What’s Left of the Truth

Bitterness has been good copy for me over the years, but it’s hardly more than shtick by now. How long has it been? The bitterness was real for a long time, but it’s been a long time since. It clings like nostalgia. It always has. I’ve always let it. It shaped my life around a black heart. My heart is no longer black. Pride drove the obsession; bitterness, the delusion; both of them, the expression. And that was the drug that ramped up my paranoia. I don’t need the drug anymore. I have found another that has no need for pride and bitterness. It’s only hope. It’s only what’s left of the truth.

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She Can’t Be Touched

There is comfort in not caring about what I can do nothing to change, affect or effect, as long as I’m not just giving up. Bitterness is the shell of giving up, the indifference, purgatory; acceptance the truth, if not exactly the heaven. Foreground and background transpose: Importance rack-focuses. The shift is motivated by both fear and weariness: I fear what people think of me for belaboring my emotions over a relationship that never was; and I am weary of caring about it. So though I do, still, think of Herself, I let no one know. Keeping it to myself will make it unreal even to me one day. The woman I wanted her to be will be a woman unto herself, a fictional character I can understand. But as complete as she may become, she will only be so as a construct of my imagination; however nuanced her psychology or complex her emotions, she is yet not three-dimensional and never can be. She can’t be touched.

Where Understanding Begins

My interpreter’s hat has a tendency to fall over an eye or two. Bias is nothing to be ashamed of or conquer. But I want this done by the end of the year, and I don’t have the patience for all the prideful rationale the delusions float on. I have plenty of room for the truth, but the truth doesn’t always have dibs on the space. My truths are shy and non-assertive, as naked as the emperor but fully aware of it. Maybe they don’t mind that much, but I do. They are not embarrassed but embarrassing. Objectivity is still hard to find, but it has never been more visible. The capture is the thing: I know when I’ve caught my prey, but I don’t know how. Consistency is not also ensnared. I catch truths I don’t understand and let them go for now. The rest is meager nourishment, but enough till the next meal. The rules imposed on me over Herself are not metaphorical. They’re real and sometimes hard to take. Accepting them is the only thing I ask of myself. I succeed, I fail. Neither praising nor lamenting either outcome is objectivity, where understanding begins.

The Power In Humility

Principle, right as it might seem or be, can still be shaky ground upon which to take a stand. A right to do something is not a duty to do it. Discretion can be too little considered. Rational rightness makes of itself righteousness with a blindly ironic twist of rationale into morality. Where irony prevails, recognized or not, true rightness is excluded. There I stood, Emperor of Righteous, resplendently naked in my meticulously woven cloak of rightness, proclaiming my “every right” to averted faces. What I say now clothes me in my humility, embarrassed over what I displayed. Whatever of my rights I felt at the time to have been trampled upon in the proceedings against me had been merely superseded by a moral duty I would not acknowledge. The principles I stood upon were kicked out from under me by the truth: the pain I’d inflicted. The resentment of my punishment as disproportionate to my crimes recedes as understanding accedes. Sometimes I resent that, too. I can’t recognize the power in humility.

Can I Ever Stop Wanting the Answers?

Speculation is a vanity of the imagination. There are many questions to ask, but do they need answered? What will be satisfied? Who’s truth will be told? If I were to run into Herself tomorrow I couldn’t ask one of those questions of her. Some things don’t matter if they only matter to you. Then you let go of them. Or you eventually only ask them rhetorically–and not snidely, either. They will always matter, really. I will answer them myself, but not with speculation. I only know my side. My truth will be incomplete. Accepting the impossibility of her corroboration and trusting my own understanding of it will be my letting go. I have to trust even what I’m not sure of–become sure of it–because it’s as sure as I will ever be. How true can that be? Can I ever believe it’s true enough? Can I ever stop wanting the answers?