Reflections

I've been trying really hard over the past few months to let her know how I felt but I couldn't get past my own anger, jealously, insecurity and sense of control. I probably should have listened to her own advice and just given both of us some space, but I was just really worried about losing touch in the process. 
  My trip to NYC had two purposes. I didn't waste any time on the first one. I wanted to look in her eyes and see what was there. To see if she felt disgust, ambivalence, or still had the same excitement she always had. My logical mind (and my friends and her on the phone) said she had moved on. But something inside me said otherwise. Something told me that the things I had done had bruised her spirit so badly that she was afraid of opening up again for fear of another blow straight to the heart - but that the feelings were still there. I can't be sure, but I would bet everything I own, that in the moment that she saw me, she was as happy as she had been in a long time. I felt her eyes spoke what her lips could not. 
  And as much as I expected her to be when I looked back and saw her in his car, she wasn't creeped out once she realized it was me. She genuinely seemed happy to see me. That's why she came running over to my car with a huge smile on her face, with a sparkle in her eye, and a little quiver in her lip. I kind of wanted her too look at me with disgust, or with the eyes of a stranger. It would have been so easy for me to walk away. I can give myself a thousand reasons why that should be the case... the distance, how I consantly reinvent myself, my disdain for mindless tradition, how rough I am around the edges, the fact it's impossible to know what a future with me would look like, the fact that I never opened up. But what I couldn't reconcile how she could feel that way and not fight for it.
  The fact is, I was tired of saying goodbye. I didn't come up here this time with a return destination. I felt like we connected on some very raw level and as long as that is in a funk I was going to feel like something was wrong. I wanted to fix it. I don't know what fixing it means, but I wanted to try one last time.  
 Someone asked me why I cared and it didn't take long for me to realize what it was. The night before I was to meet her, I called my friend Cat and told her everything. When I was breaking down the pieces inside each of us, she said, as cheesy as it my sound, "I think you found your inner child." in that moment I remembered when I wrote about my little boy growing old with her little girl. Once I shed all of the other nonsense what really mattered was quite simple.
 But things have a way of changing just as you see them as they are. Thursday night it seemed if nothing else mattered, the next day she called me to apologize even though I was the one imposing on her life. Two days later she pulled a 180 and stood me up when I was as nervous and vulnerable as a guy on his first real date. I felt like she drop kicked my inner child. I am not sure what happened. I must say I was quite surprised - I didn't know she had the capacity to knowingly hurt me, to put whatever she was clinging to before my feelings. That fact really opened my eyes. I don't know if her current boyfriend gave her an ultimatum, if her dad told her I was a creep, or if she decided a day with me was just going to remind her of what she thought she couldn't have. Maybe she is mad at me for messing up her best shot ever of getting the fairy tale dream her mom has fed her since childhood. I know she knows who I am and why I did It. It just seems like she is forcing herself to believe it's something else. She even called my surprise visit in January a "trick."  
  That being said, none of what I have said matters if she won't face it or talk about it. I can't force her to be my friend. I felt guilty for a long time after we broke up. I felt like I left her broken and alone ad by the time she let me know she had already decided to
push me away. As a result I really tried hard to make it up to her. Maybe I can't. Maybe I have and she won't believe it's true. Either way I finally feel like I have done all I can do. I feel at peace about this whole thing.
It's kind of funny how things happen though. I didn't think she had the power to let her mind control her heart. Then again I didn't think I could let my heart direct my mind.