Sides

My ex told me a funny story a couple of years ago:

During the three years he had moved to be here and I was still in Durham, my good friend Paul came back to Duke where I was working at the time and got his MBA. He and I were practically inseparable during that time, walking about an hour each evening, cooking together, going to movies, and generally just having fun.

Which, in retrospect, must have been obvious to everyone.

Juan says that our mutual friends took it upon themselves to call him here and let him know that Paul and I were carrying on and having an affair. He just laughed, knowing that though Paul and I are great friends, each others' sexual ideals we are most definitely not.

I thought this was hilarious when he told me this, and chuckled right along with him. How funny our friends can be!

Tonight I began thinking about this in more detail, especially in light of the visit of a mutual friend of ours (which I missed because I was at Baroque Band Camp), one of the merry band who called him. I realized last night when I had dinner with Juan that there is mucho information that somehow never makes it to my ears and yet gets passed on to him by our friends back home as evidenced by some of the conversations he related to me of our friend's recent visit. Over the years I've watched small bits of evidence accumulate and have come to the conclusion that he is the half of our couple that most of our friends landed with after the breakup, as most friends tend to do whether they intend it or not. That stung a bit at first, but it has settled down to a remote ache these days, sort of like an old bruise.

Tonight as I was doing my last massage of the day, the thought came to me, "if our friends were that concerned about us, why didn't they take me aside? Me, the one who lived and worked in the same town, and ask me what I was doing having an affair?" Which I wasn't even having, anyway.

The answer to that, of course, was that I mattered less. It showed me just how firmly, if perhaps unconsciously, my Durham friends had claimed sides more than a decade before our split, and gives me insight into my relative worth on their "friend scale". Maybe the thought occurred to them to talk to me, but in the end they didn't and instead called Juan instead to warn him thus setting me up as the bad guy.

Funny thing is, by that time Juan had already had the first affair in our relationship, here, while I was still being a good boy back home in NC. But none of them knew that, and it's not really important anyway. They guy he had the affair with was more like family and after my initial shock it didn't seem like an intrusion at all. When it came down to it, I just wanted the sexy details.

Honestly, I know I blend into the landscape; I know I'm not the flashiest pin in the pile and I know that the force of my character is not nearly what my ex's is. It's just not my nature; never has been and most likely never will be. Still, it's an interesting thing to look at and ponder.

Life really is an illusion, and it's interesting to be confronted with other versions of that which you think you see clearly.

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