Happy Hollowdays Pt. 03

She sat her hot chocolate down on the table with a clack as she asked incredulously, "So, you were laid out on their lawn? In the cold?"

"And the snow."

She cringed, "Jill told me she and her husband were so happy to be together that they left you outside without so much as a... hot chocolate." She looked at her mug, "Jill's very embarrassed by that."

"I don't hold it against her. They had both been given their fondest wish, one that they held no hope of every receiving. Though if she checked to see if I was alright, she did a lousy job. I don't remember that. I vaguely remember their sailing inside. I was out there for quite a while yet."

"What? How long?"

"This will sound bad, but it really doesn't have anything to do with Jill. If you guys talk, you need to tell her I harbor no ill will. She had just gotten what she needed; it was a happy ending. I didn't get a happy ending, but I got what I needed, which was an ending."

The Swiss Miss's eyes darted following my phrasing, she got it, nodded, and I continued.

"My fiancé is still a fiancé, or rather is once more. They are planning a March wedding."

My Swiss Miss's face dropped. I explained a little more quickly, "I hadn't let go of Brenda, I couldn't. I had a good reason: I loved her. I knew she wasn't coming back. She left before I got home one night. I went out to get the three of us dinner. I left as one of the happiest men in the world. Before I even got back that happy world was gone. It happened so fast I didn't understand it was gone. I returned to here, but it was empty just like it has been since. My best friend and fiancé had made love while I was away. Apparently, they had felt a mutual attraction for some time. They finally gave into it and just that fast they knew they were meant to be with each other, so they left unable to face me panicked by their actions. Brenda didn't even take her things. I thought they had run out on an errand. Finally, I called my best friend's house. Amazingly he was there. In essence he informed me that he was now my ex-friend as he was now my former fiancé's lover."

My guest's eyes were huge, searing holes in me with her intense astonishment.

I stopped talking for a while. This was draining. It wasn't as bad as it once was. I was over the hump, but damn I wanted that life, and damn I had loved that girl. Hell, I even missed Andy if you want complete honesty. Actually, you want complete honesty? Yeah, I miss my friend and my girl, though nowhere near enough to ever want to lay eyes on them again. How's that for honesty?

Swiss Miss moved closer to me. Her eyes were so large and more than a little moist. Sympathy danced with incredulity as she verified, "So, you were... engaged. And she left you. Then after all that you helped my friend, Jill, and got punched."

Putting it in so few words made me feel particularly silly. "Yes, I was feeling lonely after my girl left me for my best friend. It still ticks me off that she never spoke to me again. Never even said goodbye. Andy, her fiancé and my former best friend said she's too mortified to speak to me, probably ever again."

"Wh-What?!" She spat, "S-She wouldn't speak... to you. That little... that only helps her. She had to help you land as easily as she could after wrecking everything, after stealing your dreams. Didn't she think of your feelings at all? Didn't she..." Swiss Miss stopped cold fearing she had just gutted me. There was an odd ring to her words like she was coming to a greater understanding of something she thought she knew, like reading a good book for the second time.

"I was devastated. I admit it was ten times worse that Brenda didn't apologize, and especially that she wouldn't even talk to me. I have some anger over the reasoning I was given, that she couldn't because it would be too traumatic for her. It was pretty damn traumatic for me too, and it was her actions that caused our trauma, not mine. She owed it to me to talk to me. Explaining that to me even made my former friend Andy cringe.

"As upset as I am at the events, I am a sucker for love. I can see that part, if not excuse it. Their treatment of me after they fell for each other is another matter entirely. There is another person in the furball that I have changed my entire opinion of, however. Andy's mother, Rita, is a trained counselor, she talked to them trying to find a way for them to make it up to me. Except she decided that Brenda would make her son happy and from there I doubt she ever raised the notion of Brenda coming back to me.

"Brenda and Andy were star-crossed kids. They purposefully set out to find a trained adult they could trust. Turns out Andy could trust his mom to look out for him, she just can't be trusted to do the right thing. I was toast the second they went to her. Rita had confided in me numerous times how she wished her son could find a girl just like Brenda. Rita was the adult in the room. I have been able to think of a half dozen ways to proceed, not all of them got me my Brenda back, but all of them were better than rushing her out of my life and into Andy's. In fact, I can't find a single course I would call ethical that did that.

"Damn it, Rita was the trained professional! She stood right in that room while I explained it to her. As much turmoil as I was in and I could still think it through, I will never be convinced she didn't see a prize for her son and thereby for her. She stole what didn't belong to her, even though the pursuit was unethical. It should have taken months or weeks to settle out not a twenty-minute conversation with Andy's mother! A conversation I was excluded from. She made sure I never had a say. Rita knew the score before she left my apartment, I made damn sure she knew.

"The cherry on top is that even procuring Brenda for her son she still she never used her counseling skills to have my ex help me. I never heard from Rita again either. I think she didn't want to fill Brenda's head with conflict over me so as to clear the path between Brenda and her son. Rita wanted her son happy. The way to achieve that also happened to crush me, oh well too bad for me. Rita knows I am aware she thought through that equation. And she's going to get away with it because I'm done with them, I will not pursue them. That does stick in my side. It would be so easy to have her counseling credential torn up over this, but I don't want to dwell on them any longer. That saving me also saves Rita galls me, alas you have to let it go at some point."

The Swiss Miss was looking at me distraught. There was also something hidden there, something she wasn't sharing. I figured some part resonated with her own story. Hopefully she would come to trust me.

Swiss Miss made a point of looking at her hand drawing my attention to it. She made a point of resting it atop mine. It appeared she was drawing a stark contrast with what I said earlier about Jill never taking my hand in a gesture of more than comfort.

With doe eyes she said, "I do NOT want to anger you, Tim. I do NOT want to presume. I do want to take some of this angst and pain away from you. I don't know if it would be better, but I can see where it's possible that Brenda does feel so bad about what she did, and then her subsequent desire to stay with Andy, that she truly can't face you. I-I'm not saying she shouldn't, I agree with you that she owed it to you. But if Andy and his mother, who I agree sounds like a collaborating scoundrel, have sheltered her from the consequences, then she may not know how devastated you were. If she had known, perhaps she could have gotten past her shame to finally do something right by you. I am not telling you that you are wrong, I'm trying to find a scenario for you where you aren't so wounded. If Rita was doing the best job she could to keep Brenda with her son, even if that meant she stepped on you, I can see where she would withhold information from Brenda too."

I thought about it. It was plausible. I just didn't see why I should let Brenda off the hook a bit without absolute proof. My current verdict was based on her actions, she deserved the way I thought of her. "Perhaps Brenda is abashed. Andy was and faced me. Dammit, a man's wife is supposed to be more loyal than his best friend! How did I end up with two such winning personalities for my closest allies?"

Swiss Miss was teary eyed, "I'm sorry that happened to you Tim. I really am."

I calmed down a bit, "Anyway, for the holidays it worked out that my parents had a trip booked and my sister expected her beau to propose, so my family is out of town. No one realized I was going to be alone. After they left, of all things, I received a Christmas card / wedding invitation from the happy couple."

"No!"

"Yep. In all this time I have only received two notes from them. I could tell it was Andy who wrote it and signed it for both of them. In short, he apologized again. He said, well, it was supposed to be from Brenda too, how she was so sorry and just couldn't face me, or speak to me, or be seen by me, or manage to give a rat's fanny about me. Or do anything even remotely helpful for me, like anything that could give me the tiniest amount of closure. The letter said, in as many words, they were guilty about causing me so much pain, and they were embarrassed they were so happy when they knew it made me so miserable.

"I don't have any idea what they were supposed to do, but somehow admitting you caused a person pain and benefit from it, and then doing nothing to fix it, seems worse than being selfishly unaware.

"I eventually got so lonely I called an escort service. It's completely out of character for me. But pardon the pun there, I decided to do something I had never done and hoped that would break my malaise. On the menu of cardinal delights the words "anal specialist" stood out. As we have already alluded, it felt like I was the one taking it in the shorts. I thought it might be cathartic to try some time on the other side, so to speak. Lo and behold, I found a woman for whom being an escort was as completely out of character as my employing one."

