Funny How I Blind Myself, I Never Knew If I Was Sometimes Played Upon, Afraid To Lose, I'd Tell Myself What Good You Do, Convince Myself

--"It's My Life", Talk Talk

I have a problem with secrets. I keep everyone else's but I very rarely keep my own. People can tell me all manner of things and all that information will go to my grave with me. However, if I have something that I know probably would be better to keep to myself, whether it be damaging, private, or even strange, I feel compelled to relinquish the knowledge of it to at least one other person. The only variance in the pattern is the quantity of individuals I choose to trust and the timetable by which I unburden myself. I don't feel balanced when I hold onto too many of my own secrets at a time. I feel as if my feelings and thoughts on a matter should be on display for public consumption, as if keeping it to myself is depriving someone else to which the knowledge could be useful.

At least, that was the best explanation I could come up with at the time.

"She said she wasn't feeling good and wasn't in any condition to drive. Then she drove back to her parents' house," I said while Breanne and I were attempting to take a nap together. We weren't exactly doing the best job of it. At the time I blamed it on the being away from home factor, the being in a strange hotel room on a strange bed, but I knew it was more than that.

"Hell's bells, that was horrible of her. You must've been disappointed."

"There isn't even a strong enough word to describe it, B."

In truth, it didn't have anything to do with being in unfamiliar settings. If anything, my inability to rest after a three-hour drive up the coast with Breanne had more to do with the fact all of it felt familiar. It had everything to do with the fact that a few months prior I had flown all the way to Philadelphia, rented a hotel room just like the one I was currently in, and waited for an ex just like Breanne was to me. The whole set-up felt like deja vu because I'd actually lived through the familiar nervousness, the anticipation, even the same stupid giddy uncontrollable smiles. Except in the case of Breanne, she had actually made it to the room with me, and, in the case of Tara, she never even made it into the city. Whereas with Tara my excitement had faded and been replaced with a bitter anger that took the rest of the trip to satiate, with Breanne the eagerness had persisted even until the previously agreed upon hour of recuperation.

Sure, I wanted the sleep. I was eager to feel the wonderful sensation of being able to sleep and be next to the woman who meant and continues to mean so much to me, but I was just too damn excited. I was finally in my first hotel room alone with the only person at the time I wanted to be alone with. I felt vindicated. That was enough for me to start blabbering about how striking the differences in the outcomes were.

"When you talked to her next, sugar, did she ever say why?"

"I tried to ask her, but she couldn't quite give me a straight answer."

"Probably scared."

"Or my thought was she had some ethical hang-up about it."

"Yeah."

I wrapped my arms around her in another vain attempt to quiet down and allow the quietude of the afternoon lull to work its way over our beleagured bodies. My head said we needed to sleep, but I was bursting from the inside. Feeling the soft curls of her chestnut brown hair, the warmth of her skin, her every heartbeat, the impulse to sleep began to wane more and more. Yet I still shut my eyes, anticipating that my friend would drift off herself at any minute. I didn't want to get on her bad side so early into the trip--not when I had finally had what I had wanted for so long.

She literally surprised me when she spoke next.

"Did you yell at her?"

"What do you think?"

"I think your temper got the best of you."

"Like it always does."

"Which probably made things worse."

"Like it always does."

Having been on the other side of many occasions where I had lost my temper, Little Miss Chipper was well acquainted with how unreasonable I could be when I didn't get my way or when somebody had (again) disappointed me.

Though, to be fair, I didn't quite lose my temper with Tara as I could have. There were no putting a dent into the nearest wall, there was no pushing of anyone down to the pavement. Hell, there wasn't even one slammed door to be had. What there was yelling and lots of it. From the time I picked up the phone after she had informed she wasn't coming till I hung up the phone for the fifteenth and last time four or five hours later the entirety of our conversation consisted of my accusing her of leading me on, tricking me into coming all the way out to the East Coast for her, and then deliberately ditching me. Her end of the conversation consisted of her stating that she was confused, that she had changed her mind, and that it was entirely unfair of me. She reiterated the fact I had told her that I wasn't solely flying out to see her, that I had given her some cover story about wanting to check out jobs in Philadelphia and New York. She made it clear that when she had found out that all of that had been a ruse, had been a lie, that the pressure to see me had grown overwhelming. That's why she had cancelled, because of my small lie.

"Do you think I was wrong for wanting to see her?"

"I think it depends on what your reasons were."

"I don't know--I just wanted to see her."

"I think you do know. More to the point, sugar, I think she knew too."

"That obvious, huh?"

I wish I could say that I never lied to Breanne, but that would be an untruth too. I have this desire in me to exagerrate and to fabricate whatever I can to get what I want. Normally, this doesn't affect too many people because, normally, this trait only ever ventures to overblown compliments and outrageously demonstrative gestures that have no place accompanying my actual feelings. I have grown up saying the right things when things are going right for so long that it's hard for me to turn off. It would be as difficult if not more to do that than it would be to turn off saying the wrong things in the wrong situations.

Yet that day I chose not to lie in order to present myself in the best possible way.

"Yeah, I guess I wanted some ex sex. Pretty stupid."

"Flying out to visit your ex while she's off at college?"

"Yeah."

"I'm not saying one word."

"But would you do the same thing?"

"If the relationship had broken down to the point you and Tara were?"

"Yeah."

"Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps."

I sighed and rolled over onto my back.

I felt Breanne roll over on top of me so that she could look me in the face.

