I’ve spent a lot of my adult life learning the hard way that the world isn’t black and white, good and evil, kind and nasty. And I work hard to make sure I acknowledge the grey. A lot of times grey can even make things easier – not simpler, definitely not simpler – but easier.
But this time, I think black and white is actually my mind’s best friend.
When I think of Halfman’s actions in terms of grey: he actually loved me and respected me but got caught in his own weaknesses and stuffed up royally … I just can’t reconcile it.
No one really loves someone and treats them like shit. That is about loving themselves and to define it as love gone wrong via human failings does Love a huge disservice.
But if I consider Halfman in a black and white manner: he just wanted to sleep with me, he’d done this to other women and his wife/previous girlfriends before, saying he loved me and treating my son as if we were entering a real relationship was his way of perpetuating his ability to get what he wanted out of me …
Well that makes it a whole lot simpler to take.
I’m not thinking he was all bad in any way. That isn’t black and white, but reading his love by his own definition rather than mine – as a self centred desire to be satisfied – that doesn’t hurt nearly as much.
I can even read some of his actions and words – in hindsight – as quite clearly those of a fraction of a man who was outside of emotion and rationally working towards the goal of having me on hand for a root and some tenderness as he wished.
The way he went from a tortured confession and kisses to ‘would you be willing to come back to my place’.
The phone call he took at work before I really knew him where the tone of his voice and the words he used said to my subconscious mind: that man is not talking to his wife and he’s having it on with whoever that is.
(I dismissed that thought immediately and only remembered it a few days ago.)
And, of course, that wonderful moment after we’d slept together the first time and he lay in his enormous black-sheeted, ridiculously over-pillowed bed and said: Do you think less of me now that you know I cheat on my wife? … Not that I’ve ever done this before of course.
Of course.
1000 days 