On Reflection

           Probably I shouldn’t have opened the email. But I did, and couldn’t stop reading and rereading it, to the point that I can recite some of it verbatim.   

I shouldn’t have taken your breaking up with me the way I did.

           Now, you have to admit that it was a combustible load you dropped on me, saying you didn’t like the person I became when I was around my friends—the sarcasm, the bitchy queenery—and therefore you didn’t want to be with me anymore. I wonder that I wasn’t knocked out cold. I was desperate for it to be a joke, ironic. But you had never really grasped irony. And there was a cast to your tone–raw, menacing, not your usual nasally dull.

I reacted effusively, I admit. There’s a difference between a generic outburst and the one I threw. But what’s done is done I always say, or at least I’m saying it now. I raised my voice, and to an uncomfortably high shelf. And there was the name-calling I resorted to at that volume and in front of so many bystanders. In my own defense, you could have chosen a better venue than a grocery store. Still, I regret every word. You are not dumb, as I described you—repeatedly—and I shouldn’t have compared your intelligence to a bowling pin or compost heap or flan. I insulted your line of work and by association your ambition and initiative, which was wrong, abusive, elitist. Someone has to dig those clams. Dinners depend on them. It requires muscle, stamina. No unimportant job, that. Really more beneficial to the functioning of the world than what I do.

I remember how I attacked your manhood, criticizing you for having an appendage of real length and girth. It’s like taunting someone for being too handsome or too thoughtful or too generous. Then the flip-flop, declaring that your endowment was your only asset, that you’d have no personality at all if your mother’s ob-gyn had mistaken it for an umbilical cord and red-bagged it. I said something like that. But however I may have worded it, I was being someone I didn’t want to be, then or now. The fact is, I miss you still, and the individual parts of you.

I believe I got physical, too. Did I pull your hair? God, don’t let me have pulled your hair. You had such nice hair, and I have so little. No one tried to stop me, because no observer in a food store wants to get involved when two men fight, especially when they are clearly a couple. If only temporarily by that point. Since I am also quite a bit shorter, they likely also presumed you were not in any real danger as I slapped at your chest like an old man swatting at spider webs. Probably they just wanted both of us to disappear, wanted to get back to the triviality of shopping, especially when I lowered my insults to smells, comparing your breath to agricultural waste and your private area to a freshly-tarred road.

I am remorseful that I left the store without you, seeing as we had come in my car. Only later did I think of you negotiating the skimpy shoulders of four-lane arteries, walking home in the dark, startling and irritating each driver who’d barely missed you.

I cringe now at how I went to small claims court over the cable bill, even though I do not watch TV and you certainly do. How can I not wince when thinking of my texts, my emails, the prank calls pretending to be your favorite aunt burning in Hell.

But what I regret the most is my stoniness when you came back, weeks later, seeking forgiveness.

That had been brave, especially after how I’d hurled insults at you like you were a new assistant at Vogue. It shocked me, the lover’s return. Who shows up at your ex’s, at least without a gun? I was mostly confused, since you had paid me what I’d been asking for the cable without the court’s intervention. And while I was not ugly this time, while I didn’t gloat or sneer or try to get you to grovel, I didn’t have it in me to be humane. I was not polite, sentimental, philosophical, melancholy—not at all the matured ex-lover. I let you go on and on and gave no indication of really listening, though I was, and with violent interest. But it was a sadistic hit, watching you push forward despite my death-mask expression.

On reflection, it was huge that you took full responsibility–owned it, as you put it–admitted that breaking up with me had nothing to do with me (an amazingly generous amnesty if there ever was one), or with us as a couple. Rather, it was all about your childhood and your inability to trust that someone would love you without an ambush. You assured me it was about your dotty mother who never knew what grade you were in, and your father who couldn’t whip your bare skin hard enough. And throughout this sweet and self-reflecting confession, my heart wanted to jump out of my chest and wrap itself around you, because I was more in love with you in those misty moments than I had ever been. Maybe you pressed on because you could see beyond the Botox-like indifference of my eyes, saw that I was trying to summon the amnesia one needs to stomp out the past, and that I wanted to grab you and never let you out of my arms again. Instead I let you say as much as you could say, and then did not forgive you, did not take you back. You eventually drew yourself up and made as gracious an exit as one could in those circumstance.

Now I see those moments as defining the difference between us. You can behave badly and own up to it, take the blame, reflect on what it says about you and try to be better. Your new someone else, presuming you have one, will benefit. Conversely, I am alone but for some fantasies. And I can only scratch out a few words of apology at a time, compose an email, try to stay one step ahead of my pugnacious regret.

              I knew there would be no replying on my part. I only grappled with whether or not to save it, considering its potential for harm.