But enough about me
Most of my blogs are very focused on me and my own thoughts, so I thought I’d talk about someone else for a change. The idea is that I’m going to talk about something from someone else’s point of view in an attempt to make sure that I remember to focus my attention beyond myself. This was a cute idea in my head, but now that I’m actually trying to implement it, it’s quite challenging. I am very used to talking about myself, I’m even talking about myself now!
After a little bit of struggle, I thought it might not be possible to make myself the subject of a blog. Then I considered writing a story about a random person, which may be fact or fiction. Maybe it’s something I’ve observed, maybe it’s just an attempt at creative writing. Either way, the following is certainly not about a particular person who will not be mentioned again, which is the point that person is trying to get at with this blog.
Gladys (whose name wasn’t really Gladys it must be said) was going through a break up. The thing that made it especially hard was that she didn’t really know whether it was a break up or not. The man didn’t really want to be with her, but he never had the courage to tell her this explicitly. At some level, Gladys already knew this, but she tried to forget it by filling their lives with noise. Gifts, events, conversation, anything to drown out the emptiness. Sometimes Gladys was too weak to forget, and she wondered if the relationship even existed beyond the noise and the appearances they kept up.
He was motivated to enter the relationship because of how it would look, he wanted a “girlfriend”, and Gladys was the best option on the table. Every now and then, he would take significant steps to see if the options had updated and he could find a better deal. It’s best not to go into how, but ultimately he found his position was the same, so he returned to Gladys. He figured it beat being alone. The appearance and status of a relationship is what drove him to her, and what made him remain.
Gladys did care, in a way he didn’t. Even so, she wasn’t completely sure whether she stayed because of him, or because of what she thought they could be. Every day she hoped that he would care. Her heart was holding out for something, anything to show this sudden change. All she needed was a date that he bothered to plan for her, a text of something that reminded him of her, even just a post-it note with a love heart.
In the end, Gladys realised that the post it note was never going to come. She knew she couldn’t stay. It took a lot of strength to tear herself away from the thing she invested so much in, something she had told so many people about. She did it though. The ending to the relationship wasn’t a happy one, but after some time passed Gladys smiled and laughed in a way quite differently than she did before. They were real reactions, not manufactured to pretend everything was perfect. That's something I was happy to see.