I wasn’t surprised it hurt her to see me with other women. Eleven years didn’t erase the intense past we had, and being forced to watch me whore myself time after time smacked of disrespect even now. It sure as hell would if the tables were turned.
The fact was … I was still just as attracted to Helene as I’d always been. The fact also remained that my attraction was the most absurd thing in the world. I had nothing to offer this woman. I had no future in this place, and hurting her was like slapping her in the face time after time. And what would happen at the end of that torture? I’d be gone, and she’d be picking up the pieces all over again. Walking away from her was the right thing to do.
But I’d never been very good at doing the right thing.
What happened eleven years before should have destroyed the intimacy between us. But it hadn’t. Not for me, and given how easily I could break her heart, it hadn’t for her either. And after so many years without that closeness, I didn’t know how to give it up. Even if I couldn’t keep it. That made me an asshole. It also made me the man who’d never figured out how to get over my addiction to her.
When forty-five minutes had passed, I’d only made it through one page of multiple choice questions. I glanced up at her, and she was sitting at her desk, leaning back casually, but her eyes were trained on me. Her expression was impossible to read. It was absolutely blank, but it was clear the way she studied me, looked down at the test on my desk, and then looked at me again as her brow furrowed slightly that she hadn’t missed my concentration problems.
I took a deep breath, forcing my eyes down to the papers and away from her. I definitely should not have sat in the front row.
“You have an hour left,” she warned the class once we were an hour and a half in.
I’d finally made a dent in this fucking thing, but I still had a long way to go. Hell liked her essay questions, and I had many pages of writing yet to get through. When I glanced up at her, she was reading a book. I recognized it. It was one of the books I’d picked up from her bed the night I’d stayed with her.
That night had been strangely perfect. Not the fight, the arrest, or even the awkwardness between Helene and me at her house. But curling up next to her in bed and feeling her body snuggle close to mine like she actually wanted to be close to me, that was damn near euphoric. But then like most things in life that had anything at all to do with a woman, I reduced her to nothing more than a * for me to play with the next morning.
I wasn’t sure even now that I could isolate why I’d touched her in the kitchen that morning—except to say it had something to do with seeing her study that fucking picture. She’d been looking at us—the us that died eleven years before. And she’d studied that picture just as intently as I had. The way she focused on that visual piece of our past almost convinced me it was just as important to her as it was to me. That apparently translated into an excuse to grope her.
I sighed in frustration as I tried yet again to focus on my test, and a few heads craned in my direction. I scribbled, biting my lower lip painfully hard to refocus my attention and get through this fucking thing. I forced myself to sit up straighter, and I started writing. I knew Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I liked it even. And so I set my pen loose, finally freeing my mind of her for a while.
The cave is an analogy of an ignorant life. It’s a very visual representation of what it means to perceive things from only one point, missing the larger picture. In Plato’s Allegory, men are chained within a cave, forced to see nothing more than the shadows on the walls around them—never knowing a world exists beyond the cave, and never knowing the shadows are attached to so much more than their limited scope.
But it’s a curious analogy that relates, in my opinion, to even the chains we impose on ourselves. Take the man who spends his life living in one way, sheltered, of his own devices, from the real world around him. His chains are completely self-imposed to protect himself from the unseen and hidden nightmares of the world. But the outcome on his existence is the same.
Perhaps he makes vices like violence, drunkenness, and even promiscuity his reality—his shadows—blocking out everything else around him in an attempt to hide from the things in the world that can hurt him the most. By doing so, he sees nothing but the shadows on the walls—the telltale sign that a life greater than his own exists beyond the cave. But his cave is safe, and his perception of the world eventually becomes limited by the shadows, and his knowledge of what it once meant to live fully in this world dwindles to nothing. His shadows become his reality—his perception forever skewed.