I've spent a lot of my life, usually when faced with some kind of mocking death threat, saying "I've lived my life without regret". And more recently I have declared it more seriously, made it a personal mantra to live without regret. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.
First and foremost, I feel like my whole life I've never really lived up to my full potential. It seems like I can always see the goal, and I know for a fact I have what it takes to do whatever is required of me, but for some reason I can't muster the energy to do it. I just barely scraped through high school a year late and bottom of my class. I bombed out of community college for no real reason. My instructors repeatedly tell me I'm one of the most gifted and talented pupils they've ever had.. if only I would apply myself. It frustrates me as much as them, if not more-so. I know I'm capable of so much better; but when push comes to shove, I just fall back on my ass and I don't know why. It's maddening to know what I am capable of and to see it squandered so shamelessly. Where others make progress, I make excuses. I will and have pointed fingers at everything and everyone that can even vaguely be accused of sabotaging my progress, usually my parents. However, while everyone else may readily nod in agreement, I know I only have myself to blame for my inaction, and I don't know how to fix it, and that terrifies me. If I died tomorrow, I will have accomplished so little in my life, despite being so capable and holding such promise, and if there is any way to reflect upon your life after death, I will most certainly regret not having gone that extra mile.
Almost all of my regret comes from my inaction, and as a result, failing to live up to my own expectations. Love, though, is one area I never thought would be plagued by my chronic malaise. Which brings me to a very specific series of regrets which I think need to be chronicled. In the six months I spent out of my parents house, I learned a lot about myself. I made a lot of startling revelations, and a lot of compromises, some quite foolish. My relationship history can best be described as pathetic, in retrospect. I spent 3 solid years clinging to a girl that constantly doubted my love and who, in turn, I doubted. I went from that to a year long entanglement with someone who, for the first time in my life, really held me to some kind of higher expectation, and showed me what it would take to get there. I gave her my everything, quite literally. However, she had problems of her own, and despite my personal progress, nothing could be done to save our relationship. However, true to my starfish nature I hung on tight to every faint glimmer of hope and, when all else failed, fell back on the tried and true "we can still be friends" approach. Which probably would have worked had we not also chosen to be roommates, but I'll get back to that.
During the first half of my brief bid on freedom I met a woman whom I felt attracted to, the same way I meet most of the women in my life anymore. When we went out there was instant sexual chemistry, but my heart was dead in the water. She was too romantic, too driven by her desire to be married and have kids, and that kind of vision exceeded the scope of my goals in life. Regardless, the sparks between us could have lit a fire, and it did. This led to my first experience with casual sex outside of a relationship. I will not say it was a one night stand because it wasn't; we went out a few more times and while I certainly liked her and loved her in my own small way, it was not the sort of love that could be built into something stronger. That realization, for me, was strange. The idea that I could love someone passionately and yet not really be in love with them enough to pursue a long term relationship. We were two lonely people, friends, who trusted and cared for each other enough to share moments of passion, to feel a little less alone in an unfriendly world. However, regardless of how much sense it made, this compromise of my personal integrity (I had always loathed the idea of sex outside of a relationship before I actually had ever had sex) was not a regret; but it opened the door for one later.
It should be mentioned that during the previous year-long relationship we lived together through almost all of it, right from the first day. Which was fine at first, but was also part of the reason things fell apart. That said, once you've lived with a person and all personal boundaries have disappeared, it's hard to remind yourself that those boundaries are there again; more importantly, that person isn't necessarily inclined to give you consideration in their personal affairs. She had always shown me small tokens of affection and talked in possibilities after our relationship, which led me to the gross misconception that she was not seeing anyone else. So the first time she had a male friend over at our apartment and I was awoken to what I was almost positive was the sound of her orgasm I dismissed it as a figment of my imagination. However, when our other roommate walked in on them sucking face with her door open, my entire world came crashing down as the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. This would create a series of volatile situations wherein she would apologize for her inconsideration and then attack me for continuing to be upset longer than she felt I should be. Once was not enough, however, and on three separate occasions with three separate people I was given the same rude awakening; and every time she felt I needed to be less concerned with her pursuits and more focused on finding my own happiness.
