after the deluge

I have put this gripe off for too long to do justice to my state of mind when first overcome by the venom I felt rising inside me. But I am desperate for distraction from the previously mentioned relapsing affliction, and if I focused hard enough I could still recapture a fraction of the original angst, so I may as well give it a stab.

There is also this to say: he and Harold had nothing in common except youth. No spiritual bond could survive. They had never discussed theology or social reform, or any of the problems that were thronging Michael's brain, and consequently, though they had been intimate enough, there was nothing to remember. Harold melted the more one thought of him. Robbed of his body, he was so shadowy.

EM Forster, The Point Of It

I knew you were trouble even before we met. I'm almost never wrong about this sort of thing, and that time was no exception. Yet I welcomed you so recklessly, with the impatience of someone who had not another moment to waste on a past that could neither be continued nor erased.

I gave you my bed, my time, the food my housemates left for me, a little of myself too. You took it all, ungraciously, propounding a sense of entitlement I was too stunned (and stunted) to refute. I shrugged it all off, too preoccupied elsewhere to argue. What the heck, I told myself, my heart was not mine to give and if not that what have I to lose?

For you were there, of flesh, that I could see and hear and eat with and make laugh and... Everything that she was not. It didn't keep my mind from straying - I never pretended otherwise to you or myself - but nobody was getting hurt (or were they).

It took you less than a day to decide that you had to contact me everyday. It took me months to realise that I didn't want to know you anymore, not at all. Those were extremes even I'd never before known. How long will it take you to learn the true reason for my sudden disappearance?

Because of what I had tried (and failed) to exact from you, I cannot bring myself to say the words that will secure my release: Whichever way you spin it I did not exploit you the way you forsook me. And because of what I know about you, I am also afraid of the final insult - of your (recovered) ambivalence.