strider57

Any Port In A Storm

"I just can't be alone." Those were the last words she said to me, choked with tears and torn by confusion. She was running away, because it's all she knows. It's all she knows how to do when confronted by the reality and consequences of her actions. At the moment, I suspect she was in the middle of some kind of Bipolar manic episode, although I'm equally sure she was in complete denial about it.

I'm not unsympathetic; I understand her motivation, at least to some degree. The need to belong and to be loved. Desperately, so desperately seeking someone, anyone to fill the void. Already she was building a rich fantasy in her mind of what it would be. She had only known the guy a week, but already she was telling her friends that they were going to be married.

Love at first sight, I doubted it and of course I was right. He beat her, pretty badly, but she hung on and tried to make it work, so desperate to prove she hadn't made yet another bad choice in a long, rich history of bad choices. He used her and threw her away, like so many other men that had filter in and out of her life over the years. I heard from her after the first beating. She told me I had been right, told me she should have listened when I warned her about what would happen. Two weeks later, she was back with him. She told me "They were going to work it out." Of course, I told her there's no "Working it out" with a guy that beats you, but she didn't want to hear that!! It didn't last too much longer, but the damage was done. This time she ran away for good. She told me she never wanted to see or talk to me ever again!!

I'm not unrealistic, I understand that everyone justifies and rationalizes the choices they make in their life, but I really don't think it was that. No, she ran away from me, because I reminded her of the horrible choices she had made. "I just can't be alone?" Well, she was never alone as long as she had me in her life and she knows it; it's just an inconvenient truth she couldn't deal with, so she did what she does best...she ran.

The cycle continues, she's hooked up with some other guy now. It's didn't take her long to find some new guy eager to share her bed, and it doesn't take any great insight to know how that will end, or what the future holds. Any port in a storm; year after year, guy after guy, she will continue down her path desperately trying to find what she had, but threw away. A lifetime of continued bad choices and disappointments. Sadly, I see no happily ever after in her future.

The doubt, that lingering doubt, it's still there and I know it. You can run away from people, but you can't run away from yourself. You can justify and rationalize all you want, but in the end, there really is no escaping the truth, because it is your life.

Honestly, I wonder why I should care? I'm a man, a left brain thinker ruled by logic and there is absolutely no logical reason why I should care what happens to her, but I do. I guess that's my cross to bare, so I'll just have to take it on faith that there is some greater purpose for it? I've always been a firm believer that everything in life happens for a reason, so it's almost impossible for me to believe that someone who came into my life and had such a profound effect, did so without purpose. There really are no coincidences in life.