Before all this, I had made plans to have a long-time friend and romantic interest from afar come visit me, so that I could hold her in my arms for the very first time. This visit had been a long time coming and had previously been very anticipated as we have long felt an attraction to one another but have always abstained from a long-distance relationship. We both have had bad experiences in that area and did not want to spoil the magic of actually meeting and falling in love with each other the right way.
After the third time hearing my ex-girlfriend make love in the adjacent room, however, something snapped in me, like a gear falling out of an over-wound watch, and I decided to make my own immediate happiness a priority. This pushed the forthcoming visit very far from my mind, as it was still some time away. The aforementioned friend and lover I had been with before entered back into the picture briefly and passionately, and perhaps, in retrospect, should have been the extent of my happiness seeking. However, I had invited a much more recent friend, who lived a half hour away, to come and visit as well. Her relationship failing, she needed a genuine friend, and I felt up to the task, but was totally unprepared for what came of it. I had once again fallen into the passionate embrace of a girl outside of a relationship, only this one was not to end as well as the first. Unlike the first one she had little life experience, being a few years my junior as opposed to my senior, and this led to certain.. misconceptions about the nature of our entanglement.
This all happened a month or so prior to the aforementioned long-time friend's previously anticipated visit, which I had all but forgotten in the hostile environment that was my apartment. She came to visit in-between visits from the younger friend, in what was to become the most horrible and guilt-ridden two weeks of my life. As was becoming the trend, I grossly underestimated my reaction to the old friend visiting. In the weeks leading up to her visit I had solidly convinced myself we were only friends, but the moment my arms closed around her, a half a decade worth of wishful thinking and painful longing came rushing to the forefront of my mind, and I felt more at peace that I had felt in some time. That was the whole original goal of this visit, to finally bridge that gap, to feel her touch, to fall in love with her the right way; and I did. Those four days saw a happier and more passionate me than had ever been seen, despite my rampaging house-mate. I was very sad to let her go, to see her get back into her car and drive home, but a much more pressing problem was in the front of my mind, as I now had a decision to make.
When the younger friend left, I had told her she could return the weekend after the family reunion to which she was headed, which was only three days after the long-time friend had left. Trouble with that being I had not even considered falling head over heels for the friend I had been wanting to fall head over heels for for a long time, and now I must tell the young friend that not only was I in love, but that I had slept with her.
Before I continue I feel it necessary to stress that I have, without question, loved every girl I have ever been with. I could not be intimate with someone I do not love on some level. However there is a very severe distinction in my mind between loving someone and being in love. Whereas I loved the younger friend, I was truly and honestly in love with the old friend. I feel my real failing here was that I did not give myself the proper time to really absorb what had happened with the old friend, to really let the concept of being in love sink in and cut off everything else. That failing allowed the young friend to grab hold of that single heart string before I could sever it.
My mistake was in letting the young friend come back at all, however. My stomach turned when I told her she could still come, even though she suspected what had happened. At the time I told myself it was not fair to her to deny her what I had already agreed to, especially considering it was her birthday. I loathed the idea of telling her what had happened, but I felt that she deserved the truth. So, despite her protests and not wanting to know, I told her. There was a lot of crying and hugging, and, in what was to become a very bad pattern, sex. That should have been a red flag, her having no issues with it despite my admissions, but, as I previously stated, something in me had been broken off, disconnected. In the back of my head somewhere there was the knowledge that I was fucking everything up horribly but the part of me that cared, my integrity, my decency, was cut off. The part that was in control was the survival instinct, the part that was concerned only with staying alive and happy, living moment to moment.
