The Art of Waiting

Today I had a visit from x. He found a note in his wallet a few weeks ago, and believed I'd written it before we broke up last year. Since I didn't remember, he brought it over for me to see it for myself. We're going through a period of calm - I have been replaced by his new girlfriend. As a result, he doesn't try to visit me the way he used to. When he does, it's not for long, and it isn't traumatic the way it was before. And so I agreed to let him in. He handed me the note, written on a piece of paper torn from a notebook. I recognised my handwriting. I'd written "a prescription" for him, many months before we broke up. It was a prescription to stop the symptoms of our dying relationship. I wrote that he needed to let go of his rage. That it was killing us - our relationship was smothering under the weight of his anger.

I remember handing him the note after one of his many violent outbursts, while he lay fuming on the bed. He'd calmed after he read it, and slipped it into his wallet where it was quickly forgotten. Now, a year after I left him, on his birthday, while visiting at his parent's house, he found it accidentally. He told me he showed it to his mother, and she cried.

He tells me he's trying to follow my advice now, though it's too late for us. Sadly I don't believe him. He went on to say that he finds it exciting to fight with his new girlfriend. When she lashes out at him during her alchoholic binges, he lets the torrent of his rage plunge over both of them, and it leaves him feeling exhilerated. It's exactly as it was when I was with him. The play remains the same, only my lines are being spoken by another actress. I believe he is addicted to anger, and there is no saving him. My advice has fallen on deaf ears. He doesn't even recognise that he has missed the point, yet again. It's too bad.

He is a man in search of something that I think he will never find. What he's looking for is an answer he has already rejected. His life is spent in a manic effort to pound others into the boxes he has built for them. One by one we escape from those prisons, and then he simply looks for another body to twist into the shape of the one who recently left. To shove them into the box that he didn't even bother to alter. His humanity sometimes shows itself unexpectedly, and I see bewilderment in his expression. Then it's lost again in shadow, and I understand that he's more comfortable in the dark. That brief light shows too obviously his image in the mirror.

Human relationships are all about waiting. Waiting for the right one to come along. Waiting for a loved one to change. Waiting for someone to return our love. Waiting for someone to prove they do not love us, so we can move on. I waited twenty-four years for x to prove he did not love me, and finally he did. He abandoned me on a highway cutting through dark farm fields, in the middle of night, with no way to get to the ferry dock. No money for the crossing back to the Island. Kind strangers helped me get home after a long night of wandering. People who could have passed me by without a glance, felt compassion, and assisted me in my time of need, while my boyfriend of many years didn't spare me a second thought. He didn't even ask how I'd managed to get home. It was then that I realised he'd been proving his lack of love for years. Only now was I strong enough to acknowledge the truth that had been screaming at me from our first meeting. Then I understood I could leave him. That cruel lesson is what gave me my freedom.

I'm learning to stop myself from waiting. In a way, it's a form of selfishness - I will no longer stand still for others. I think the act of waiting is sometimes a lovely thing, but it has been disastrous for me. I suppose there might be a healthy way to wait, but I don't know yet how to do that. I see myself floating on a raft among my loved ones. Sometimes we drift together, then gently move apart. Each of us follows our own course, making decisions to paddle or let the current take us for a while. We dip our hands and feet into the sea, or curl up on the raft in our effort to remain dry. Life will happen as it does, and I can make my changes as they are possible. As I wish to make them.

Perhaps I will wait again one day, for someone who waits for me. Maybe I'll come upon someone on the path, and we'll walk together. If one of us chooses to cut through the forest for a bit, the other will not run after simply because they don't wish to be alone. Instead we will each go our seperate way, and then, if it's right, one will find the other waiting up ahead. That, I think, is how it should be.