Maitresse

'I am leaving you' she said with a slightly impatient sigh, and left me sitting there with a slightly stunned look on my face. After all, she had been my mistress for 5 and a half years. In the grand scheme of time, that isn't that long of a time. For a man of 40 odd years it is a significant amount of time. Considering I didn't lose my virginity until I was strapping lad of 22, I have only been in the dating/gene pool for a little over 18 years. All things considered, 5 and a half years out of 18 is almost one-third. When you do the math that way, you start to understand my shock.  And shock it was, an almost (to her I am sure) comical look was surely on my face as she uttered those four simple words, "I am leaving you."

It doesn't take a genius to sort out that once one party utters those deadly words, that there isn't a whole lot the other party can do to stop the actual statement from becoming true. Of course, that doesn't stop us, it just that it is going to be harder than Chinese math, a sum that you can not solve, like me trying to explain why I thought leaving me was an awful idea (and not just for me). After 5 and a half years, we had no secrets, we had no uncharted territory, no real surprises for each other. However, that really wasn't the reason she was leaving. I said we had no uncharted territory, we did have however, have unexplored territory. We both had walls that the other was not allowed behind. Thick bastard of walls that just did not encourage climbing over, mining, or tunneling under.


She had built her walls early on in our torrid affair, and it was a torrid affair, and I bumped into them quite frequently, and with some force, until eventually I learned to respect their existence.  Of course, like the mature adult I am, I built walls in response. It was like a relationship arms race, and the more walls I bumped up against, the more walls I erected. It became quite silly after a while, and I am pretty sure that if you were to ask her, she would tell you that I built the first wall, and she was just trying to protect herself from becoming walled in by me. Who knows maybe she is right, maybe I built the first wall, maybe she did. It might have mattered then, it certainly doesn't matter now. 

The ironic part is that when we first met, I couldn't stand her. She was demanding, loud, rude, and frustrating. So frustrating that I didn't for nearly two years consider the candle worth the game. We were sort of thrown together by forces beyond our control, and we just decided that if we were going to be planted together, we should go ahead and bloom. And bloom we did, I like to think that I came as close as man could or will come to taming her. I am not bragging, I am merely stating what I feel to be a fact. It took about 4 years to get her under some facsimile of what I call 'control' (and not in a bad, creepy way). 

She was a hard mistress, and she taught me a lot life's lessons, and she didn't teach them softly. She forced me to look out upon a sea of failed relationships, and didn't sugar coat the fact that we were, in many ways, adrift upon that sea in a very small, very leaky boat.  She was not gentle, and a small part of me will hate her for that for a very long time. Even though the larger part of me realizes that her cruelty was the only way she had to show me what I needed to know. Of course, I thought I knew all I needed to know, and that was probably the problem that led to her leaving to begin with. The impatience with which she declaimed her desire to leave was almost more than I could bear at the time, and remains a source of mystery to me. After all we had been together for 5 and a half years, and now suddenly I was being judged to be made of inferior material.

I did try to understand, to comprehend why after so long, and some really good times (some bad one too, but that the nature of relationships) she suddenly (or so it seemed to me) concluded that she was 'happier when she wasn't around me', and 'happy when she knew she wasn't going to see me.' Those statements left a very large, very dark bruise on my psyche that I am not sure will ever fully heal.  The fact that she repeated them about 10 times certainly didn't help. 

You have to trust your heart to know what is real, and my heart had spoken, it promised her the sun, the moon, and the stars if she would just stay. However, she was not the type of woman that needed those types of promises, she walked on moonbeams all on her own, and certainly was not going to believe the sun, the moon, and the plans we had made to be anything other than the last gasp of a desperate man. She taught me to feel as blue as blue can be, and I guess I should thank her for that, for showing me that despair is a feeling that you can eventually get used to, and then get over. She left, and took a lot of my time with her, wrapped up in her being like a butterfly in a cocoon. Time mostly well spent, and I can only hope that my next mistress allows me to do the leaving. Because say you what you will about how hard it must have been to leave, it is the being left here, leaning against the loneliest street lamp this clown has ever leaned against, that has taught me another of life's valuable lessons. However, I will keep the details of what that lesson is to myself. After all, if I told you what that lesson was then you would be almost as clever as me, and I can't have that now can I?