Full Moon

Thanks to the Tarot.com horoscope that populates my Google Homepage every day, I knew that it was a full moon yesterday… but part of me knew that already. I knew because the floor beneath me had tilted last night, forcing me to slip into a parallel universe where ghosts walk among us.

He emailed me. He emailed me because he knows I prefer email, because it’s less invasive than a call, where you choose to receive or ignore, where you have to listen to the message and the palpable awkwardness where he betrays himself. In an email I project the inflection; I receive and read on my own time, in the comfort of my bed or on the drive to work. There is no real “tone” – only the tone I give it. And I gave it a good one.

I shared the news of our upcoming convocation with some of my closest friends, the ones who knew how torn up I had been, the ones who would understand the unavoidable duality of my emotional response to his resurrection. I loved him very much, like a brother, shared some of the best and worst moments of our lives… but he had betrayed me to such a degree that I had felt sucker-punched by the truth; he had bitch-slapped my heart.

“It's been a long time and we're all in such very different places in our lives. I do hope that it goes well and that you can reconnect (if only for a dinner) from the place where you both had a deep love for one another,” one friend said. I remember that place, but I think we torched it, leaving it scorched like a brush fire spurned by rough Santa Ana winds.

Ironically, it was always he who felt betrayed, wronged, abandoned by me, denied a chance to dip into the “reservoir of good will” that he felt entitled to – unaware that he had drained that long ago. I think we felt our despair, our outrage, at comparable intensities, two sides of the same coin. And that makes sense to me… to us.

Seven years later, I’ve put that whole thing – him, them, us – behind me. I’ve seen him around and felt saddened by the palpable distance, by the clear effect I have on him; I make his skin crawl. That’s all I want to undo, and I had tried before, reaching out prematurely I guess. But this time it’s him, he’s ready, and I’ve accepted.

I don’t know if he’ll let himself see the scars with his fingerprints on them, sense that my workshop is closed, that I don’t go around piecing people back together anymore. I wonder if he’ll see that the part of me they killed stayed dead – and that I’m ok with that. Someone had to kill it off… but it didn’t kill me. I know that he will look through me today to yesterday, to the days he’s rooted himself in despite trying to move ahead, trying to get a do-over, or perspective, or a level of understanding that would absolve him of what he’s said and done.

I hope he can see all of that tonight -- the moon will be bright.