R46 yeah, I feel that. It’s like a numbness and a soreness you carry with you forever.
While I wasn’t necessarily in forever-love with the girl I insulted, given we only knew each other for one summer (living in the same house and working for the same employer in Amsterdam), I did feel about her like I’d never felt before. The emotion she stirred in me was the closest to the feeling of ideal true love I’d heard described, bolt from the blue stuff. It’s like we were totally effortlessly in-sync about everything, and made each other laugh and smile so easily and constantly. I could spend all day doing nothing with her and feel fulfilled. It was almost-frighteningly easy to be open with one another, and share every part of ourselves (except the physical, because we never made it that far). Toward the end of our friendship/acquaintanceship, I had started to flirt and drop heavy hints about my romantic and sexual interest in her, and she seemed to be reciprocating. But it was too perfect...
Though we got on amazingly well amazingly fast, for some reason one day we got into a minor argument over a preteen kid we were both babysitting. On request of the little girl, I corrected some spelling in a story she’d written, which my love object did not appreciate and popped off about (saying I was stifling the kid’s creative mind). This simmered for several frosty hours, then later escalated into a full verbal fight over dinner, complete with long cold silences, barbed comments, and a storming off—her, after she called me a fascist and a horrible influence on kids, and I shot back that I had a stable family and went to an extremely good school and what would a dropout latchkey like her know about how to raise a kid in comparison to someone like me? This woman had a young child of her won at the time and was very sensitive about her lack of education, and though we’d only met and starting spending time together a few months prior, I knew that well enough to weaponise it in the heat of the moment. I regretted it the minute I said it, and I can’t shake the memory of her lovely face just collapsing and turning white before she turned around and walked out of the house without another word or look back.
Though I stayed in the property and the country for another month after that, moping about and desperate to reconcile, and left her numerous texts and emails (and even one apology card in the mail), I couldn’t get a hold of her. Unusually for me—a die-hard single Pringle, flake and commitment-phobe—for the first time in my idiotic life I was willing to be with a girl 100%, and in this case even help raise her daughter (and I’ve never wanted kids, so that’s major). Despite my seriousness about her, after a couple of months I got the message, and stopped trying to contact her or find out where she was. I figured that maybe time, space, and respectful distance would help.
I never saw or heard from her again. Last I heard, she emigrated to France and got engaged to the father of her child (who was her on-off teenaged sweetheart, hot the picture when I’d known her). It’s been about five years of no contact. While I have now got some perspective on the whole incident and have changed my ways (trying to speak with more kindness and restraint), I still think about her often with longing and regret. Not sure what I’d do if she turned up on my doorstep tomorrow saying I was forgiven, though there is a stupid romantic nostalgic little part of me that would want to embrace her and ask her to marry me right then and there. Realistically, though, we’d have to build back up and work on a relationship, if that’s what we both wanted and if it was feasible. During our first and probably-last fight, we both said ridiculous things and blew up over nothing, and with hindsight I do think she was quite immature (she’s younger than by a few years) and projecting her own issues onto others, as much as I was being a superior bitch. I think it’s a real shame we lost a sterling friendship and potentially more, over something that insignificant.
Miss you, Tara.