I couldn't help but smile. She looked at me in wonderment puzzling how I could be amused. "Hey, you can only get kicked for so long, then it gets funny, or you kick back."

She looked at me like I had just given her good news. Jill was right, Swiss Miss was in the same shape Jill and I had been when we met.

"My escort was Jill and I just relayed how our time went. Although from a feelings standpoint I couldn't tell you if that was a week ago or last night. I can tell you I feel better than I did before meeting Jill. I am happy for her. I am not as crushed as I once felt, nor quite as numb. I do still feel pretty lonely and here we are. Unlike others though, I am willing to do what it takes to bring about the "right outcome" regardless of whether that outcome is for me."

Swiss Miss nodded appreciatively. I saw the cringe. I preempted her, I couldn't let her stew in awkwardness. "You want to ask me something. You just don't want to cause me any pain."

Her mouth opened just a bit in one of those "you just read my mind" sort of mannerisms. Her voice was small, though I'm not sure if due to the subject matter being hurtful to her, or her hoping to minimize any negative impact on me.

She finally gave a knowing smirk, which I believe was connected to my reading her mind, then became pensively resolute, "Tim, which felt worse, losing your fiancé or getting so lonely you finally called for someone to help you?" She shook her head trying to figure out how to phrase the next part. "How did it feel to end up helping the person you called to give you sustenance while you received none yourself? And Tim, how did you make it through Jill receiving what you needed, only to be battered and abandoned once again?"

She held her hands up unconsciously trying to reach out for some answer, then letting them drop empty in her lap when she found nothing to grasp, "I have to think after losing the love of your life it might feel great helping someone else regain the love of their life." She breathed heavily; the notion she was about to express carried great weight for her. "Though it seems helping someone else get what you were desperately praying for, while denied that mercy yourself, would make the loss you were suffering so much more intense."

Her face scrunched up as she spoke. I thought the trouble might be two-fold. The awkwardness of the question for me, coupled with her own intense desire to discover the answer.

Her hand came up facing its palm to me, "Wait, Tim, that isn't exactly what I want to know." Her eyes filled with tears. "H-How did you do it? I mean it, how could you muster the strength? How could you get out of bed, finally work up the energy to try to move forward after being crushed, only to have the salvation you wanted given to someone else -- paid for by your own efforts? When you realized after all your efforts someone else was receiving the gift and you weren't, how did you muster the strength to not only be ground under heel by the news, but to work for that other person's benefit when it consigned you to the depths? H-How did you survive?"

I sipped my hot chocolate taking a bit of time, "That's several questions," I playfully smirked, elicited wide eyed astonishment from my guest. "Let me try to get them all. First, it was worse losing the love of my life. Helping someone else regain their love would be an absolute blessing, if I wasn't hoping for that blessing myself. So, it has to take a back seat to the first as a matter of precedent. What drove me to meet Jill was having the ember of my hope stomped on and smashed by that damn Christmas Card and wedding invitation.

"You see that card told me not only was Brenda not coming back, that she wasn't just moving on; but that she had moved on. She was still getting married, just to someone else. That wasn't the scenario I wanted or needed. I was hoping for the holidays there would be a knock on the door, I would open it to find Brenda begging I could forgive her. Her wedding invitation was the Christmas gift from hell, tearing the image of that dream beyond recognizable shreds.

"I couldn't look at it. I couldn't face it. Dammit, I still loved her! I still wanted her to love me. That was NOT going to happen. Not only was she not going to see me to beg I take her back; she no longer thought about asking forgiveness, she had already moved past the notion of saying goodbye. But I was still waiting on that. I NEEDED that! I dreaded it, but I NEEDED it! I was waiting on her visit so I could move on, I had been waiting for months. Now that damn Christmas card was telling me exactly how little I meant to her in contrast to how much she meant to me. She was NEVER going to come; she had no intention of trying to put things right in any measure. I was still waiting on a final chapter with her, because for me she was the most important book in our library. In contrast I was only a playbill to her, one that she absent-mindedly left on the bus when she was in a hurry, because I merited no more care than that.

