Closure is pretty damn healthy and useful, if you can get it. Understanding another person’s perspective regarding a conflict, particularly if it ended the relationship, makes letting go and moving on easier. No mystery to solve, no excuse to analyze or pine for different circumstances, one less bell to answer, one less egg to fry, pass the ice cream.
When closure remains as elusive as that third date that never gets scheduled, or the broke friend’s turn to pick up the tab, there’s a risk of fixation. The brain has a puzzle to solve, and the heart cares a little too much about the answer. So unoccupied resources are siphoned off into the black hole of Why Does My Former Best Friend Hate Me or Why Did You Act Like You Cared About Me If I Was Just A Piece of Ass, until an overly complicated but somehow easier to accept answer is built. The real answer is something simple and irritating: because you’re prettier, or my personal favorite, because I make poor decisions that devalue your worth as a human being when I’m drunk and horny.
What our beautiful crazy brains invent to fill in that gap rivals Einstein and his theory of relativity. In the absence of concrete data, we mentally calculate the square root of a backhanded compliment, multiplied by the exponent of that time I ran really late and screwed everything up, divided by the decimal equalvent of the times you looked foolish ratio. Until we’re up at four-thirty in the morning with a stiff drink, hunched over the figurative whiteboard with a green ink spot on our lips, exhausted, but on the very precipice of solving for x(butreallywhydontyoulovemeanymore).
The very sobering and logical argument that one is devoting precious time and energy to discovering the true motives of someone who cares so little about you that they can’t even tell you why they are wholly uninterested in whether you live or die on their way out the door can easily become further evidence that there is a big, complicated, mysterious answer to the equation. Surely, the coefficient of awkward comments can explain this unfathomable result…
Sometimes our hearts forget that the brain works a puzzle to occupy itself; there isn’t an epiphany to discover that explains the hurt away and makes everything understandable if not repairable. It doesn’t want to believe the simple truth, and so it invests heavily in the outcome of the brain’s aimless exercise. Sadly, some hearts have a harder time accepting that some people really just are thoughtless assholes, unable and unwilling to take responsibility for their contribution to conflict.
Or maybe it’s just me.
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