Reminder of a Simple Lesson

I was about to fall asleep, then I remember.

I don't know why I remembered, but I did. I remembered that day at lunch time when my best friend with a timid smile told me, first with a prelude, "Hope this doesn't change much.", at which point I sort of knew what was coming, then she told me she had started dating someone. After being dumbfounded despite the lack of total surprise, I said, "Don't know you I am still in love with you?"

Then I remember another episode, this girl, less than two years ago, sat at my kitchen, after we had a big fight that we resolved, finally, "Well, not to add oil to fire...." During those one or two seconds before the inevitable next volley of assault, I knew what would be said. Come to think of it, I think my best friend and I had a big argument too, outside the Medical School. But resolved it just before she broke the news. Same here.

Then I remembered other instances.

Then I remembered what a friend told me just two days ago, "Don't wait around. Don't wait until they start dating someone else. That really hurts. A lot!"

I remembered now. I remembered the lesson. The simple lesson. If you wait, you have just three outcomes, and in my life, the third possibility that anything would happen the way you want, that never happened to me. The other possibility is that you get tired of waiting and break the "relationship" anyway. But the most likely outcome is what my friend said. It's the outcome with the most intense mixture of humiliation, disillusionment, remorse, even self-hate, and of course, jealousy.

It's so obvious any pre-teen can tell you. Why some of us decide to wait and hope that things would change is really ridiculous. In my case, the wait merely builds up so many excuses not to do the right thing, builds a connection whose very strength provides the strongest source of excuses that eventually lead to its own destruction, and Fate eventually will smack you with the worst kind of jealousy you can feel.

I thought about this lesson before I could fall asleep. This time I again didn't get the outcome I wanted from waiting, but at the very least I didn't wait long enough for the inevitable smack on the face to happen. The pre-teen lesson finally is learned with dignity.

Waiting is for cowards.

That same friend told me that she had been on the "other side", and she told me that because she cared about the man who was waiting that she told him to stop waiting and when that didn't work, she broke off any contact, for him at least as much as for herself. Isn't that another pre-teen lesson so many adults have forgotten about? Suddenly adults need so much more courage to do what is so natural on the playground.