Past Profundity

During a major housecleaning and nondestructive renovation, I found an old journal I had written in while still dating.  I thumbed to the last entry and read it.  It was painful then, because I was wrong, and profound now, because it is so true.

Pearls in the Mirror

Today I asked someone how he felt about me.  He couldn’t say.  Or perhaps he didn’t want to.  He said that he didn’t know really, and if he did, he wasn’t sure he could express it.  I told him that I needed to know because I needed to tell him something, and couldn’t until I knew how he felt.  He kidded around about it, and I said I wanted to tell him something that might hurt his feelings:  how I felt about him, and that I was not going to say until he had.  “That’s not fair, we aren’t in high school anymore.” he chided.  I told him that there hadn’t been a day that I hadn’t thought about him (we hadn’t seen each other in months) and wondered if he was still angry, missed me, never wanted to see me again… I just didn’t know.  He said he had been through that too.  He mirrored everything that I would say about how I felt toward him.

If you put a butterfly in front of a mirror, you see two butterflies.  The lack of differences between them proves the illusion.  If I pass by a glass that shows another woman that does not move as I do, no matter the resemblance, it proves a window.  I wanted to know if I was standing in front of a mirror, or a window before I opened myself and stood before him.

I have yet to find out.  I should go home and get some sleep I was told.  AS IF!!!  These thoughts come to mind unbidden, and drive sleep away like birds before a storm.

I did go home and lay down.  Sleep led me a merry chase as my thoughts tumbled down every corridor of my consciousness.  I did not find rest.

I have a need to share things that are precious to me, and I am deathly afraid of being misunderstood.  My feelings are mine alone; no-one else knows them save God.  I only share with the people that mean a great deal to me.  I hold my friends most dear, and wished to give this gift to him.

Then, what I had asked, or rather demanded, him to do hit me full force.

If an oyster makes a pearl, it is not aware of the beauty that it creates and holds within.  It does not know of the tiny thing that crept between itself and its shell, regardless of its value to those on the outside.  But, we take pearls from oysters.  It fights us with everything it has in a futile effort to keep us out.  Once we have conquered its useless defenses, we poke it and prod it and examine it, searching for the little thing that crept between.  Bereft of its only treasure, the oyster withers and dies, and in order to properly display our trophy, we must destroy it.

Only God is aware of the nature of the beauty in the oyster; the oyster itself is ignorant.  By rights, also should we be.

What I did to my friend was the equivalent of rape.  I had no right to demand something that is only shared with God.  All I can do is make my apology and humbly beg his forgiveness.

I swear by the tears I shed as I write this, that I will never ask such a thing of anyone again.

…

Yeah.  I kept that promise.