i feel you.

It was a wasted spark of deja vu, hearing her just inside his door like that. She stood, barely across the threshold, begging for answers She, the opposite of me: tall and slender, well-raised and well off, convinced and naive. So sure that no one could be wrong but the other; a quality I frankly both envy, and want to slap right off any face I see it on.

I can't deny that there are two sides to every story. Three, in this case. His, mine, and hers.

And the most painful thing; the thing that kept me from standing up so so long ago. The cage that trapped the tiny fluttering "enough" in the back of my throat,  was built of the longe barbed prongs of my empathy.

Did you know that empathy will rob you blind? She is a good one to have on your side, that empathy. She's one of the people you need to know to really, truly be human. But if you are me, you will invite empathy to dinner, let her sit at your table, and she will be ravenous. I could not feed empathy enough, and so like the good, midwestern hostess, I fed her all I had, and starved.

That is why I have not been classy, on the blog. I have been this way because this is my place, this is the door empathy cannot break down. This is the place where I can commune with her and know that I must abide her, as she is thick in my blood, but here I have refused to be the better person, for the first time in nearly a year. Because I saw the other girl, and for all her visciousness I could not hate someone who stood in the same threshhold as me, with the same briny tide washing in and out of her eyes, taking away with it more and more of her resolve each time the tears abated. I could not hate the striking, angry girl who, after all, only had the same questions as I?

I could not begrudge that "why." So I followed her to the stairs, and I apologized. I cried, and told her I was sorry. I who had not knowingly committed any crime, was indicted by my empathy. The rest of the details are brutal, and mine. But I had to testify, that it was all my both-sides-of-the-storying that got me here.

My empathy for the both of them. For her, out of the aching knowledge that we are women, and we are fools. For him, out of a misguided love, that commanded I see, acknowledge, and fight his pain. Even if it leaves me jausting windmills.

I traded empathy for conviction, for self love. And for that, for a while, there was no room in my words for understanding, only for the rebuilding of fortitude, only for finding myself in the mirror at last, and not the negative space the filled the holes between all the qualities I didn't have.

I have been seeing myself, and I have acquired a feral hunger for my own strength. Angrily shooing those who might wish to partake. It will pass, of course. I will not be so demented with need, in time.

But until then, please forgive my need to be angry, to be right. To protect what is so newly mine.