"Could you really be as awful as me?"

"As you? Never," I heard her laugh. "Besides I know how much Tara meant to you not so long ago. I was there hearing about it for a lot of it."

I don't if I've ever mentioned it before but one quality I've always admired about Breanne is that she's always taken the people who've come in and out of my life with a grain of salt. She doesn't have these jealous spurts that everyone else seems prone too. She has this zen-like acceptance that people close to you are going to have people who are close to them that you may not know. As she puts it, a person is like a note in a song, a person is best served when its surrounded by other persons in as many varied and different combinations as possible. She has never once asked me if I've ever loved someone more than her because she really doesn't need to know the answer.

"You want to know a secret?"

"Shoot."

"I don't know if I really still loved her at that point. A lot of how I felt about her changed in that year we were apart."

"I could've told you that, sugar."

"I think it was more the idea of getting to be with her one last time than the actual getting to be with her that I was concentrating on. It was as if I needed to prove to myself that I still mattered enough to her for her to want to come out to see me. I needed that validation, I guess."

"We all like feeling wanted, Patrick. We all like feeling that we still have it when we need it."

"I felt so humiliated. I felt like I'd wasted all this money on her and she didn't even have the decency to show up. I felt like such a sucker."

I tried to laugh, but it came out harsher than it was supposed to. I looked into the oceanic blue-green eyes of Breanne, trying to coax out of her some secret sign of disapproval. I wanted her to tell me that I had no right to do what I did. I wanted her to say that I had been underhanded and hadn't treated Tara fairly. I'd made her a promise that I wasn't taking a vacation strictly for her and that she could have backed out at any moment. Then, when she had taken me up on my promise, I chastised her for it. I hadn't told anyone about the secret deal I made up until that point. I hadn't blabbed about it because I had feared that they would, in fact, belittle me and taken sides with Miss Tara. It's one thing to believe you are wrong. It's another thing entirely to have your friends and family actually announce that the mistake was yours. I didn't want to face such scrutiny. Instead, I had allowed everyone else to believe she had been more spiteful than she actually was. Indirectly, I had made her out to be lying and conniving, deceitful to the core. The more lies I spread about her and that trip, the more I started to believe that I had been in the right. I started to really believe that I had been the victim throughout all of it.

But I knew Breanne saw through all that.

I knew she knew me for the bullshitter that I was.

What's more I wanted her to call me on it. I was telling her these secret thoughts because in my heart of hearts I wanted to be reprimanded for my unsavory behavior. She needed to be my confessor and she needed to let me know how to make up for my sin.

"I know you want me to tell you were wrong, but I can't."

"Why not?"

"For the same reason you're always telling, Eeyore. The heart has reasons Reason cannot comprehend, remember?"

"So you don't think I was wrong."

"About as wrong as me wanting to see you one last time before I go off to college."

"This is different. This is special. You're a special circumstance."

"Just because I want to be here just as much as you?"

"No," I said, brushing the bangs out of her eyes. "Because you came up here with both eyes open. I didn't exactly hide my reasons under a bushel."

"Hey," she replied, "we both have expectations here, darling. Let's get that straight."

I smiled.

"Secondly," she continued, "You and I aren't so different. I flew out here to be with someone I used to go out with--the same as you. I only proposed this idea because I knew you were still smarting over a recent break-up with someone else--the same as you did with Tara. I came here with the full knowledge that after this trip is over things like this trip probably will never happen again--the same as you."

"But it's different, Breanne. We're different."

"We're really not, not in the bigger scope of things."

I still insist to this day that we are. I can't even count another single person I've slept with over twelve years ago that I'm still in contact with, let alone to the degree that she's still the first person I call about everything. However, she's entitled to her point-of-view, I suppose.

"So this is just a fling for you, is what you're saying."

She giggled a bit and pecked me on the cheek.

"You know I'm not," she said, laying her head on my chest. "But you know it can't be anything too meaningful either. We both know that. It's too late for us for this to mean something."

She was right, of course. I didn't tell her that, but the two of us had come up with our own implied agreement. This trip was a vacation for both of us in more ways than one. This trip was a vacation from not only the lives that awaited us back home, but it was also a vacation from the restrictions we had placed on our relationship over the years in a helpless attempt to preserve our sanity.

"We didn't rule anything out," I whispered to the top of her head.

"I don't want to talk about it any more, Patrick. I think I'd like that nap now."

I don't believe we ever tried to dissect what exactly that trip was supposed to be for us. We both agreed to let the vacation be the exception to the rule that is us. We let it be the vestige of a dead dream that two kids had once shared when they had first met and fell in love. It kind of became the picture in our heads that we showed ourselves how life might have been if things had been different. Sometimes, when I get frustrated thinking that she and I should have ended up together, I remember that week and how we fought the least amount of time I've ever fought with her. I start to remember all the sights, all the times we had, all the words we exchanged, all the nights we had in each other's arms, and I can almost convince myself that those few days are enough for me to live the rest of my life with. I can almost convince myself that it would have been all downhill from that point. We had the happiest times we were going to have with one another and that I could make due with that fact.

Except I know all that isn't true.

"You want to know my secret, Patrick?" she asked me just before we were almost fully asleep that afternoon.

"What's that?"

"My secret is I worry about how I'm going to have to give this all up. My secret is that I hope that this isn't the last time we do this. I secretly don't know if I ever want to go back home."

She buried her head in me again, took a small yawn, and closed her eyes for the afternoon.

"Good night."

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers