phrase

     Once, I humiliated a man to some people he desired to be friends with after I repeatedly resisted his advances by showing them some particularly unflattering texts he had sent me. My goal was never to humiliate him, but he was certifiably humiliated nonetheless -- I learned of such after he confronted me on the interaction some time after it occurred. It wasn't all that hostile -- his confrontation I mean -- in that way that a man acts when he's frustrated with you but totally and indelibly wrapped around your finger; not to say he was as infatuated with me as he was with the idea of being with me -- after all, there's only one thing no man can resist: himself.

The whole ordeal would hardly have been a sentence anywhere my hand should write over, if not for a single accusation he made to me; it was rather late in an early winter evening, sat upon a faux leather couch which felt red, that he said to me, "Y'know, you're a special kind of heartbreaker. You turn people into stories." Or something along those lines.

When I read these words and hear them spoken again in my mind I have two reactions to the abstract comment. Firstly, what the fuck does that mean -- who the hell says something like that? Be it hardly a question worth asking, the answer being as obvious as the attitude the phrase was spoken towards me with; it's something only worth the breath of those lonely, horny poets I find myself accustomed to spending time with. Despite the relative depreciation I have ascribed of the character that spoke it, the phrase hangs over my conscious like the bags under my eyes stick to my visage. How do I interpret that horrible can of worms that he lobbed at my head?

The way that I unpack that loaded sentence is first quite literal. I turn people into stories -- of course, in the context of the conflict, he probably refers to the story I "turned him into" -- being that I had an account of his actions, and in giving that account, I so insurmountably summarized his character to a degree that which would usurp the interpretation of his character in those whom have heard it. I mean, why else would he have completely stopped talking to these people? Maybe I give myself too much credit (if that's a proper application of the phrase).

But it's not that which haunts me. It's that there's a pattern, and I worry he may have been right. In summarization, what that man [S.R] meant, that which nags at my psyche is this: I have an affect on people in my life, an affect that brings about such an intense and emotionally saturated ordeal that it irreparably mars them. I take that marring, leaving them and forever keeping just for myself a story of them and their emotions -- a souvenir of their suffering, a trinket of their toil -- to share to everybody else. A wandering collector of hearts. The worst part is -- where this to be his claim, there would be a pattern to make the claim upon. [H.H] didn't talk to people for a long time after she moved, and the falling out she had with her mother was only very shortly after I so shortsightedly dumped her for whatever reason I had at the time (you'll have to forgive my memory). [S.L], when I broke up with him, told me afterwards that he almost killed himself. He said to me, "it's hard to have your world decide it's gotten bored of you." [S.S] is in a horrible place, and while I take not all the blame for that -- it being due in no small part to his inability to grow -- he gave me some sort of allegory not too dissimilar to [S.L]'s to describe his own feelings. What if I do turn people into stories? This shame -- this guilt even -- as much as it is speculative, it wanes and waxes: and I do feel its crushing waves.

I talked to my therapist about it, and she told me that these people's actions are no consequence of my own, and I am taking on a toll far greater than I must in ascribing their feelings to my affect. She told me that rather than the pattern being a result of my behavior, it may be rather a similarity in the people that I attract; and thus the way they respond. That does help, and it may be the only reason the shame washes away the same as it crashes over me -- I am not one who turns people into stories, just a song that a few of the same archetype chase. A book that characters happen to fall into. That might not sound good, but at least it's better than being at fault for all of this. I could not bear to be the ignorant perpetrator of such injustices.