So, I am in Europe right now and it is very strange how as you go through life you fall into situations and they affect you and you just move forward and process those situations without realizing how much damage was done until several years later. Then you are forced to deal with the aftermath of the junk that happened so very long ago. Hopefully, I am a smart enough person that I deal with them as soon as I realize how they are affecting me rather than after they have destroyed me.
At the beginning of this year, I had to deal with the realization that a friendship had died and it was time for me to decide whether or not I was going to keep it around or clean it out of my life. Rather than holding onto it and letting it affect me and the rest of my life any longer, I dealt with it with compassion and moved forward. But, I didn’t realize that the moment of the actual ‘death’ was still affecting me and affecting how I dealt with so many things. I think in every situation where there is a death, it changes you, sometimes good and sometimes bad. In this death it emphasized something that I have inside me all the time and that is my personal since of introversion.
The death of the friendship was a moment, in a restaurant. It was an Italian restaurant in Milwaukee. The restaurant sits on one of the canals/river and was enclosed in glass. I was facing towards the outside, the other two people were facing towards me. I was eating veal scaloppini. I sat there with two other people, a boy and a girl. One was the friend and was my roommate on the road for almost 10 years. The other person was a boy, who I thought was also a friend. But, as you learn in life, friendship means different things to different people. I sat in the restaurant with these two other people that I know so very well. But, I sat alone. They talked, they laughed, it was if I was just a bag thrown on the chair. I had never felt so alone in my life. It took several more years before the death finally occurred and a full year after the final realization of the death until the healing was able to occur.
I guess that is where I am now, in the healing portion of the death. I just wish it didn’t have to happen while I am in Europe and should be laughing and enjoying myself. Instead, I just want to sit in café’s in the middle of market squares by myself and eat delicious food and write out my thoughts and feelings.
See, I guess the lesson I learned is that I would rather be by myself and alone than surrounded by a group of people and alone. I cannot think of a more soul destroying thing than sitting surrounded by people and being all alone.
