Of fear and perfection

In my eyes, your were perfect.

Might have been the rose-colored glasses.

Or all the assholes in my life prior to you.

Whatever.

You were perfect.

Or as perfect as I wanted you to be.

And that's a lot of pressure.

To be perfect.

And you kept insisting you weren't but I ignored that because, well, to be repetitive, you were.

And perfection is a lot to expect of someone. I didn't realize that. I thought it was a compliment. 

You were simply perfect because you weren't them.  You didn't behave the way I expected because of the way I've been treated. You surprised me at every turn because I had been conditioned to expect different things.

You were perfect because you were just simply you.

And I was so afraid that you would do what I expected that when little, incidental things happened that felt oh, so familiar, it plunged me into crazy because here I was again, in exactly the same place, getting exactly what I expected. And that was crippling. Because I expected you to be more because you had been.

And the more I became Cancer Girl, the more perfect you became. You were there, you gave me support, you gave me comfort. Just those simple things were things I had lacked in my marriages - simple comfort, simple support. And you became more perfect.

And I never thought to ask if you felt that pressure, if you felt the cancer, if you felt anything. You were so simple, just going along, being perfect in my eyes that I never looked to see if the perfection was crushing you.

I thought I was so smart, seeing the fear from your marriage, seeing the fear of this being something more than casual, seeing the fear of you being trapped by whatever this was.

But I never thought about the fear of being perfect.

And perfect can be scary.

Because to me, this was as perfect as it could get. Easy. Simple. I tried not to label us or put us in a box or think about anniversary dates or anything because I didn't want to break the perfect. Because I knew of your fear and didn't want to scare you away.

But in the end, fear is what finished this.

My fear of letting you go. My fear of you being not perfect and becoming exactly what I expected - just another one of those men who would go through my life and leave devastation in their path. My fear of not being perfect for you and my fear of being invisible and unimportant and nothing.

Your fear of letting me too close. Your fear of my being exactly what you expected and leaving you gutted and devastated if this was something more than nothing. Your fear of the expectation of perfect and not living up to that. Your fear that this being something might mean you missing something else.

And here we are, perfectly fearful. So close to something yet now, so close to nothing.

We succeeded perfectly in letting us go.