You've left me to clean up your mess so many times I've lost count. Most people would show appreciation, but you're not like most people. You've never depended on anyone but yourself and you're too proud to give the appearance of starting to now. If I were to confront you about it, you'd try to shrug it off and tell me that you never asked me to. You may not say it with words, but your eyes would. It's true, you never did, and you never will.
Even so I wish you could just understand why I can't pretend not to care and leave the broken pieces lying there on the ground. That it doesn't hurt when I step over them, because I love you too much to watch you lie in the bed you make. I'll admit that when it comes to all these feelings I try to push back down deep inside of me I have nobody to blame but myself, because you never asked me to love you, either. But I do, and I will.
When we started this business, we were filled with hope. You felt as if you might be able to atone for some of the guilt by helping others with your science, or at least distract yourself with it. I thought that with enough time I might be able to help you heal. That was my job as a psychologist; as a friend, right? Neither one of us was naive, but we needed to believe, and chose to blind ourselves from reality. And here we are now, eight years later, not that much better off for it all.
This time you've left me too weary to fight back and I need distance. Our office is on the top floor, but adjacent to the law office below us there's an extra room we rent out that I've visited many times before. I make my way down, flip on the switch, and squint as florescent lighting washes over it. It revives my memories. To anyone else, it looks like a normal conference room with a table and chairs. Only you and I know that the table a relic left over from when we first opened up shop in a tiny, two-room office downtown.
I let my mind wander for a moment on the chairs and where they came from. I don't remember, but it doesn't matter; only the table does. We didn't know then that it would come between our marriages, draw a line between us, and cause us to keep our distance. That in our own separate ways, we would each pay the price. No, we didn't know any of that when we made love on this table that night so many years ago.