Now You See Me

In the last forty-five minutes you have checked your phone thirty-six times.  He still hasn’t texted you back. While you try to keep your gaze focused on the massive excel sheet in front of you, your eyes keep glancing down at your phone, and you can’t help yourself.  It’s been three days.  On day one, you gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was just busy – stuck at work until midnight? And then the next day comes, but now it’s the weekend, so you have to start conjuring up some new excuses for him - unless he’s an investment banker, then I suppose you don’t have to be quite as creative and can stick with the imagined excuse from day one, even if it’s Saturday.  For the rest of us, we start really thinking outside the box.  Maybe he had to go on an impromptu business trip and is on a plane without internet for twelve hours? Or maybe his grandma really isn’t doing well, and she’s back in the hospital for the fifth time.  Or maybe he’s really sick and is in desperate need of a delivery of chicken soup from his favorite restaurant? Or maybe his plane never made it back from Japan last week and something terrible happened to him? And as the days pass, your mind begins to wander into deep and dark places. 

But as you sit there worrying about him, paranoid that something happened to him, you wake up on day three only to see photos of him with a glass in one hand and a girl in the other, flooding your newsfeed.  And while part of you is relieved that he is alive and well, the feeling of relief quickly dwindles as you come to the harsh reality of the situation.  While you found yourself distracted for the past three days awaiting a mere text message, you weren’t even on his mind.  No matter how busy he may have been, how long does it really take to send a text message – thirty seconds? Or to pick up the phone and make a call – five minutes?  So while you were going through a rough two days, he didn’t even care enough to take five minutes out of his day to be there for you – and ironically YOU were the one worrying about HIM.  Busy or not, there’s no excuse not to be there for someone that you care about.  If a person truly cares about you, it comes through in their actions. Whether it be that you are going through family problems, or having a personal crisis, all you want to do is talk to him.  Yet while you’re grinding it out, just trying to make it through, he’s throwing back countless gin and tonics as you’re out of sight, out of mind.  So as hard as it might be to admit to yourself, the explanation is simple – he doesn’t care.  If he did, it would come through in his actions.

So now what? Well, you might push back at me and say that he is playing games – trying to make himself appear mysterious and aloof, all to set the stage for the never-ending chase.  Or you might play the naïve card, and argue that maybe he lost his phone or somehow missed your message.  But let’s take a moment to put things into perspective.  Given that you checked your phone about thirty-six times in the last forty-five minutes, do you really think that he made it through the whole three days without looking at his phone and reading his text messages?  He saw the message.  He opened it, read it, and blatantly decided to ignore you.  Not for one day, or two days, but three days.  And while there are a million excuses that you can conjure up in attempt to cushion the blow, there are a million more reasons that point to the fact that he ignored you because he doesn’t care.  Not only did he ignore you, but he didn’t think twice about it – didn’t consider what you might be going through or why you might have wanted to talk to him in the first place.  You are not his priority, and while you’re sitting there, fixated on his every move, you are not even on his radar. In fact, as he’s eight drinks in at the bar on Saturday and knee deep in march madness on Sunday, he barely remembers that you exist.  You might as well be invisible.

As petty and nonsensical as this all sounds, I have to admit that I’m not above this.  As much as I try to look at my life from the eye of a third party, and give advice to myself as I would to another, I get caught up in the pettiness just as much as you do.  When I really invest my time and energy into getting to know another person on any level, I put them on a pedestal.  Somehow because I initially thought they were worthy of my time and attention, I turn a blind eye to the reality of the situation in front of me, and I make excuses for them time and time again. He couldn’t possibly be ignoring me because he doesn’t care.  She couldn’t possibly have skipped my charity event to go to a dive bar with her friends.  But more often than not, the excuses that I craft for the people closest to me in my life are nothing more than fabrications of my imagination. 

When we really care about someone or feel connected to a person on such a deep level, we want to think the best of them.  Whether we intend to or not, we always give them the benefit of the doubt – and as they rip us into pieces and deteriorate in front of our eyes, we continue to see the version of the person that we’ve created in our minds rather than the person standing in front of us.  And this realization may in fact be the one that hurts the most.  When the smoke finally clears and we see them for who they really are, we start to question if any of it was real, or if it was all a fabrication of our imagination - right from the very beginning.  And then we close our eyes, and wrap our arms around ourselves, gripping the memories as tight as we can, knowing that in only seconds, the only way to move forward is to let them go.  To see the person for who they are.  To look at the situation in front of you.  To realize that actions speak louder than words.  To face the fact that you are a ghost to him.  To realize that the person who means the most to you barely knows you exist.  And to find it within yourself, to lift up the smoke screen and see the people in your life for whom they really are – even if it means admitting to yourself that you were wrong about them all along.