I find myself less and less able to be so easily hurt as I get older - whether it is because I have found that the hurting is the thing which causes both the healing and the growing, or if it because I have become so negatively affected by the world around me that I close myself off to being hurt. There are those who will say one or the other when speaking of me, I say both simultaneously.

Today I have found myself hurt. Deeply. The kind of hurt that doesn't heal though. It only causes growth by default, because to ignore it and hope it goes away is to refuse any type of growth. I never want this, but the hurt is so hard right now, the pain so fresh and so wounded that I don't want to be confronted with it right now. It is unwise of me to just react to the situation and in the heat of the moment rashly make a decision I will inevitably regret, and yet to not react to this predicament is to ignore it. I'm not the strong one in this situation and I will be the one who just sits and ignores it, I always am, but this time I feel a bit even more hurt by doing nothing, as if I am adding to the pain. To apologize is to initiate and to initiate is to threaten and to threaten is to cause more fences, and I don't think these fences will be the white picket ones you talk to your neighbor over; I am tending to think they will be the kind that hold rolls of barbed wire at the top.

Why are there even such things as ulterior motives? If there weren't, I could apologize and there would be no thought from anyone my purposes. You apologize simply because it is the right and good thing to do, the thing that will make sure of holding nothing against any man. I hold nothing against him, nothing at all, but somewhere along the way we've miscommunicated and that nothingness has become something very big that I don't understand. And in no way can make restitution without him understanding my motives.

I wrote this to him in a letter I undoubtedly will not send.

"You think that what you say shouldn't, or perhaps couldn't matter much. Its weight is only weighed by those whom you choose it to be weighed by, but I think you're wrong.

What each of us says, whether through words or actions; since we know they speak even louder and more blatantly than words anyway, carries an amount of authority that nothing else does. And how could they not? Neither is exclusive, and without either we live in a world void of any type of communication.

It's no secret, at least not to those who know us both well, regardless of how well or little we know one another, that my hesitancy towards you was not born out of dislike, but rather an uncanny resemblance to the very thing I fight hardest against: Myself. Being around you was like being in some sort of funny house at the carnival where the mirrors are some sort of representation of the person you know so well, but strangely distorted in such a way that you didn't want them to be the same.

I'm sorry that our relationship has come to this. I ask your forgiveness for not realizing the depth of you and taking it so lightly. I'm sorry that in my search for transparency I've found someone who would rather remain so opaque that he is virtually invisible. And I'm sorry that I found you when you would rather be hidden.

I'm not a man hater. And I do like you. I never wanted to be your best friend, and never pretended to be so. I never intended to know you, just the knowing that comes from finding someone who says the same thing you've always thought and silently agree with - not because you want to be like them, but because you are like them. And even that wasn't purposeful - it was default. I haven't got you 'all figured out.' For goodness sake, I haven't got me all figured out, let alone my family and close friends, and after them the people I barely know. But most of all, I never wanted to cause pain. So for that I am most sorry. Pain is inevitable. It is present in every friendship, relationship, or casual knowing we experience. We never mean for it to be, i
t just is. It teaches us what we have lost. It teaches us what we have gained. It teaches us what could be and what could never be. Yet most of all it teaches us that life is one series of good things and bad and together they make up the stuff of life that we most hate and most need. I hate to be the cause of it though. I am sorry."

So that was it. I am sorry. I am. I'm not sure what exactly I did, but for the pain I am sorry.

But that doesn't fix things does it?