"Them"

From the first moment we were physically near one another, it was like I had found that thing to fill the empty space beside me-a space I didn't even realize was there. Standing near him, barely minutes after we met, walking by his side, had the comfort of a deep hug. I quickly fell into sublimely comforting love.

He suffers from paranoia. I think he realizes this to a degree, but not enough to really do anything about it. To expect someone who thinks everyone around him is messed up and out to get him, to look that deeply inside and be able to see that they are really the one who needs help, is probably asking too much. But he has this heart. This sweet, tender, so giving heart, and an innocent, child-like quality that just wounds me in it's sincerity. But there is everything else. Between his alcoholism, paranoia and extreme (bizarre) defensiveness over the most unexpected things (he once told me he was more grown up than me because he lived in a house with a dog, and I only lived in an apartment with a cat), I felt sometimes like I was barely holding onto my own mind. And I could feel myself growing ever smaller as a person.

The last time I saw him he told me he didn't trust me. Basically that he thought I would turn on him and try to harm him in some way. He didn't want me in his house anymore when he wasn't there and one day he changed the locks on his doors. I can't say more about the last conversation we had that day, because it would be betraying a trust and there are a few lines I won't cross. I just know that with all the insanity up until that moment, that he finally did something I could not live with; he didn't trust me. I became one of "them" to him. Someone out to get him. And it was like in one of those movies (I think I've used this analogy before) where someone is standing and the camera shot pushes the back wall so far back that you can't reach it anymore, even though no one moved. And that's what happened in the car that day as we rode back to his house and I got in my car and drove away. Two feet away from each other, we couldn't even touch.

I texted him tonight because I have something at his house I need to get, and because deep down (not deep enough yet) I still crave any opportunity for contact. And so I asked him if he would be home Saturday so I could get my thing and he said he didn't know, but would leave the key. He would leave the key. "Why?" I asked. "Why now?", even though I think I already understood. "Just do it, okay", he wrote back. And because I believe there was so much more that he wanted to say but couldn't, when I closed the text I cried.