"You rotted my soul," Joel Elliott typed at me, with all the piss and vinegar, anger and hatred he could possibly muster and squeeze into the tiny pixels between those words—words that landed and cracked like a backhand to the face in a silent room.
I don't know what I ever did to Joel Elliott to rot his soul. It certainly was no goal I ever had.
I only wanted to be happy. Like, good-to-the-last-drop happy. The kind of happy you can build a life on. The kind of life that when you sit, rocking in your rocking chair in the twilight of life, you are still satisfied with—even after all those years...
And it's not as though I wanted to hoard all of that happiness. When you love someone, you want that level of satisfaction for your loved one as much as you want it for yourself. And you want it for them even if it means that that sort of happiness isn't going to be found with you.
And I would know. I've done my share of leaving for just that reason. It is an unspeakably heartbreaking reason to leave someone. And those you leave behind rarely understand it. And those who come to understand often won't do so until they find what they were meant to find. And then, in that moment, it is suddenly clear: your vision, what you wanted for them and what you wanted for yourself.
And maybe they won’t ever admit it aloud, but in that same moment, they are utterly relieved that you made the decisions you made. That you didn’t settle. That you didn’t let them settle. They look back at what the two of you had together and they sigh in utter relief that they are not still in that gimp of a relationship, barely eking out 'satisfied'—let alone 'happiness' (a concept which had become a wistfully distant echo of a wish—a thing dreamt of once, but long since ceased to believe existed).
True and lasting Happiness does exist. And life with the right person is not simply matter of hard work, communication and perseverance. Of course, any combination of those things will be necessary at times in any relationship, but in the right relationship, their application is the exception, not the rule...
But I digress. I was talking about soul-rotting. Right.
So the day after Joel Elliott sent me his love-note, someone else from my past, Eric Kattan, sends me a picture of an admissions folder from Columbia University. Yes, the Columbia University. He had been accepted to a master's program there. "And," he said, "I owe it all to you..."
Whether or not it is strictly true that Eric Kattan owes his admittance to Columbia University to me is a matter of debate. After all, it was he (and not I) who accomplished all of the hard work. Eric not only completed his undergraduate degree while working full-time as a network administrator, but he did so in grand fashion—grand enough to earn him admission to one of the top universities in the world.
But in all cases, I do know this: what we leave behind us lives in the perceptions of those we left behind. And those perceptions are, for all intents and purposes, Reality and Truth. For in our absence, there is no-one to speak for our intentions—no-one to correct inaccuracies.
So in this Reality, Eric Kattan owes his acceptance to Columbia University to me, and I rotted Joel Elliott's soul.
Intent is immaterial.
Eric's kind thoughts did manage to somewhat soothe the sting of Joel's biting attack. And while I do not mean to imply that I deserve to only ever have kind thoughts conjured of me, I do mean to make clear that my intent has been good, even if, at times, misguided.
And so this is a wish, spoken aloud: may I leave more good than bad behind me. May the flowers of spring bloom in the wake of my footprints, and not the withering decay of fall.
Original post date: 4.9.2009
