passion...schmassion

Day 10112: Dear Uncle…

I wish I could not hate you. I wish I could do something that causes you the same amount of pain and grief that you’ve caused my family over the past few months. I wish I could rewind the clock a few years past and make sure that you never reentered our lives, and what was past was past and that you would never influence our future the way you did. I wish I saw past the smiley, toothy exterior and saw the empty shell of a man beneath the well-dressed-well-mannered façade.

You are a fraud. I wish I never met you.

You swore up and down to my family that you would never hurt us, that you only had our best interests at heart and that you only wanted to love and be loved. You pretended hurt and anger when the family questioned your values and past. We stood by you, supported you and fought for you. We were prepared to defend you to the point of alienating our family, and, we did alienate the family - remember the fights and the rifts that took months to heal. But we were strong and we weathered through it and patched things up ourselves – no thanks to you.

We believed in you even when no one else did. When everyone said to look at your past and that a man’s character lies in his history, we pushed back and said that people could change, and that you were just a victim of circumstance. You deserved a chance at happiness just as much as my mom deserved a chance at happiness. Little did we know that you were circumstance and we were your victims.

We were blinded to you. The missed Christmas mornings because you were too proud to share them with the family – the missed family get-togethers because you THOUGHT the family didn’t accept you for who you were. But do you blame them when you’ve lied to us all along? They were the ones who saw the truth and you wanted to limit exposure to them in case they saw more of the real you.

I’ve never believed that people have one grand purpose in life. Rather, our purpose lies in the people we meet and the people we impact. Positively or negatively, our decisions and actions influence those around us – our families, our friends, our casual acquaintances. I like to think that all the things I’ve imparted on the people around me were positive experiences and that no one has suffered unduly because of a decision that I have made purely out of selfishness… because it makes ME happy, or because it’s MY life, and there’s nothing anyone else can do about it.

There are experiences and people that we treasure throughout our lives. There are good experiences and then there are the experiences that quite frankly, we could have done without. All we can do is learn from them and hope that a similar situation will never occur again and how to deal with it should we be unlucky enough to cross that path.

You can brush this off as angry ramblings of someone without as much life-experience as you. Or you can take to heart what I’ve said. My point is not about love and marriage because I don’t believe that exists anymore. I’ve grown up and lost my girlish idealistic view of the world and see it for the cruel harshness it really is and that people just go around taking what they want and never really giving anything back. The point I make is one of human decency and respect for your fellow beings. In doing what you did, you’ve shown us how little you respect us, and how little you care. You’ve shown how selfish you are and that you can take a freely given love, twist it beyond recognition and throw it back into someone’s face. I no longer have any respect for you whatsoever. You’ve used us and lied to us, made us believe in something that didn’t exist.

The next time you promise someone happy ever after, security, love and respect, think it a hundred times through and then a hundred times more. It’s your choice what you do with your life. It’s not too late to change your ways and find yourself happiness. No matter how much I would love to see you when you’re seventy, alone, probably drunk and miserable because you’ve alienated everyone who has ever loved you; because you’ve never taken the time or the energy to form something lasting and because you never saw a good thing when it stared you in the face. No matter how much I would love to see you fail at everything you do. I wouldn’t and I couldn’t wish that on anyone – not even you.

Instead, I wish you the best and hope you find what you’re looking for. And when you find her I hope she’s smart enough to see you for what you are and that maybe, just maybe, you might deserve another chance and she doesn’t break your heart and spit it back in your face. Karma. What goes around, comes around.