We Might As Well Be Strangers...For All I know of You Now (Keane)

Listening to Keane for the last couple of days has underscored the experience of processing my grief over g's engagement. Somewhere, so many wheres, out in the world, many someones know what it is to lose someone. Not to death, but to the simple fact of their life moving on, away from you.

I understand the steps involved in processing such an event, and I am certain that one of those stages involves thinking, obsessively, over all the loose ends...all the ways in which the outcome one expected/hoped for, was horribly misjudged. Or, the ways in which the actual outcome violates every thing that happened prior to it.

When you lose someone, you lose the hope of having him. You lose the right to celebrate his birthday in any remarkable way, you lose the right to presume that you know him, and there is no remedy, because his allowing you to be appointed such a place of familiarity and importance is both the cure and the impossibility.

In Prince's Song "If I Was Your Girlfriend," he asks "would you run to me if somebody hurt you, even if that somebody was me?" The one person into whose arms I wish I could fling myself and to whom I wish I could sob out this story, is him; but by virtue of having lost the right to presume to even know him, I certainly have no right to presume such an intimacy as that. And I wouldn't ever presume it.

When the woman with whom a man wants to spend the rest of his life enters his landscape, lesser women (his friends) must defer to that relationship. It is a matter of honour and personal dignity. Ever observant of decorum, I would be the last person to violate this unspoken agreement. But I did know him. I did pray for him. I did yearn for him to the point of absolute pain. I don't want any glory for those things. They came naturally to me; indeed, no part of it was anything but a joy. I seemed to be born to care for him so wholly, so doggedly, and with more insight than I have loved most others.

Yet I remained unseen and unacknowledged. The very strength of my passion rendered me invisible to him. And among the many many things that I regret and grieve, it is that this love, so much bigger than myself, is swallowed up in another woman's hopes and dreams being brought to fruition, swiftly and decisively.

When I think about this, I ask myself: "Well, would you have him be unhappy?"

Of course, the answer is no. Focusing simply on his having his heart's desire, I can almost wish, actively, for him to be with her. These moments are my reprieve from the ache of the stone that presses into my heart. But would I have myself be utterly forgotten, completely cut off, the love that I bore him, which was larger, even, than my own life, stand for nothing?

It would seem so.