Strange, Fragile Beasts

Relationships are strange, fragile beasts. They can wander, staying away for years at a time, then come back and go about their business as if they had just walked in the door after a trip to the store for a gallon of milk. At other times, they demand attention and will wail like a lovesick fox if you haven’t bothered to look their way in the past five minutes. My track record with relationships is about as erratic. I have managed to hold onto friends for decades, even with no words over the wires, through the air between us, or in the post for years at a time. With others, though, one or two careless sentences out of my mouth or off the ends of my fingers have burned long-term connections faster than a match dropped into dry kindling. Thankfully, I’ve learned a thing or two about diplomacy, with one of the most important lessons being: keep your distance. Yes. I realize that it’s pathetic, in a way, but contact with some people nearly always means walking away feeling awful about who you are or who they are.

Thanks to René Girard, I’m figuring out why interactions often go as they do. I still shake my head over the convoluted way in which I found his books. His writings on mimetic desire might have saved me some heartache if I had read them earlier in life, but no matter. I am thankful I’ve now gotten my eyes on them. I’m thankful that I can take what I’m learning, recapture the past, examine it, and realize where I went wrong.