Life Musings

Here's an excerpt from an e-mail which I sent to a friend recently. It has been edited for content.

Last year, I met a gal that I thought I'd wind up marrying. She was a 37-year-old woman from PA who was severely disabled and had never been married. In fact, the vast majority of men were scared away by her multiple disabilities--lupus, osteoporosis, siezures, a twisted spine and a whole lot more. We clicked, we became best friends, and we started talking everyday on the phone, for an hour or more. With all her disabilities, that took some effort for her.

I fell for her, hard, despite her numerous disabilities. She acknowledged that we were a good match on paper, and we even started talking about marriage. Like me, she's never really known romance before, and this seemed like a fairy-tale match made in heaven.

She refused to commit to anything, though. She said that she could find no fault in me, but just wasn't ready and didn't understand why. Later, she confessed that she's been reluctant to form ties with people since so many of her friends abandoned her after they found her physical limitations to be too troublesome. I don't know if this is why she was so hesitant or not. Either way, that barrier remained, and so I chose to be patient.

Then I got laid off, and I knew that I might be forced to leave the country. I decided that I didn't want to leave without first finding out if there was a future for us. Even before then though, I could already sense increasing fear and hesitancy on her part.

So we spent a couple of weeks together,to see if there was a future for us. Well, to cut a long story short, midway through this period, she started claiming that she never had any romantic feelings toward me, and that she never wanted to be anything more than friends.

I was positively shocked, and confused. After all, we had been holding hands, rubbing noses, playing with each others' fingers and doing other cutesy stuff. We had been talking daily for long periods, and on two occasions, she said that she expected to have very pleasant dreams because she'd be thinking of me. We had even discussed the prospect of adopting children, on more than one occasion.

So, that left me feeling very confused, and hurting badly. I've healed a lot since then, but to be honest, I'm still hurting, and I still cry out for answers.

I'm thankful that things are getting better, and that I'm recovering from the hurt. I haven't heard from Terry in weeks, which is unfortunate. She stopped answering phone calls right after our blow-up -- out of shame, perhaps. I don't know. I am disappointed that she chose to walk away during the darkest and most painful period of my life, at a time when I was jobless, deeply troubled and hurting very badly. In retrospect, I guess it shows what kind of friend she really was.