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How funny, how interesting that the truth of who I am, after all of these years of absolutes, years of absolute Black and White, is a person who sees the world in so many shades of grey.

There is no absolute Love, no absolute Virtue. I’ve had it all wrong and because of this I have been so hurt over and over again, thinking or believe that one person could love or want me and only me and then wondering why it was that I was so hurt when my lover even looked at another or appreciated her beauty.

But a slap in the face to grow up and realize, to resurrect yourself from that glass covered bed like Sleeping Beauty, and all without a kiss, and realize that you are not hermetically sealed, no prince will be forthcoming to kiss you awake, that perhaps you are not beautiful. Or perhaps you are (you tell me, I can’t tell anymore), but there you are finally awake and does it hurt to realize that you are not the only one deserving of your others love? Yes, that love is not singular that you thought it was. That love is not Love in the Platonic sense of the world – it is not philosophical Love, but everyday, real-world love and you must make your peace with this.

All these years and I finally have. I finally have and for the first time I allow myself to say okay, then it is okay if another appreciates me. I don’t go looking, but by some miracle, I notice when another notices. The only trouble, it’s not someone who should notice, it’s sticky and awful in some way because I never asked for him to notice, but there you have it. He notices. And I in turn notice him. So we are stuck, as if bound by honey, catching each other, touching knees and feet under the table, being together at every moment, and then suddenly lately, he drops me – no email, no contact, and although I try to reach out because formerly he was emailing me about fifteen times a day at least, and although we spoke on the phone a lot, all this and more, it has faded. He has left me broken.

I finally accepted the world as it is and it has spat me back out like it does not want me. So it is then that I have retreated back; not to my glass bed like sleeping beauty – I never was her in the first place. No, I’ve retreated even further back than that to being sealed in this glass house in which I live, which I rarely leave, sneaking cigarettes when I can, hardly taking caring of myself, reading books that I need to read, try to prepare notes for things I must do, trying hard to do my work and failing, and wondering what and where I went wrong.

Of course, it could be that he is married and got spooked. Maybe he thought we were going to have some torrid affair. I never thought that. For the record. I never thought so. I thought we loved each other, yes. I thought that that love transcended ordinary friendship, but I never once thought that it would lead to an affair. It is utmost ego to think that it would. It is nothing but arrogance on his part to make this assumption that I would ‘have him’ if only ‘he wanted.’ And what if he were wrong? Did I think I would lay on my back and fling my legs in the arm, wrap them over his shoulders and voila! I’d take it?

Bullshit.

So he vanishes into his middle-aged crisis. Go buy a fucking car next time, I think.

Go dye the grey out of your hair or go buy Gale Sheehey’s book (is that how you spell it?) book “Passages” and read it and come to terms with the fact that you haven’t come to terms with you age, because frankly dear, I’m much younger than you and probably too young – we are of a totally different generation. I’m not about to sit down and cook for you every night and play your long-suffering wife, or long-suffering anything.

God, this is boring.

God I’m getting boring. All I wanted was this: one kiss. That’s it. So simple it would have made me happy. And now? I’m not so sure I even want that. A good part of me is truly disgusted by him. Disgusted by his arrogance, his sudden lack of communication and thinking, surely that when he does decide to resume communication (if he does, and he probably will at some point), that I’ll be there just waiting.

That’s a risk he takes. When I shut a door it closes forever. Sure, I’ll be your friendly acquaintance but no more. You’ll never know me as you did. Never. You’ll never receive the life spirit and verve I once offered, I will, by contrast, give you my dead eyes, my pale skin, my dead weak hand, a brush away kiss of the cheek with my body arching away from yours instead of toward. No more gifts through the post – no more code and when you move to be near me, I will get up and walk away.

You won’t find this, and I’m glad of that. The best part of all is that you’ll experience it and as you told me the other day, and since I can say it here, there is something satisfying about vengeance. Is this vengeance though, love? Or is this simply what you deserve?

You would say I am “a woman scorned”. I tell you now, I am no woman scorned. If anything, you are, will be, are already, the man scorned. It is not you who closes or will close the door and create the finality here, it is I, and I will do it with great authority such that the slam echoes.

I know. I am a wretched bitch. A real Lilith. Screw me for sticking up for myself. Screw me for sticking it back to you. And screw me for every trusting you and expecting so much more. And screw me for shedding so many tears before I ever came to this conclusion, which took months of crying and jerked sobs.

Yes, screw me for this, and screw you too.

isn't it time you saw me as I am then? I hide too much, I hide behind a facade of my own doing, I keep to the shadows.