without ever feeling as though she had left anything at all. She simply put it on a back burner until she could pull from it if the need arises. But it is never needed. We are excused from a place in their mind to become an even less important part of a heart until we are nothing more than a dirty mistake of their own and a point of failure to which they will avoid at all costs. She is, by the way, still living in California. She has a nice house in La Jolla, and would have loved to see me when I was there visiting, but her husband won't let her see her old school friends anymore. She still emails me occasionally to tell me that she is miserable now. Well....yeah. I bet you are.
The entry was a rather sad and very painful thing to read. Because it was exactly why I was so afraid to fail in a relationship now. All the feelings of rejection and lost love I blamed myself for rather than realizing that it was something I had no choice in making nor was it any failing on my part for it happening. But still, I saw it as a failing in me. How could it not be if you were everything right and nothing wrong?
The second paragraph explained how I had decided that I am not responsible for what people choose for themselves. I knew it to be a recipe for disaster, and that's exactly what it became, but how do you explain what to recognize when it is something that they can't even see? You don't. How do you teach them to fight what they don't see what is wrong? You can't. The most important part of this journal entry was at the very bottom, and when I came to it I was reawakened to a very stark reality. Written at the bottom were five words. "Decisions are choices of finality."
Let me say this again. Decisions are choices of FINALITY. I will be honest and tell you that when I read this I had to just....walk away. Just walk away from my house and my life, from anything that had to do with anything and anyone. I sat there in this worthless heap of dejected misery at the understanding that, once again, I had allowed myself to come full circle and be rewarded with EXACTLY what I was terrified to feel at the very beginning of this relationship. The very reason why I was so adamant about what it was that tears my soul apart was for exactly that reason. It tears my soul apart. It isn't an understanding of what it is that keeps loss away from you. It's that loss is up to the person who leaves you for whatever the reason. It isn't my choice. There is no amount of love that can't be traded off if there is no comprehension of the depth of it in the first place. That isn't to say there isn't love for me, but there simply isn't an understanding of the depth of it. And that is not my fault. So regardless of what I know, it is all worthless if THEY don't know it or understand it. And it's made worse by refusing to allow me to make the comparison from what I give to what is there. That ISNT deciding what love is. That's settling by default. ANYTHING greater than zero is better. But when you have to and it gets compared to ten, the difference becomes striking. There is no fair reason why a person like me should feel guilty or obligated to another person if they have made a choice contrary to what I have offered in true faith. It is not up to me to make them believe. Only that I give them enough to believe in. It is not my responsibility to lessen the severity of loss by wishing to make it better. And allowing them to believe that you will always be there to pick up the pieces does NOTHING but add an already unappreciated sense of loyalty to an equation you have been eliminated from by CHOICE. The sad part is that it isn't a choice I even had a say in. So why am I so agonized over it? Why let someone believe that there is always a better life in the future regardless of how long I endure it without any sense of urgency on their part? Time counts, and keeps counting. If it's good enough now to want it for their future, why should I endure it until everything else that is left there is gone? Including the future!! There IS NOT a way out in the future. The decision, as far as they are concerned, is final, and expecting another person to wait around for what they say is worth having but not worth having now,while they live somewhere else refusing to want it or need it, is a waste of my time and a pacification to them. Loss is just that. LOSS. Regardless of how badly I want it, there can be no full comprehension of that decision unless I make it a finality to them just as much as it was made to me. If the consequences of not having the love I wish for her results in a life with less, so be it. That is not my desire and it is not my choice. It's hers. If it results in a feeling of jealousy for another person I spend time with when I'd much rather be with her, so be it. But it was not my choice to be anywhere but with her. And if, in the future I ever grow to trust a person enough to want to spend my time with them interferes with the ability to have me take her back in the future, so be it. Because it is not my choice to be with someone else. It is my second choice because I can't be with her. But letting someone else let me suffer with a life unfulfilled so they can live a life half filled is still not the way I wish to spend my life. I want my love with her, but she has to want it just as much. In addition to that love, it has to be a love she is willing to give back. And she doesn't. And so I have a new analogy. No, people are NOT like two paths through the woods. Paths in the woods are what happens when people fail to come to full grips with the consequences of final decisions. It's a way of saying that what you are is just what they want in their lives....just not now.
My complete and total exclusion from her life and the total rejection of my love for her in place of something not even properly defined or fairly explained now has led me to this. Instead of paths, I like to think of people and their lives as freight trains. These trains follow tracks that run parallel, but they run in opposite directions. They travel in the direction OPPOSITE to what you are on now for very good reasons. If you are on a train that is not going where you want, you have to hope that one going in the opposite direction will come your way. When you are NOT going where you wanted to go, the other train is exactly what is needed, right when it is needed. A few trains may pass in a lifetime, but only one will need you as badly as you need them. And THAT train will pass only once. Regardless of the will or desire to carry you and all of the load, there will come a time when the train passes by completely. The train that wants you on it, may even STOP in its tracks to give you more time. But these trains move FAST. And while one may be willing to apply the brakes to go as slow as it can to allow time for the person they love to jump from one to the other, it is only a brief amount of time before the one you are on doubles its efforts and applies coal to its engines to speed off without giving another chance to offload what you need onto the other train. What you want at that point becomes the impetus to keep you from doing it. And after that, the train will never slow down to let another chance again. It is gone. And regardless of the other trains desire to have you on it, will simply be unable to pass by again.
I don't WANT to go off alone. I don't WANT to watch what I love more than anything stream off into the night because she was too afraid to jump, but it will not be me who assumes the responsibility of the loss. It isn't my wish at all. It will not be me who rejects the love. But it will also not be me who lives in a relationship less than what it should be.
I feel as though I am to allow someone else to go back and reclaim whatever it is they thought they had and, at the same time, make me feel as though I am the one who will be the lesser person for wanting it in my life. I sacrificed EVERYTHING. I had to start over with a clean slate to have them at my side as an equal. Not my train, but OUR train. Not MY tracks, but OUR tracks.
It isn't enough to be going in the same direction as before and still believe that the train is yours as well. Not if it isn't under your control anymore to direct it, or slow it, or stop it, or get off. That's the proverbial runaway freight train.
The offer to let me give her all of the love I have for her still stands. But I am so terrified that it is only me that realizes that this is a freight train....and not a path.