What My Little Eyes Saw (Part 1)

In relationships I had what I called “spares.”  Yes, just like the tires.  I kept them for backup, in the event something happened to the main tire.  It’s embarrassing to admit today but when I look at it now, it’s like I never intended to really invest.  I used sex and relationships as an escape but the irony in that is that I ran to what I ran from.  My parents was a part of that 10 percent.  Both were established business professionals with a great deal of notoriety.  We lived in an immaculate home and my siblings and I wanted for nothing.  We were envied by everyone because we always had the best of everything.  But inside our home was the strangest emptiness ever imagined.  It was a distant pleasantness that I know now to be a nonchalant unconcern.  Their relationship was over but they did what so many couples do, they existed under one roof while leading separate lives.  I didn’t know this at the time but they each vowed to stay while both secretly had lovers.

While my father remained attentive to our needs by providing everything imaginable that we could ask for, my mother seemed to be consistently distracted.  Her fog would happen after phone calls or visits away from home and would escalate to agitation when we asked the simplest question.  My life continued this way for 15 years, knowing that there was something wrong but not having a clue as to what it was.  The stares and the whispers became apparent as I got older and there were certain circles that we were a part of that just felt like freezers because the atmosphere was so cold.  When I put the pieces together in my early twenties I felt ill to know that we socialized and played with the kids of the men and women my parents had affairs with.  Evidently, that was the definition of “family friend.”

It was hard for me to understand my true feelings in relationships but I think that I loved one of my “spares.”  Although our relationship was true to form with all the ups and downs and unnecessary emotions that my parents had inflicted on to me, I think I came to love him or at least the thought of him.  See that’s the problem with what my little eyes saw.  I couldn’t distinguish what was real and what was make believe.  I wanted to be with him but not all the time but I didn’t want him to be with anyone else but I wasn’t quite ready for a commitment relationship but when he decided to marry someone else I stopped the wedding – it was just a mess.  I was just a mess.  I remember meeting and discussing the status of our relationship after he finally got married to someone else and emphatically saying that we could not be friends while driving to the hotel where we we spent the night just days after he said “I do” to someone else.  He told me it was a mistake and all the excitement and emotion encouraged me to accept him as he was because after all my parents had done it so it must not have been so bad.  For years we remained in constant contact, enduring both our marriages to other people and the birth of children.  We celebrated with one another and kept the torch burning strong until one day when it all came crashing down for everyone.

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