Set in Stone

I have a moral compass and an outline of how things and people should be. When I meet someone, I construct their personality in my head based on how they speak, what they avoid and how they treat small things. I trust and organize myself around that version of them and when it breaks, it feels like death. Like a moment I cannot come back from.

The difficult part is that I am the same person who will argue that human beings are human. That we make mistakes. That we cannot be perfect and yet when someone actually makes one, something in me cannot accept it. I sit down and play the scenario over and over, looking for a different outcome to their choices and I find them. I become awestruck that the choice they made was their best one, and I cannot reconcile that with myself.

I understand that I should give grace but I just can't give it. I don't know why the understanding and the giving are so far apart.

When the construct breaks, my own presence feels like pins and needles. I want to run. I want to cry, acknowledge, ignore but none of these are comfortable. When I acknowledge I feel like a hypocrite. When I ignore it eats me up. When I talk about it things get worse. The understanding just sits there, useless, while everything else hurts anyway.

But then there is my family.

When they disappoint me, when they break the construct too, something is different. I give them grace and it never feels like a betrayal. For a long time I thought it was because I loved them more and I do but I think it's something else.

With them, I had no choice but to stay, and staying through years of arguments and disappointments with no exit meant the construct had to expand to hold their failures too. Their defaults became part of who they are to me so much so that when they do something incredibly strange I just accept it and file it away. Not because I am forgiving but because the exit was always closed.

Which means the problem with everyone else isn't that I am unforgiving. It's that I leave before the sitting can do its work.

I had a friend who we used to talk for hours without feeling like an end was coming. We shared our fears, our hopes, our weaknesses, everything. I constructed her as someone almost without fault. She was that good to me. One day my perception of her cracked. She said something that made me feel like she didn't fully trust me. I was hurt but I said nothing.

The second crack came during one of the hardest periods of my life. I was going through homelessness. It was winter and I was hand washing clothes outside in the freezing cold with my baby wrapped in blankets nearby. My skin stung from the water and the soap wouldn't lather but I had to wash the clothes anyway. I hung them outside to dry but they never did. There was no sun. They just froze, and they stayed frozen for almost three days. That was two days before my baby's first birthday and I felt like I was going to break. I needed someone to talk to so I called her. She said she was in town and would call me when she got home.

She never did.

A few days later she called and said her life had been a lot. I said it was fine because it was true. she was going through a lot, I had seen it before that call and after, and she is still carrying it now. But that didn't stop me from going quiet. My reasoning was that I was also going through a lot, and I had needed a shoulder.

That was it.

It's been three years of quiet, except for one surface level call where I said I would call her back and never did.

I wonder what would have happened if I had told her how I felt. If I had been open to being uncomfortable, whether we would still be friends. But I made the decision for her. I have a feeling that if I had said I needed more support she would have shown up differently. People cannot change what they don't know. I knew that and I still said nothing.

I know I broke her construct too. I just never had to watch it happen. Maybe I should have been the bigger person. Her problems compared to mine seemed minuscule but my emotions didn't register it that way and sometimes at 1am, 3am, I wish I could just call her and talk.

She was and still is a wonderful person.