Rewriting lonely memories

He had her do all the things with him he once did alone. Mostly they were things he enjoyed, but also some of the difficult parts as well. It was as if he was trying to rewrite his past with happiness into it to fill all the lonely memories. Like, hey Life, you messed up, this is how it was supposed to be from the start and how my past should have played out.

Or at least recompense himself. Prove that it is actually possible to have the love and involvement of one other person through his experiences. That, at least, things may have turned out differently; that his prayers were overlooked by mere chance; that perhaps his hopes and wishes might have come about, and still can; that he was not doomed by fate to go through life alone.

'See? Someone could've shared this happiness with me at the time. Someone is with me right now, doing so. The same could have happened before. It could've. I wasn't hopeless. I'm alright.'

But she wasn't interested. 'I didn't know' would be her self-absolution, 'what it meant to you'. But that made it worse; it wasn't that she didn't know that was the problem - how could she, anyhow?  It was that she didn't care enough to want to know. And that made it all the much worse.

Still, he was not defeated by her despondence. He saw it as she was not the right person, not that no such person could exist. In fact, he felt a little bit closer. It wasn't there in her, but he felt he got closer to experiencing it. That not finding it in her, somehow made the thought it was out there more tangible, rather than diminishing it.

He couldn't get mad at her. She was who she was. But he did feel betrayed she tried to hide it from him for as long as she did; she never did give up hiding from him in the end. She would always do so. And he could not continue ceding to her excuses, knowing she did not open to him and build a trust.

'The question from the start is a very simple one. What are we looking for, and do we want the same things? Her fear was always: something different and no. So she kept that secret from me, though I always knew, and stayed me at a distance exhausting all her second and third chances to demonstrate that her answer was what she said.'

It wasn't her answer that killed the relationship. Surely no two people can want all the same things and be so like-minded. Those differences can be worked out, and really - they don't all that matter. It was lack of trust. Not opening up, making one-sided decisions on what the other should know, and not revealing one's thoughts and true self. That killed the relationship.

'I can see by your actions what you are. You cannot hide from me what I can learn from you without you saying it. By keeping what is known to you from me, you only make yourself untrustworthy. Difficult. One who refuses to admit and so we play 'pickle' in a protracted expenditure of time and energy to play out an outcome we know what it will be, but one of us doesn't care to think about.'