What if No One's Watching?

Tomorrow is the birthday of someone important in my life. Maybe not all that important in my life currently, but important in the overall trajectory of my life. So I'm thinking about him today.

It's complicated...or maybe I just make it complicated, I don't know. Maybe it's actually very simple. But when I try to think of where to begin, it seems complicated. It's hard, when you are a romantic type of person, to seperate in your mind that you were in love with someone once, but you aren't anymore, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. And it's hard, when you are a compartmentalizing, control-freak kind of person, to figure out where in your head and your heart to put someone who you used to be in love with but aren't anymore. I like things to be neat and orderly, I like to know where everything and everybody fits. And I don't know what column to stick this person into.

Be that as it may, he intrigues me. He has intrigued me for years now. He's a beautiful, destructive, imaginative, ambitious, cruel, loyal, defiant person. The more time passes, the more I'm not at all sure I'd do things differently if I had them to do over again. If we do what we do and learn what we learn for a reason, and it makes us who we are, then I have to thank this person, as much as anyone else I've known, for his part in making me who I am. And now, for maybe the first time, I like who I am.

What I am wondering now, though, is what effect I had on him. We were together for a long time, and while I've given hours and days and weeks of thought as to how he changed me, what he did to me, I've not thought a lot about what I did to him. It may be that, more than any other old transgression, that concerns me--how could I have spent so long with somene and not imprinted on them at all? Is he sorry? Would he do it differently if he had it to do again?

I'm going much farther than I'd intended into narcissist territory. What I want to say, I think, is happy birthday. Happy birthday, and thank you, and I'm sorry, and I miss you. But mostly just happy birthday.