we were never friends

After socializing with me for about seven years, a guy said "We were never friends. we are just two people who met at a conference."

We were walking from the SF Costco up to Market St so I could catch a BART. I had asked him to walk me to BART because it was an unfamiliar neighborhood, a not well lit neighborhood and it was dark, late in a winter's evening. And I am female. Most females are leery of walking alone along dark, unfamiliar streets.

 As soon as he said the above, however, I told him he didn't need to walk me to BART. I said I was just fine on my own but he wouldn't leave.  I had really wanted him to hop on his bike, which he had walked alongside me, and just get away from me.  He refused to go and I didn't want to argue.  I did have a fleeting fantasy of stopping at one of the bars along the street we were one, bars that seemed dive-y to me, and asking a bouncer to let me in and not let the guy I was with in, to say the guy I was with had been bothering me. I didn't do that because I have never been comfortable going into bars, especially dive-y ones, in sketchy neighborhoods with bouncers at the door. Truth told, I don't know what kind of bars were along that street. I only glimpsed inside a couple of the as doors open, light spilled out in the dark street and a big bouncer-looking guy was always at the door.

That guy said many things that cut me over the years but it was telling me, after seven years, that we had never been friends, that we were no more than two people who met at a conference, that cut the most.

Well, there was also the time he said something else, a deeply negative characterization of me based on what could only have been his ignorance, a reference to something about my personhood. It was about an aspect of who I am that he had never talked to me about. When he uttered that insult, which I can't bring myself to type out, I asked him how he could know about that aspect of my past and he said he had done some internet research. In seven years, he had never talked to me about it.

Maybe he was right when he said we were never friends. Every friend I have ever had has talked to me about this aspect of my personality, the one this guy hurled at me in angrily abusive negative terms. He was always telling me that he never hurt me, that it was my responsibility to manage how I experienced his behavior.  I don't want to be as tough as one had to be to endure that guy's deeply unkind judgments about me.

 He was right. We were never friends. Friendship stays. Friends forgive.  This man could dish out unkindness but could not forgive it in me. he could be human, get angry, be verbally abusive but when I responded to his angry abuse with angry abuse, he shunned me.

When we got to Market Street, I again told him he could leave me. We were a few blocks from the closest BART and he insisted on walking me. Just as we approached the Civic Center BART, I said something about how hurt I was by his 'we were never friends' remark and he said, coldly it seemed to me, with no empathy and no lightness about him, "Then it looks like you have a choice to make."

 "Yeah, it does. I should choose to have nothing more to do with you but I can't."  Then I paused. He waited for me to finish what I was saying "I can't choose to have nothing to do with you because I have seen neon light rays dancing around your head like a halo, like magic. If I had never seen that, I would never speak to you again."

I don't know what his response to that was. He didn't say anything. It was dark. I was focussed on getting to the escalator to take me down to the subway. As soon as I stepped on the escalator, he hopped on his bike and was gone.

One of my great strengths, maybe my best gift, is I let things go.  If someone I consider a friend makes behavioral choices that hurt me, I might lash back while I am feeling the sting but I let things go. This guy seems incapable of letting go of others imperfections and unconscious of his own.

I can let things go.

 I have not yet found a way to accept the loss of someone with a white neon, pulsing light ray halo that wove through his hair.