But just like anybody will tell you, one can never be friends with old lovers, it is very difficult to do. After a while we began to be comfortable with each other again, she would come over my house in the mornings to have breakfast and to sleep in my bed so that we may wake up next to each other like old times. But the truth was that we never grew apart from each other, we kept old habits and didn’t realize we were hurting the others in our lives. We were in our own little Cave again, we pretended like nothing was going on when in fact we were still acting as if we were still together this whole time. Not wanting to spend any time with the other people we had acquired along the way, not caring about their feelings and how they would feel if they found out about us hanging around this way.
One day I looked at my own shadow, I stared in the mirror for a long period of time, longer than I’ve ever looked at myself in years. I had realized that my worst fear was not only to lose that person but to throw away the countless memories we had acquired over the years. We were both stringing ourselves along, pretending that what we were doing was right, we were both using each other as puppets and we were each other’s puppeteers. until finally we had kissed in my bed, it felt natural, as if we had never left each other’s side. I had never done anything of this nature in all my years of living; I could not sleep the next 3 hours with her next to me with her head pressed up against my chest. My heart just raced and begged for me to either stay or leave her forever. Just remembering in my head how hard it was to leave her there alone in my bed because I felt so guilty for what I had done hurts me. I had to adjust my eyes to the truth because I was mislead by my own truth that what I was doing was ok. That me and her were just friends and didn’t have feelings for each other at the least.
It took remembering what she had done to me to realize that this isn’t the person I wanted to be with, that she had done me harm first and I was still being sucked into her strings. That it wasn’t both of us being the puppet masters. She was the true master, because she had put those images of old back into my head and I being the romantic I am went right into her trap. Her new boyfriend was my old best friend, who she had previously done the same thing with while she was with me. It took that one kiss to remind me why I had left her and why we had broken up. I thought that my truth was her because we had been together all this time that it just felt natural. But when I finally opened my eyes to see the sun come up and shine in my face the truth. I had to let her go, she was hurting me and I was hurting someone else, it wasn’t fair. If I had kept to this path I would never been able to look at myself in the mirror, because I was fighting for a person that no longer belonged to me and I knew wasn’t good for me. It just had to end all over again or I my truth would forever be questioned.
It took remembering what she had done to me to realize that this isn’t the person I wanted to be with, that she had done me harm first and I was still being sucked into her strings. That it wasn’t both of us being the puppet masters. She was the true master, because she had put those images of old back into my head and I being the romantic I am went right into her trap. Her new boyfriend was my old best friend, who she had previously done the same thing with while she was with me. It took that one kiss to remind me why I had left her and why we had broken up. I thought that my truth was her because we had been together all this time that it just felt natural. But when I finally opened my eyes to see the sun come up and shine in my face the truth. I had to let her go, she was hurting me and I was hurting someone else, it wasn’t fair. If I had kept to this path I would never been able to look at myself in the mirror, because I was fighting for a person that no longer belonged to me and I knew wasn’t good for me. It just had to end all over again or I my truth would forever be questioned.
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This is an articulate and introspective reflection on your experience with your ex-girlfriend. One of the ideas that really caught my eye was your image of staring in the mirror for a long time. This is evocative on both the literal and metaphorical level. The psychologist Jacques Lacan theorized that our identity first begins to form at the precise moment when, as toddlers, we first recognize our own own image in the mirror-- when the toddler sees his or her own image and realizes that it is him or herself.
Lacan calls this "The Mirror Stage", and your blog here made me think of that in a new light. Even when it's combing our hair or getting ready to go out, we use the expression "putting myself together" for how we interact with our self and that reflection. We all look with other purposes in mind both existential and psychological, sometimes with good effects and sometimes with bad, and sometimes with other things in mind or at bay.
And so another expression related to this is the old adage of "taking a look at yourself". What's going on in the mirror. Who is that? Can I look that person in the face, how do I do that, and what do I see? You take this further-- to being able face oneself, or as I interpret you, to forming the image that we want to see and honor in the looking glass.
What advice would you offer for how to do that? This could be an intriguing and quite edifying essay topic, particularly if you base it on a movie that relates either to your metaphor or to your story, or ideally both. Only parts of this movie connect to your story, but a great movie in which talking to the mirror plays an essential role is "True Romance". On the more metaphorical level, "Eyes Wide Shut" relates very closely to your story. On the one hand Tom Cruise's character is trapped inside a fantasy cave-like environment such as the one you describe, and on the other, he fails ever to see himself until the end, when the real lesson comes. "Memento" is a lot like this too, and come to think of it there are a lot of mirror scenes in that movie too. Let me know if you'd like to discuss any of these. Good work here!