Mark's Pages

April 12, 2003:

I miss my friends from before she came into my life.

I loved her with such fullness that it pushed everyone else, literally everyone, into a kind of dim gray background, in which hers was the only figure in vibrant color. With the passage of enough years those colors became permanent, until finally her own fading, from long absence, has left a world of monotone.

In retrospect I realize what a mistake it is to invest any single individual with so much importance. Yet one of the central lessons the experience has taught me is that the heart is not ruled by what the head understands. So that there are still times when I miss her so much I feel I could vanish.

More than anything else I regret that we met so early in life. I catch myself thinking, what would have happened if we were to meet for the first time, say, now? With the years of accumulated experience and insight triggered for the most part by her loss?

Yet the question is easy to answer. If we met today I'd never speak to her more than once. I detest people like her. Manipulative, dishonest. My mature ethics are in large measure the rejection of her ways of being. I'd walk, and be relieved to have dodged the bullet.