I've slept on it.  I still wish none of this had happened.  I should have done something differently.  I'm not sure what I should have done differently, but I am sure there is something I didn't do which would have avoided this.  I know Irene is not having a great time now either, least of all because my insignificant relationship with her has had a hiccup.  She has other crises simmering in her life, I'm the least of them. 

But I am not going to be reactionary.  She seems to be waiting for a reaction, but the steel grip of rage is keeping it all inside me.  I don't know who she is anymore, and I don't trust her, anymore.  If she wants to know how I am feeling, she can join the few strangers and passersby who read this blog.  Of course, she could have asked me, and I would have been happy—immensely relieved even—to talk about it.  But, for whatever reason, she has been quite consistent in avoiding any conversation with me about anything.  I have tried to engage her in conversation, and she gets all tense and artificial, and walks away.  She doesn't want to hear it. 

She doesn't want to hear it.  Hmmm.  Okaaay.  I've had some experience with that bullshit.  I've laid my feelings at the feet of 'friends' who then stepped all over them—while trying to get a better view of the scenery, or something—as if I wasn't even there.  When that has happened, the responsibility for it has been partly mine, I think.  You see, it works for me to diminish the significance of my hugely painful feelings, and it helps me deny the pain if I can get the one involved in those feelings to confirm their insignificance.  But there will be no pearls before swine, this time.  Respect accrues to the expression of genuine and sincere emotions, and my feelings will be respected, even if only by me.  The time will be mine.

I want to post 'FUCK YOU' in 48 point letters, but that would appear infantile.  And I don't want to appear infantile. 

What I really want is just to be friends again.  You know that easy, swaying, gales-of-mirth kind of friendship that we had up til a week ago; that kind of friendship where a question like "What's going on?" really meant something.  But I'd have to tell Irene how much I've been hurt.  And I don't want to admit that I'm hurt. 

We've been (or so I thought) planning on getting an apartment together since last summer.  We looked at three or four places since October, we looked at two apartments just ten days ago.  I liked one of them even though it cost more than it was worth, but all the apartments in Worcester are going for way more than they are worth, and if Irene agreed, I would have taken it.  She told the guy we'd like to look at some more places before deciding.  So I set about arranging more appointments for us to see other places, figuring that we'd either find something better, or we'd agree that the one I liked was reasonable considering how overheated the rental market in Worcester has become.  She agreed that we would look at more places on the following Wednesday (last Wednesday).  I set up some appointments.

We never looked at another place.  Last Sunday, she began to seem kinda irritable around me, and talking about the apartment hunt made her uncomfortable.  Since we were considering March first as a possible move-in date, I figured she was just anxious about moving in to a roomate situation—each of us would have been the other's first roomate in a very long time.  But she never once said—or even implied—that she was not still planning on getting an apartment with me.  I mean, even with all her antsiness around the issue of moving in together, I felt certain that she would tell me if her plans had actually changed.  I never even questioned it. 

Monday night she was at work and she took a message for me there (we work together).  She left me voicemail Tuesday morning.  "You got a call at work last night from a guy named Lou about a two-bedroom apartment.  You can see it tonight, and you can call him at..."  The emphasis was hers.  Wednesday night, when we were working together, she was very recalcitrant as I was trying to set up an appointment to see a place on Friday.  12:00 noon would be too late, but 11:30 AM too early.  Reluctantly, Irene assented to an 11:30 AM appointment Friday.  I kept telling myself, "If she's changed her mind about getting an apartment with me, I am sure she would tell me." 

Wrong.

What!?  She wasn't talking much to me all last week; I already said I thought that was due to her tension and anxiety around the issue of moving.  I was right, I just didn't realize that her discomfort was not due to the planned move, but was because she had changed our plans without telling me.  I resent that my feelings were not just ignored, Irene recognized what my feelings might be and she disdained them.  She could have just said, "I don't want to do this now."  She wouldn't even have had to explain any more than that because I can easily understand, from personal experience, the ambivalence around taking on a roomate.  Even if her motives were purely selfish, she could have owned them, and said, "I know we have been looking for an apartment together, but I've got a good deal that doesn't involve you, and I'm going to take it anyway."  That would at least have been better than this pretense that I am not really here, that I didn't have a significant emotional investment in this endeavor myself.  I can appreciate her not wanting to address this with me directly; that would have been difficult for anyone to do.  But that is what I deserved nonetheless.  Her aversion for dealing with this conflict—which is, when all things are considered, a pretty minor conflict—and her choice to do it the way she did, to the certain detriment of our relationship, has at least made me aware that things would have been much worse if I had gone ahead and moved in with her. 

Brian, a co-worker, said, "Damn!  That shit's wrong.  Friends just shouldn't do that to ya." 

"My friends don't do that to me," I replied, and Brian seemed shocked that I could discard my friendship with Irene so easily.  I wish I could.  That easy, swaying, gales-of-mirth kind of friendship that Irene and I had up until a week ago—I wish I could just forget it like it never happened.  But I can't.

When Irene came to work Friday night, just before I was leaving, I said, "Hi!  What'd you get?" curious about the apartment she'd found... and desperately hopeful that she would drop this new artificiality that she was hiding behind. 

"I got a deal that I couldn't refuse," she recited from rote.  Without another word she disappeared into another room, and stayed there until I left.  Our friendship is on life-support.  I'm sure that very soon I will address this with her directly.  I have not done so yet, I think, because I want to make certain that our friendship is dead, I want to be sure that there is absolutely no hope of it resuming before I give myself permission to express the rage that I am feeling.