"And that IS the truth of it. For Brenda, her decision to go with Andy far outweighed her decision to leave me. It may have caused her great pain, but she decided to deal with me by not dealing with me, and she succeeded. At this point Andy feels worse about me than Brenda does. That boggles me. Both my "wife" and my best friend betrayed me, but it was my best friend that had, and has, more loyalty to me. That doesn't seem right to me, it truly is a "hard" fact for me."

The Swiss Miss was terribly conflicted. Once again, I had the notion that she knew something or wanted to say something but didn't know how to express it. She finally said something, just not exactly what she wanted, "Oh, Tim I can see just how you feel that way. Yet as a woman I can see how Brenda would be crushed. No, I'm not taking her side. Frankly, she did have to face you; she absolutely HAD to. But that she didn't doesn't mean she didn't care; please believe me, it may mean she cared deeply. Think about your own assessment of Rita. If Rita saw how much Brenda cared for you, she would have done most anything to keep the two of you apart if she wanted Brenda for her son."

I tried to answer the Swiss Miss's concern a different way, "Letting Brenda go, which was as painful as her leaving me, let me see that I was still trying to protect her. I saw her a certain way. I was in love with that ... image and was still protecting it. Seeing her for what she was felt like I was being disloyal to her. Crazy I know. Especially as what I loved probably never existed. I think that's why I felt and feel so hollow right now. Forget Rita, if Brenda cared for me as much as I believed, nothing could have kept her away. Instead, she found excuses to not even try. There's a world of difference, no matter where you place the blame.

"Seeing her for what she may actually be is its own separate problem, though no longer mine." I shook my head my lips drawing into a wry rueful line, "You know, at the end of my time giving up on my love, knowing now that Brenda had the capacity to do this, I actually prayed that she never does it to Andy."

I had to stop there. I was at my duration and had to regroup. When I glanced at Swiss Miss her mouth was hanging open in astonishment. I reached over, and with bended finger lifted her chin, closing her mouth. I resisted the old joke about flies letting in. I'm not sure she realized I touched her, though she absent-mindedly began rubbing the spot, and not in a bad "yech" sort of way. To me she felt warm, almost too warm. She felt like a woman, and to enjoy touching a woman was an amazingly human thing for a man who was so damn numb.

Lost in thought Swiss Miss wasn't going to start the conversation again, so I continued my explanation "As to helping Jill; I have no heartburn about helping her whatsoever. I faced that I had somehow called down the lightning bolt I needed from heaven... and it had gone to Jill. She won the billion to one lottery, I didn't. I was still dancing alone. I might have wanted that fairy tale ending of getting my love back, but Brenda didn't. I had the Christmas card to prove it. Knowing that, is what led me to call your agency. I knew I was not going to have the happy ending before I chose Jill, before I met Jill, and before I realized there may be a chance to help Jill.

"There's no comparison between losing Brenda and helping Jill. But that stark relief thing you mentioned was overwhelming, not because Jill got my miracle, rather seeing someone else move on I knew I had to do the one thing I wanted least -- give up on our love, well, my love of Brenda. It was the only choice I was given. There was no intersection, there was no fork in the road, no other direction available. I had to let Brenda go. It was just a real kick in the teeth seeing someone else move on happily, though that was what it took to make me know I had to move on unhappily. I finally had to look right at the fact that... Brenda didn't want me."

Tears rolled down my guests' cheeks though she kept her composure. "Was it right here, Tim? Right in this room?" She was impassioned looking around, like the place was now some sort of shrine to unrequited love.

"No, laying out on Jill's front yard."

"Whaaat?!"

"That's why I found it odd Jill told you she checked on me and said I was alright. I'm sure she and Gary were very busy together, but I was probably laying out there for the better part of an hour."

"Good God!"

"Crying my eyes out like a little baby too. It would have been pretty tough if she had come back out and caught me, you know?"

She stared at me; this reaction was mixed too. Part of her was a deep well of molten sympathy, and part of her was looking at me like I was a moron for the fit of pride of wanting to hide away my wounded condition. I'm young but have found we rarely have the luxury of feeling or getting to deal with only one emotion at a time. I had a lot of pride destroyed in my heartache, it's like every sensibility and belief I had was under assault. It was; because every sensibility and belief that comprised me had been discarded by the person I loved.