Callous

It’s easy to play off Sarah’s empathy. She grew up in a family full of erratic and self-centered people. When you depend on those kinds of people to meet your needs for love and safety, you get used to forgiving a lot of wild behavior. What choice do you have when you’re 5 or 6 or even 16? By the time you’re all grown up it can be hard to see the flaws in the survival techniques that helped you make it this far in life. You made it out and now you need to pivot from the dysfunction you learned in your nuclear family if you have any hope of assimilating into the world of relatively “normal” people.

Sarah is very forgiving. Not only because she was forced to forgive since birth, but also because she wishes she could be forgiven for all the crazy learned behaviors that came from growing up in insane circumstances. She yearns to be understood, to be handled with care, to be given chances to make amends when she screws up. She’s trying to be better. It’s what makes her the perfect mark.

I have done so many completely bonkers things to Sarah; created bizarre situations for her to be forced into. She reaches her breaking point, then I just have to shed a few tears and talk about my childhood trauma, and she starts reconsidering being so hasty with me. She believes people are like her, mostly good without intentions to cause harm, any harm caused is accidental and can be atoned for. Hahaha, She’s a total Pollyanna. It’s why we work so well together, or at least we did in the beginning.

I’ve had many, many years to reflect on my motivations and her feelings. Still, I’m always just flopping back and forth, floundering around like a hooked fish, waiting to die of suffocation in the hot sun. But I never die. It’s just eternal suffering. If I had ever known what my true motivations were / are, I think there was a time when Sarah would have truly forgiven me for being a monster. Or is it “acting” like a monster, not “being?” I guess if there had been change it would be “acting” but after over a decade now it’s probably “being.” 

She told me once; she said if I cut her then keep ripping the scab off eventually a callous will form and she won’t feel anything anymore. I guess that’s where we are today. There’s no more room for forgiveness in Sarah’s mind. I keep focusing on that tiny little period in the beginning when the possibility of love was on the table, but even that was always a fiction to Sarah because I never even gave her my real name. It’s different for her than it is for me and that’s the part I can’t seem to wrap my head around. All she wants to talk about are felonies and evidence logs and STOP INVADING MY PRIVACY and I just want to get back to that sweet spot where I was riding the highs and lows of always being on the precipice of rejection or the possibility of feeling wholly accepted. I’m all about edging. That’s where the true ecstasy is. The other states are too stable and placid for any kind of artistic genius to emerge. I could never just sit in that. But Sarah won’t consent to surfing those waves with me, which is not as fun, but ultimately I have never needed her consent.