As Quiet As I Could

I'm sad about how things have devolved. We're friends now; friends in that stilted, numb, conventional way that is pleasant and even gratifying amongst colleagues or friends of friends, etc.. But between us it just feels hollow, pretend. We both know there was something more to be had, and as it fades, the sadness is palpable. We talk, we're friendly, we're neither of us prepared to fully let go. But you'll never take responsibility for your emotional neglect, and until you have, I'll never trust you. And of course I realize you can't; to open up to that means opening up to the entire prison of your life, which is terrifying and, from your perspective, inescapable. And perhaps it is, after a fashion; perhaps it always was. For me, it would have been enough to have had a happy life together, but I haven't a career and...  entrenched... family ties, if not exactly close ones. The pain of parting from your painful like might simply have been too much,

After having written you that e-mail, I know in my belly that it's important I remain strong, which in this case also remains silent. I placed the onus on you to make the next move, and to retreat from that decision undermines my credibility, costs me your respect and my own self-respect. But it goes against my nature; one, separation anxiety. I don't actually want  you to go away; on the contrary, I'm hoping against stupid, foolish hope—that disagrees with my deep down intuition entirely, I might add—that you might ride to the occasion. I fear your failure to reply as another sign that I am yet again discardable. I thought... I thought I had been the good guy, for once, someone to be proud of, someone l liked. But your silence, your unwillingness to notice or in a tangible way show your care that I'm hurt creates a terrible dread that nothing and no one I will ever be will be loveable. I know, I know, the otherside to this story. This has nothing to do with me but

Listening to the playlist I wrote for you, the one you never understood, I think, even if you intended to take it seriously.  My how things have changed in only two weeks. My understanding of you, the scale and drama of the barriers between us, how I understand myself in the midst of all of it. Several days ago—the last night we had dinner to together at East Lagoon—it began to dawn on me, finally, that this isn't and was never going to work. I'm trying desperately not to be angry with you about it; I haven't any right to. But I've always found it challenging not to grow frustrated when a problem lies between me and someone else, a someone, a want, that ostensibly I know how to solve. Only, after all these years, I've learned at last that you cannot make someone see it your way. They have to get there on their own, and if they can't do it in time to resolve it (or, I suppose, if I've been wrong and can't see through it or let it go in time to re