Heartbreak

Well, it seems that my friends did break up after all. All the misunderstandings, breaches of trust and bad sex did it in. It's funny, you know, when at the end of the relationship all these petty details come out and you realize how fucked up the whole business really was.
It's incredible the amount of shit that you have to take sometimes when you are having a relationship. When I was listening to some of the details, I could not help but compare and contrast with my own situation. I guess it's human nature to compare our lives to others (that are slightly more fucked up) and gauge our outcomes and breath a sigh of relief when we see that we are not quite there yet. But I imagine that it should work like a cautionary tale, though. If we are seeing some of the signals, what do we do? Do we despair? Do we seek counsel? Do we do nothing and wait and see?

I guess we tend to do nothing. The same way we do nothing when we see that we are seeing a lot of a guy we're not supposed to see (because we're married, because he's not, because he's leaving soon, because he doesn't love us, etc, etc, etc. the list never ends) but keep seeing him and do not feel guilty about (because he's just a friend, because we know what we're doing, etc, etc, etc). It's the doomed/romantic/Bovaristic view of the world that we sometimes tend to have what keeps us paralyzed.

What is it with the car crash symbol? I call it the car crash symbol after I witnessed a car crash years ago: I was sitting on someone's porch drinking lemonade and talking when I saw a car coming to a four-street intersection. Then I saw another car coming to the same intersection. From my point of view, I saw them both coming and I knew they were going to collide. Nevertheless, I could not say or do anything. All I could do was stare. A voice in my head kept telling me: "tell them -my friends- to cover their faces/run/look". But I did nothing. I stood there, the only one facing the street, unable to utter a word. And then the crash came. The sound of metal hitting metal, the bits of security glass (thank goodness for those) the screams, the confusion.

And I was still there. I did not move. I knew what was going on. My immobility broke at last and I could run inside. I think I went to the phone but someone was already there (no, there were not cell phones at hand). I then went back to the porch and looked at the scene again: chaos, cars stopping, the neighbors loitering, our table game forgotten. Monopoly money on the lawn.

It's the same with these relationship disasters by the side of the road. You just look and do nothing. You don't stop seeing whomever it is you don't need to see. You don't stop encouraging intimacy with him while withdrawing it from your lover. You don't stop the idiotic behaviors that get you into stupid and hurtful arguments. You don't seek counsel and mediators for the petty fights. You just sit there and, unable to move or utter a word watch the two cars collide. Sad, isn't it? But I guess it's also part of our 'whatever will be, will be' mentality. Some atavistic destiny-complying mechanism that kicks in so we don't have to assume responsibility for our own lives and their outcomes. A very simplistic and effective avoiding strategy. Only problem is, I guess at the end all we have left are all the bits of security glass, the twisted remnants of what we had and a hell of a traffic jam to deal with. And still we do nothing.
Fun, fun.