The chickens have come home...

You know how I keep talking about the axe swinging precariously over my head?  Well, the rope finally snapped, and the axe done fell on my neck.  As I write I am slowly bleeding to death thanks to the gaping hole in my jugular, two holes to be precise.  What am I on about?  Karma, my friends, the bitch has finally caught up with me.  Two of the gentlemen who have featured on these here pages, unbeknownst to them, obviously, have finally joined our little group, and they are not exactly happy to be here.  Alas, my lovelies, I must make amends now, for inaccuracies, lies, fallacies, and possibly unwelcome truths.  This shall not be pretty, but retractions seldom are, no?  Folks, this is a classic case of my chickens coming home to roost, and oh how they are roosting.  Note to self: stop talking about the men you date, or don’t date, as the case may be, not unless they’ve moved to a far off land, with no internet access.  Another note to self: stop asking foolish questions. 

Everybody, say hello to Mr D.  Mr D, stand up and take a bow.  Mr D is the man (perhaps not so) fondly referred to as Disappearing Dude, and Scar (that wasn’t me, by the way, I just called you simba.  Not sure that helped any…).  The last time I talked about this man, he had reappeared, and then he disappeared, and then reappeared, and then disapp…you know the story.  At the end of last year things finally came to a head, and by that I mean I finally got drunk enough to ask him flat out if he wanted me.  He said no.  I know, I should know better than to ask a question I don’t know the answer to, but in my defence, I didn’t really think he’d say no, so it kinda stopped me in my tracks.  See, I was working up to bigger questions.  Stop laughing, I got what was coming to me, and then some.  On a related note, I am done asking men questions, even when I’ve already given them the answers to give me back in return.  So, the man finally killed that vibe, and I got to spend December coming to terms with my foolishness.  For some reason, and I think its simply human nature (assuming I am not the first to feel this way), I felt great shame at being rejected, again, and again.  ‘How many times,’ I asked myself, ‘do you need the man to tell you, and show you, that he’s just not feeling your ass?’  I mean really, I asked him what?  I am such an idiot.

But alas, the story was not yet complete, was it?

January rolls around and with it comes…you guessed it…Mr D.  Now listen closely, because this is where it gets interesting.  I thought, when he reappeared, again, that he was looking to (re?)start something, that he was hanging around with intent.  Then we had a long drink and I asked another question, one that inadvertently answered all the other questions I’d ever had about the man.  Forgive me Mr D, I must tell this story, but only to put right what has been wrong all this time.  Ladies and gentlemen, the man fell in love last year, round about the time I was busy pining after his unavailable ass, such as I do.  It didn’t surprise me that he was dating, I was (and I use this term in the loosest possible sense) dating too, but I guess part of me thought I was in the back of his mind much the same way he was in mine.  Not so much, apparently.  Stop laughing, you evil buggers…  As I was saying, he met a girl and fell in love, and when he told me about her, that’s when it clicked that I had never been that girl for him.  No wait, it didn’t click right then, it took a couple of weeks of silence and solitude (long story, another day) for it to finally become clear, and how clear it is now.  See there’s a way a man talks about a woman he loves, the way he smiles, and gets flustered, and frowns, and fidgets…  I can’t honestly recall seeing him in that state when it came to me.  As silly as this sounds, listening to him talk about her made me realise what had been missing all along.  And that’s why now I must print a retraction.

Disappearing Dude never disappeared.  He was never there to begin with.  All the accusations I made were misplaced, inaccurate, possibly just plain untrue.  I had him all wrong.  Scratch that, I never had him, and therefore could never have lost him.  Folks, this is what delusional behaviour looks like, when you convince yourself that because you feel a certain way for a man, that he feels the same for you, because that’s the way the story goes, no?  No.  He didn’t, and I must apologise for claiming that he did.  Did I get hurt?  Yes.  Did he hurt me?  Yes, and no, as it turns out.  Is he to blame for my hurt?  No, not really.  I did that to myself, by not listening to what he was saying and not saying, and not reading the signs that were plain to see.  Do I regret it?  No.  Well, yes.  I’m feeling slightly very foolish now, but foolish is a part of life, no?

And now the story is complete.  Not quite the happy ending I was hoping for, but an ending all the same, which in turn means a beginning, a real one this time, and hopefully a chance to get it right next time around, because you know I will have a next time, perhaps sooner than you sceptical buggers think.  That’s a suspense tactic, by the way, I must keep you guessing, no?  Perhaps not.

Everyone here, knows everyone here is thinking about
Somebody else,
Well it’s best if we all keep it under our heads,
I couldn’t tell, if anyone here was feeling the way I do,
But I’m lonely now, and I don’t know how,
To get it back to good…

The second retraction is not quite a retraction, but not for lack of trying.  For any of you out there who are considering telling your own tales, a word of advice: be careful who you call an idiot, they may track you down and call you an idiot right back.  This man was not amused, and to be honest I can’t really blame him, after all I did call him batshit insane (but in a good way, no?  No.  Somehow I suspect there’s no good way to call a man insane…).  So I wrote about my attempted relationship with the man, an attempt that lasted all of two months, and the post I did was not a ‘ah well… shit happens!’ post, noooo…  I was mad, and frustrated, and trying to figure out what had happened.  See, it just ended, literally, just.  I tried to make sense of it as best I knew how, which basically involved a long rant, but in so doing I presented only half the equation, my half, and I, you, never got to hear his half.  The tragedy of the post is that I never made that fact clear, that it was not a complete story, by any stretch of the imagination.  Said man has since accused me of being negative, of only talking about the bad and not the good, and not just in that particular post.  And to a certain extent he’s right.  I painted the picture of a bad, bad man who was just looking to get laid, and nothing else, and while that may or may not be true, it doesn’t speak to the rest of the man, does it? 

Even as he was tearing me a new one (poor choice of words, no?), I got the distinct impression that what pissed him off wasn’t so much what I said, but what I didn’t say.  By focusing on the (to my mind) bad ending, I neglected to mention the beginning, and the middle, both of which were pretty good.  The man was, is (when he’s not shouting at me), smart, and funny, and sexy.  A little fucked up too, but who here isn’t?  I know I am, perhaps more than him.  Kind (and somewhat angry right now) sir, apologies for the misrepresentation, it was not my intention to paint you as a bastard.  Actually, it was, but not a complete bastard, just a bugger with (perhaps) some bastard tendencies, not unlike myself and the rest of the idiots out here.  Perhaps one day you will tell me, and the rest who are reading this, what happened, and why, because we both know that the blame, if any, should be equally shared between us.  Its not that I’m looking to rekindle anything, I fear that ship has well and truly sailed now, as well it should, all things considered.  Ah well…  Shit happens!

Everyone here, is wondering what it’s like to be with
Somebody else,
Everyone here’s to blame, everyone here
Gets caught up in the pleasure of the pain, everyone hides
Shades of shame, but looking inside we’re the same, we’re
The same,
And we’re all grown now, but we don’t know how,
To get it back to good…

The song is ‘Back 2 Good’ by Matchbox 20, the rock band of my campus years.  This song, as with all good rock songs, has lyrics that can mean whatever you want them to, it all depends on your mood.  I find it melancholic, bittersweet almost, but some of you will find it romantic, and others still will find it angry, who knows?  Listen, take what you will from it.  Useless fact, whenever I’m struggling to work something out in my mind, I turn to one of two things, wine, or rock, rock ballads to be precise, because both have a way of drowning out the noise long enough for me to find clarity, even if many weeks, or months, later.