I would not immediately confess this two-fold almost infidelity to the old friend for some time. In my head, it wasn't infidelity; I was not in a mutually exclusive relationship with anyone yet, after all. There was, however, a deep sense of wrongness about it all that was never very far from my mind, yet never close enough to make an impact on my decisions. Yet when I did confess it I promised sincerely to not let it happen again, only to eat my own words later. The young friend visited once or twice a month, much to the chagrin of the old friend who lived much further away and was in college and could not afford such frequent visits. I certainly wish she could have. As much as I continually told myself and the old friend that things would stop, as much as I wanted them to, I found out the hard way that I am very easily swayed by those who already have so much as a single heart string in their grasp, as she had. In truth this infidelity, as it now was, having lied to the old friend, troubled me much, and I stepped up the stakes when I went to visit her at school by officially professing my love for her and making her my girlfriend. Surely, I thought, now having a girlfriend, I should be immune to any outside influence. You see, I felt that part of the problem was the younger friends willingness to continue relations in spite of my clear and present affection for the old friend, and I felt that perhaps seeing this official declaration might not only strengthen my resolve but push her away. A serious error in judgement.
Part of the reason everything went so badly was that I was determined to prove to myself that the young friend and I could just be friends, without the sex. I hated the idea of giving up the one friend I saw on a regular basis, but that, too, would have been the best decision.She came to visit once more after I went to visit the old friend, and for the majority of her visit I was thoroughly satisfied with my resolve. However, on the last night of her visit, a night she should not have even been here but was pressed into staying due to inclement weather, everything fell apart. There was crying and hugging and that led to the single most grievous mistake of my entire life. A mistake that never would have happened had I done the right thing from the get go.
Some people won't blame me for what happened, considering the circumstances. I loved two women, that was a first for me, and I was in completely unexplored territory in pretty much every aspect. However, I blame myself entirely, as, despite whatever excuses or circumstances there are, I could have, indeed, should have made better choices. Instead I became everything I have ever mocked and hated about my gender, everything I have ever stood against; and in so doing I not only almost lost the woman I so deeply care for but I dealt a near fatal blow to the young friend as well. I loved her, and it was a love as such she had never known, and losing that was hard on her. Knowing that, however, is what made me sympathetic, and that is what led me to keep having her over as company. I had a deep-seated desire to make things right and all I ever did was make things more wrong.
The hardest part, though, was owning up to my infidelity. I did not know how to even approach the subject, I knew exactly how painful and terrible it would be. I hated myself for it, I could only imagine the pain it would cause her. In out long friendship I had never done anything to hurt her, I had been her safe haven always. However, while I could not find a way to admit it, I was not very good at hiding my secret and I could not deny it when she finally suspected. Such pain I have never known in all my life and I never wish to know it again. I had never seen her angry, nor had I ever made her sad, and now she was more filled with both emotions that she had ever been before. Her accusations stung and her words were laced with venom, but I could not protest. She was right to be hurt, and she was right to inflict it upon me. I had done nothing in her defense, I had behaved with depravity and wounded her deeply, the very least I could do was endure, so that she didn't suffer alone. It drove me to the point of madness, truthfully, when conversations would get quiet and she would make a horrible inquiry or accusation specifically designed to twist the knife I had driven into myself.
In spite of her pain and perhaps in the face of better judgement, though, she would not give up on me. Perhaps the one thing I did right, admitting responsibility and sharing the burden of her pain in order to finally do right by her, was what made it possible. There are times I still don't feel like I deserve it, but mostly I am just grateful. Grateful to have survived, grateful I can still make her smile, and most of all, grateful I did not lose one of my oldest and, indeed, my dearest friend.
In summation, I have few regrets, but they are very big ones. I regret not living up to my full potential as an evil genius. I regret that my better judgement did not survive or prevail in the face of so much adversity. I regret that I hurt so many people close to my heart, and that I could not do right by everyone I have wronged. Despite having saved my friendship and relationship with my oldest and dearest friend, I had to break the heart of someone who did not deserve it; indeed, I had to leave her to fend for herself as though I had never truly cared about her, even though it was my caring for her that led to this terrible conclusion. I only hope that these regrets, in time, are overshadowed and forgotten. I hope that those I have hurt find forgiveness possible and find true happiness in the process. Most of all, I hope I can learn to forgive myself for the mistakes that I have made, for I hold myself to a much higher standard than anyone else and am, undeniably, my own worst enemy.
