Erosion

Fully recognizing that the Buddy System sucks, and having my eyes opened by my boss in regard to the Millstone two months ago, I untangled myself from a massively awful Buddy relationship and walked away from a guy I truly loved, who will never love me. (And it was disappointingly easy to get rid of him. I didn't respond to one email and two phone calls, and have never heard from or seen him since. Which only threw into sharp relief against the wall the writing, "He doesn't care about you and never did.")

The process of getting over him has been long and slow. I still don't feel able to love a man. I'm not interested in dating. And yet I have lost, in Leigh Ann's words, "That One Person" -- That One Person to spend free time with, to hang out with, to laugh with. That One Person who was my life's default companion. And everything, while much better for me without having to listen to all of his relationship problems and support him in his endless emotional crises, has been emptier. There's no one to harmonize with on the guitar. No one to sit on the porch with. No one to ride around in the car and listen to music with. No one to charge my empty hours with pleasant reminiscence and anticipation, and my full hours with chemistry and company. No one to converse with about the things we conversed on.

Enter Kevin.

Kevin lives downstairs. He is the ex of one of my good friends. When I first moved into the house, they were living together in the apartment below mine. Shortly afterward she asked him to move out, and thus began my friendship with her, and a long summer of her breaking up with him. I learned a lot about him in the process. A lot of unpleasant things, a history of emotional abuse and selfishness and anger, passed down to him from his father. So when my friend moved to another apartment, so that she could live in a place to which he had no keys and no access, and he moved back in because they had had a joint lease, I already hated him and was fully prepared to maintain a hostile course of interaction.

He helped a lot. We had one conversation when he first moved back in wherein he was extremely manipulative, trying to get me to talk about her, and then angry and rude when I wouldn't be manipulated. He asked nastily if he should even say hi to me when he saw me in the future; I replied that if he didn't feel moved, it wouldn't bother me. And that was the only conversation we had for a year.

Until this summer, the Summer of Job Loss, Friend Loss and Despair, when I spend inordinate amounts of my unemployed time on the porch. My door opens onto the same porch as his. As he lectures at a nearby university and has summers off, I saw a lot of him. We began to chat, cautiously, and then comfortably. He never brought up my friend in conversation -- not ever. And so we got to know each other.

He's been fascinated by me for a long time. My friend warned me to anticipate that he would. "You're nothing like me," she said, "You aren't as susceptible to his crap. That's going to drive him crazy."

So I became aware, toward the end of the summer, that he was, at least a little bit, "into me." There was a certain expression on his face, a certain intensity in his eye contact, a certain cant to his body angle when he sat down in one of the patio chairs to talk to me. He asked me once to go to dinner, and once to go to the beach. I had valid enough excuses to refuse him politely both times. I enjoyed his conversation, and felt like a traitor for it, but was interested in nothing more than the occasional porch talk (particularly as I'd get nice little compliments here and there about how beautiful I am, and how clear my skin is).

But then he found out that I sing. And he is extremely talented on the guitar.

Kids, music gets me every time. I've never been a groupie, I never followed the campus bands much (even though they were really good), but music is one of the central joys of my existence. And then Kevin introduced me to Gillian Welch. We started practicing songs we both knew, and he'd pass me a new song every once in awhile. He said my voice gave him goosebumps. He was extremely admiring.

Two Sundays ago we performed together at a really laid-back, no-audience neighborhood house showing, on a porch, on a nippy day. A guy I knew from RCIA came along and recognized me, and he's always been way too interested in me, and so he talked to me for awhile, and when he left, Kevin remarked jealously that the guy really liked me. I shrugged. After that, whenever Kevin introduced me to people I didn't know, he left out "this is my neighbor," and said simply, with a light, possessive touch on my shoulder, "And this is Sarah."

And, curse of curses, I didn't correct him. I've been so damn LONELY. And Kevin, despite his small stature, is a pretty good-looking guy.

So last Thursday when he called me in the evening to say he hadn't seen me for awhile, and did I want to come down for a cup of tea, I said yes and hung out with him for awhile.

Then I spent all weekend away from the house to get a grip on myself. COME ON, IDIOT, I said, He's an ABUSER. You KNOW this. What's your problem?!

The thing is, Kevin doesn't make (since we're not dating) any demands on me. He's just there. And his company is enjoyable. But I'm pretty sure, at some level, it's an act. I saw how he acted around my friend, and how he would act so normally and kindly around other people at the same time that he was hurting her. I saw, several memorable times, how he treated her, and I hated him with all the fiery hatred of hell for what he put her through. But this Kevin? A completely different Kevin.

And yet, despite our optimistic (stupid?) societal outlook, I don't believe that people ever really change. Especially not that drastically, and not in that short of a time span.

Plus, my friend often told me how great he was in the beginning.

So I've been talking about it with everyone who cares about me. I've been clamping down on my understanding of reality. And I've been avoiding him. I mean, what can I do? To ignore him or refuse to talk to him is rude, and he's done absolutely nothing wrong to me. But I have to guard my heart -- that ancient cliche -- because I witnessed the damage he can inflict, and with all the hellish things I went through this year, I don't need to add one more source of stress, insanity, depression and heartache to the list. And if I'm not careful, things could progress in a dangerous direction.

My best-beloved John helped me tremendously this week. I was telling him about the situation, and how Kevin is wearing me down, and John said, "No! Don't give in! That's just what the predators are waiting for."

So I'm doing my best, and not doing too badly. But argh. He's already worn me down considerably, and now I have to try to rebuild some of the levees. And I don't have the energy.