Don't You Think?

Edgar found a poem he'd scrawled on a torn envelope when Lenore was still living with him.

Little indications...

sneaky advice

Cannot happen randomly.

intentional?

so tired... it never ends.

He'd never loved anyone the way he loved her.

But did she love him? It seemed in retrospect that she loved the person she thought she could turn him into.

Without the power to change him, she felt weak and useless, so when he wouldn't change to fit her idea of who he should be, she argued until he was numb with exhaustion then left him to run into the arms of other men to cry about what a disappointment he was.

Yet to change, what he really needed was peace, not prodding.

When they met, weighed down with the rigors of higher education and the transition into adulthood, he'd no peace for so long that he'd forgotten this.

How could he have told her?

By the time she was done running his mind in circles, he'd become defensive, snarling, a badger in a bear trap, anytime she tried to talk to him about her discontent with the relationship, because he’d no time to think.

Even then, he couldn't blame her for her unhappiness. His life was a train wreck. It went off the rails because of poor decisions which, though made out of naiveté, were nonetheless his responsibility to remedy; but she was the type of person who tried to fix everyone but herself, and so was he.

An inevitable disaster where two trains meet.

He couldn't say he'd forgiven her because she didn't wrong him.

She was entitled to her life; but in the end there was one thing which he could no longer tolerate, from her or anyone else, though it was most people's idea of normal, a common practice which fell under the purview of "emotional intelligence".

Don't you think, she would say, before framing a question that he knew, every goddamned time, was really a request.

Sometimes he said no, he didn't think that, and then asked her if that was what she thought.

She always nervously replied: No, no, of course not, I just wondered.

What if she replied: Yes, I do. Can you do this for me?

Considering the nature of some of these pseudorequests, his answer could not possibly have always been yes, but it would have been yes far more often than not, if she had only been honest with him.

Sure, he knew what she really wanted, and sometimes he even lied, said yes, and did it, but it never made her happy.

Sometimes… was never enough.

He would try to put on a happy face and pretend for her, but then he realized he was doing two things he didn’t like, and wondered how many more there would be.

He couldn't shake the distinct feeling that he was being trained—domesticated like some dumb animal. He looked around at a lot of other couples he knew, and realized this was a normal thing, this innocent lie.

After she left, he beat himself up a lot, soul-searching all the way to the bottom to try and understand what was wrong with him. He’d never been normal, he supposed, nor did he ever care to be. After a while he realized that what she was asking him to do really wasn’t wrong… but it wasn’t right either, and it certainly wasn’t love.

Yet this was what society deemed functional. As a general rule, we were all supposed to read each other’s non-verbal signals and act accordingly, regardless of what was said, and sometimes, even regardless of what was openly agreed upon.

After living alone for a while, his indifference to the matter turned into disgust.

If the normal person's idea of functional was this sort of casual hypocrisy, he'd remain alone and dysfunctional, at least by their definition.

***** * *****

This story is a sequel to another, though I think it stands in its own context as well. Here's the first: