you & i

twenty-five » retrograde motion

dear infinity,

i'm still hurt. do you know how heartbreaking it is to know that your own girlfriend cheated on you even though—no, in spite of the love you have professed and shared for close to a year now? in spite of everything you've done for her? in spite of the secrets you've shared and the tears you've said and the times you have held her as she cried until her tear ducts dried and spilled her heart out because she just couldn't hold in the pain anymore? forgive me, finn, but i just don't understand how you could throw that all away.

and the tragic thing is that i still don't want to throw us away. no matter how much pain you've put me through, i just can't let go of what we had—of what we could still have. but i can't trust you anymore, so i don't know how we would salvage our relationship. that is, if it can be salvaged.

i know a negative plus a negative will never equal a positive. all the number would become is even more negative than it had been before, moving farther away from the desired solution as time continued on. so we could never work that way.

before... well, before you betrayed me and broke my heart, i might have viewed us as a positive and a negative. there was always that possibility that perhaps the positive would outweigh the negative, and we would end up being something good together. not as good as i thought you were, of course, but something good anyway. well...maybe something just as good as you seemed to be, but only because i used to think of you as a positive infinity. no matter how negative i might have been, you would always get rid of that.

if only i had known that you never were. clearly, your positive infiniteness was not a law to hold above all else but an initial condition i only gave myself. i hadn't realized that it had been true for only a problem. once i'd worked that out and moved on to the next, i was too blinded by my love to see that the given conditions had changed—that we had changed—and thus i worked through our entire set of problems, misinformed and disillusioned. no wonder none of the solutions i came up with actually solved anything.

you might be wondering about a positive plus a positive, but i have never considered the possibility of the both of us being positive numbers separately. i'm sorry, but it has never crossed my mind that i could have been a positive aspect in this whole relationship. i always thought that you would be the best part about it. ironic that you are the one driving us apart.

maybe i shouldn't blame this on you. but i don't know what i've done wrong. i've been putting all of my effort into keeping our relationship alive; i've focused all my energy into making sure we were still us, together, happy. (remember when those used to be synonymous? oh, finn, what have you done to the both of us?) i've put my heart and my soul into you and me, but you decided that i didn't need to be a part of our equation anymore.

and though i've said it before, i'll say it again. it hurts. it hurts, finn. it hurts that after all the love i gave you, you felt like you needed more. it hurts that after all faith i put into you, you broke it because you weren't satisfied. it hurts so, so much that after all the secrets i've dutifully guarded for you, you still decided it wasn't enough. and i didn't even dare to breathe a word about your abortion, not even to myself.

but all of my efforts don't matter to you anyway, so why should i still bother with trying? it actually stings a little that you went so far with someone else, to the point of getting pregnant. you know, i'd believed that i was your first. i suppose i should have known because you were far too skilled for that, but something in me believed that you were still pure of this world. maybe that's why i thought you were so positive.

but how could you possibly have been so positive with so much negative baggage? you almost had a baby! how could you have stayed as young and naive as i had painted your portrait when you were faced with the realm of motherhood? how blind was i, to think that you were as untainted as a rose bud, free from the troubles of this world. how stupid was i, to believe that you were perfect though nothing else was.

now i wish i had never met you, honestly. now i wish i had never seen you as an angel, standing in front of that moment of transcendence. now i wish i had never been fooled into thinking that we could transcend beyond a mere moment. now i wish i had never even dreamed of falling in love.

sincerely,
beyond