Goodbye, goodbye.

Have you ever noticed that it’s the people on the periphery of your life that are the ones unlikely to cause you hurt? Nothing wholly unexpected, let’s face it, you can’t let everyone in, it’s impossible to keep everybody close. That said, are there ever any right people in your life to get hurt by? Perhaps the thing with emotions like being disappointed, letdown or being betrayed is that it’s always the people you love the most who’ll be behind any pain you experience.

Take relationships, if you’re unhappy to a point where you want to stray, you just end things, don’t you? If you feel like you have the desire or need to try something with someone new whether on an emotional or physical level, then by all means, have at it. When things end between two people, one will always experience more hurt than the other, that’s just life, but it’s better not to be living a lie rather than misleading or being misled by someone. No one wants to be a pity project, to be a boy or girl that someone stays with just because it’s convenient. Some of us will happily settle for being safe in a relationship but only if you’re both on the same page, it’s a wonderful thing to be someone’s everything.

Life happens though, things change and you can begin to question everything you thought you once knew. It’s easy to think that nobody should be trusted but that’s no way to spend your waking hours. Why shy shouldn’t you hate someone if they’ve done the worst thing to you that anyone can do to anyone else? Let someone think that they’re appreciated and loved and then show them unintentionally that it’s all fake? What do you do, how long does it take for you to catch someone in an untruth?

We play, we pretend.

The ping of a notification signals an incoming text message just as the moon turns blue. A phenomenon that happens once nearly every three years. The moon thing, not the texts, although the regularity would be about the same. The ghost of a girlfriend past, she’s probably drunk as per. ‘Can we meet?’ You have to marvel at the stones on her, you couldn’t mark her neck with a blowtorch. Two people in the world know how much she messed up previously but that number is only so low because one person wasn’t interested in a battle of ‘he said, she said’. It must feel pretty good on some level to invent a story that’ll satisfy you, to placate as many people as you can peddle bullshit to and pretend that it actually happened. Doesn’t there come a point where you don’t even care enough about someone to set the record straight? What annoys most is the fact that there was no anger or humiliation, betrayal was the order of the day, feelings crushed by a girl who was supposed to a be a best friend and someone to grow old with. She’s not the woman most people thought she was. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, I fucking deserve it.

When the walls of denial are finally broken down and you get the other person to finally admit to themselves that we’ve been lied to, we can go one of two ways. Try and find some sort of messed up path in your mind that you’ll be able to justify their lying and get past the infidelity and/or emotional turmoil or realise that you’re worth more and that it’s better to cut ties altogether. Nobody needs to keep pulling on a particular thread, to continue with something that isn’t ever going to end well. Once the dust settles, you’ll know you were right to trust yourself.

So we catch up, curiousity often gets the better of us. In my experience, anything can be fixed she said. In my experience, she was full of shit. In the end, all that was offered that meant anything was a barely audible, ‘I’m sorry’. There’s so much that I should tell her about the way she made me feel but frankly, she deserves no more of my time. I was out of there faster than A-Train on Compound V, you can’t negotiate with a man who doesn’t need a particular person in their life, especially if it’s someone who messed you about. The more baffling thing is you now have someone who has the temerity to cheat on their current boyfriend. You think I didn’t know? I debated long and hard about turning around and saying something but I didn’t. It makes sense that if you waste a second of your life hoping that someone will suffer for what they did, then you’re allowing them to hurt you again. Fuck that feeling shit shit, there are millions of us that deserve better. Walking away, what should be an awful moment feels like anything but.

Kiss the way we were goodbye.

@TheSamMcLeod

Get up off your knees.

One of the most difficult aspects of growing as a person is learning how to forgive yourself after you’ve fucked something up, if you’ve made a mistake. What if you don’t even know that you’ve made one though? It’s entirely possible that you didn’t think you did anything wrong, but if someone important to you thinks that you’ve let them down, then they’re right, their perception is their reality.

We’re all human, bound to mess up now and again, even if we don’t realise it at the time. When you’ve inflicted hurt upon someone, forgiving yourself can prove to be the difficult part, it’s easy to keep telling yourself that you’re nothing but a social hand grenade. Even when you finally find out that you did something that caused them some pain, or if you’ve been forgiven, it’s tough to not to examine where you went wrong. Making mistakes, taking risks, even accidentally, no other way to live, right? We all get up in the morning, we all step out of our front door at the start of each new day, learning is important, don’t we all want to be a better person every day? It’s tough when clearly something has happened though and you’re left in the dark. If the dynamic has changed and you don’t know why, and they don’t tell you why, what can you do? You can ask the question, but if they’re less than forthcoming, then all you can do is hazard a guess. Sometimes shit just falls out of the sky for you. Nothing else to do but focus on yourself, try and get through each day and be done with it. If you’ve said sorry for whatever it is that you’ve made a mess of, then you’ve done all that you could. Fuck, you can say sorry and not even know why, some people are just polite. Tomorrow is a new day, and although it’s easier said than done, there’s no point in continuing to worry about something that you can’t fix. Zero point in taking yourself out at the knees before you’ve even learned to walk in any given relationship.

On the flip side, perhaps it’s much easier to forgive than to say sorry; maybe it’s something we learn as a child. As we all get older, we realise when people hurt us, it’s not always a reflection on us, it’s more to do with their flaws and insecurities. There will be good times and bad times, and maybe you shouldn’t want it any other way. Still learning. If that someone doesn’t want to tell you where you’ve gone wrong, then saying sorry and forgiving them for their silence is the way to go. Holding grudges is bad for the heart, the mind and the soul.

Let’s be honest, no matter what you’ve done, you’re never beyond redemption and if you can see that, fuck it if someone thinks that they’re so perfect that they can’t front up or think that they’ve never made a mess of things.

It’s normal human behaviour that when people are hurting inside, they believe that no one else in the history of the world has been hurt as much as them. It’s tough to say, but none of us are that special. Everyone messes up sometimes, and you don’t have the monopoly on feeling hurt or let down. If someone saying sorry isn’t enough, then it says more about you than it does about the other person. No one wants to be in the ‘friend’ column, rather than the ‘I love you’ column, but what’s the point in hanging on for someone who won’t be honest with you.

Friends are always important, especially when it comes to needing advice. As is the case with all people you have in your life, some will tell you what you want to hear, but some will be brutally honest. Let her go or try and resurrect things, what to do?

They say let you go, but I want you back.

From thinking about her every day, she’s gone to crossing my mind less and less. Days and weeks pass when I don’t think about her at all. It’s no reflection on her, we’re just not in contact. Sure, she’s missed, but again, what’s the point in thinking about something that you can’t fix.

I have to travel to discuss a potentially life-changing work opportunity. As beautiful and big a city as this is, it’s a small world. I think I see her, but it can’t possibly be her, guess she has a doppelgänger, maybe we all do. It’s the first time I’ve thought about her in what seems like forever. Still shaking my head at the coincidence, I walk into a store and a song comes on shuffle that reminds me of her, iTunes has that way of messing with you at times, doesn’t it? Still listening to that song, I can’t bring myself to skip it, so I check my emails whilst browsing stuff that I don’t need. A note is there, but at least I finally know why we’ll not be anything. Autocorrect on a message changed ‘wasn’t’ to ‘was’ and it altered the entire context of the conversation.

It’s innocent, but she made a choice to not query it initially and not let me know why she was confused. It hurt then, but now it’s okay. It’s been said before but it’s fine to say again, there’s nothing wrong with being humble.

Girl, I’m sorry I let you down, so stupid that I messed up.

@TheSamMcLeod
@YouMeMusicLife