Anonymous Letter

Surely. Surely you are tired of this too. I mean, who wouldn't be? Every time you think it's over and it all settles down, something somewhere happens and I kick up a raging duststorm again.

I'm just waiting for the day when you let down your guard for one brief moment and I can get my foot in the gap to end our friendship. And because you're tired of it, you'll let me. I'm hoping that I'm wrong and that I don't know you well enough to know you'll never do that.

Because. You are the one vulnerable spot I have left. You are the one place where I don't stand on my own two feet, if not inwardly, at least outwardly independent. I am afraid of you. Because you hold the power to hurt me more than almost any other human being - except my Mom.

I can't hide from my Mom, and I love her far too much to want to, even though I don't always listen. But you - you're different. I don't want you that close. No one else holds the darkness of my past and has helped me as much as you. Now you stepped back. I'm so very afraid that you'll hurt me again. Pulling back hurt me. Now I want to arrange it so that you will go completely away - and it is in control and I know what is happening. As I wrote not too long ago in a poem - it's the waiting that makes me sick, that cuts me and scars me more. Let's just leave it in control. We both know you'll go sooner or later.

You refuse to leave. Because you say that you care. I won't allow that. I won't admit it; I close my eyes to it. I don't want you to care. Because I don't understand your brand of caring and I don't want it. I have always thought of you as suffering, martyr-like. Doing your Christian duty and enduring my presence from the lofty heights. I won't admit that there can be any feeling whatsoever on your part to me, because I don't want there to be. If you care about what becomes of me, that leaves me vulnerable. And I don't want that.

So why does your apparent non-caring hurt so badly that I want to shove you away completely? I barely understand myself.

I think if you go, I will be able to heal. You say I must learn to live with the pain and hope it dies away. Leave it with God and trust Him. I can. When you are a memory. Fading into my past; just like so many others.

It's easier for both parties. You have your own life to live which is already taking you further away. Watching you sitting there on my screen isn't doing anything at all apart from hurt me further. Please, don't stoop to endure my presence because it is necessary. I would rather die than be your duty.

You don't understand me, so don't try. Just stop being as stubborn minded as I know you are from our long-term friendship, stop convincing yourself that you're doing the right thing and break this.

Wouldn't it be better if we sat down and you stopped looking at it with your determined blinkers on and we managed to agree to go? Before I end up pushing, and pushing, and pushing for a weakness. Because you are human. And sooner or later, I'll find the weak spot if I keep pushing. And then you will, in sheer weariness or despair, give it up.