a letter from me to them

He expected her to change, he expected her to adapt to him. Which she had done. The changes he had gone through in the past have been enormous. And positive on the whole. He had survived, which is the best and only thing he could have done, and he did it. The problem comes from the fact that while she had been accepting all this in the face, standing up against it all, he had done nothing, made no attempt. There is a difference between what is being asked of him, and what he makes an effort to do. There is a difference between a mother buying flowers for her daughter because she knows her daughter is upset, and him buying flowers for her because he knows he did something wrong. Effort.

Something broke when he separated; there is no doubt about that. But things that are broken are and can be fixed. But what he may not realize, and probably doesn’t, is that when something breaks, it’s never identically repaired again. It’s never the same. What he has failed to realize is that it broke for a reason. A weak bridge cannot sustain its weight, so it folds, implodes, on itself. But the bridge isn’t rebuilt the same way, it’s reinforced, it’s made better. That’s how it works.

             And so he failed to realize this. He still fails to realize this. He broke something very strong. And it took a lot for him to do this. And she let it happen. She’s done fighting with people about whether or not it’s something that needed to be done. Though, she's still a proponent about living in the now, what is now versus what could happen. Things change, people change, every day. He thought that her friendship with him can return to what it was. No. That will never happen, because she doesn’t want that type of relationship anymore. Because there was something inherently wrong with it to begin with. That is why things break, and he needs to understand that it does not matter that he broke something, only that it did. He cannot keep acting the same way towards her and still get the same results. More importantly, and to take most of the heat, he changed her. Which means also that he cannot act and react towards her the same way he had in past and expect the same results for the present and the future. That’s how things grow: they change, they adapt, they evolve, and they are never the same again.
          What she needs for him to do is understand that every situation is different, every argument feels and looks different. That she reacts a different way every single time, so no matter how much he thinks he has a hold on something, her. It becomes a power thing, a control thing, between him and her. And letting go of that power is where she, herself, has faltered, because it’s like a fortune teller, it's like destiny. She knows what will happen and the only thing she can do is watch. What she tries to do is alter how the situation plays in real time. And perhaps that is something that she should stop doing. The less she tries to control, the more she ends up actually controlling. She has been burned. But only because she has done her own burning done first.