Out of the Blue and Into the Light

Regret is a funny thing. One always immediately regrets anything that causes one pain. And I am no exception to that rule.

Charlie was a regret in a lot of ways. Not just the obvious ones. He was someone I had hung all my hopes on. He started out so good. His overwhelming confidence won me over immediately, but what I didn’t know was it was a complete cover-up for the desperate inadequacies he was trying to hide. All that playful banter that I mistook for swagger was really just a deflector shield. He was actually quite ordinary. Pathetically ordinary. Underneath his highly polished exterior existed a miserably non-descript little boy who only created interesting theatrics when it brought the right kind of attention his way. When he didn’t need it, he shunned it—especially when it came from others—and pretended he hated it. His bravado was a misleading infomercial that was designed to catch and release. He never intended to reel anyone in.

Yet here I was wasting my time regretting him. HIM.

Regret is something reserved for actions you willfully committed. It’s something to be used only in emergencies, when something of great value is at stake. There was no reason to waste my regret on him. He wasn’t that great a catch. Not after I realized he was all an act. When I realized that he was just a simple man with a simple plan: get what you can and get the hell outta Dodge—then blame it on her (his flavor of the week) it was easier to let go. But not without the anger.

I don’t know why or how I fell so hard. Maybe it wasn’t the fall that got me but the falling. I loved the idea of being in love with someone and he was the closest prospect at the time.

Maybe that’s how Chad felt about me. Maybe I was just the easiest one to love at the moment and none of it was even personal. I was beginning to think that that was the case with Charlie. Maybe it wasn’t Charlie I loved, but Love I loved. Then why couldn’t I simply transfer it to Chad, if that’s all there was?

There’s something about naked need that requires my pity. And where there is pity there cannot be attraction. Is that how Charlie saw me?

But I hadn’t seen pity in his eyes when he made his announcement. And I took solace in that. I’d rather be alone than pitied.

I’m not sure Chad felt the same way. I suspect he’d take my pity as long as I came with it. But that would rob him. No one should have to settle for mercy.



School droned on and different guys here and there showed an interest in me. Usually just a passing one. And once in a while, I could detect that familiar rise of testosterone catch Charlie by surprise and make him appear to be scanning my horizons for ships he was planning to battle. But those instances were few and far between and I eventually gave up.

The great thing about letting go is when you actually get to that point, you are able to see things you were blind to while you were keeping a white-knuckled grasp on them. My surrender allowed me a lot of freedom. I got to see a lot of things from the vantage point of a million miles away—the best distance to be from Charlie when he’s in the room. Because of my surrender, I was privileged to watch him snare a couple more girls in his web and witness what it all looks like from the outside.

One in particular caught my attention. It couldn’t help but catch my attention since Libby was paraded in front of me on a daily basis when he would bring her into the group and allow us the privilege of watching her fawn all over him. Her simple-mindedness was aggravating enough that I felt she deserved whatever she got from him. And it became a game—a daily ritual, really—to watch how far she’d go to please him, not knowing yet he was unpleaseable.

Unless you’re a million miles away, you can’t see Charlie for what he is.

He hung onto her longer than anyone before her—even longer than his precious Sara—simply because, I think, she was stupider than the rest. She’d wash his clothes, rub his shoulders, fetch him food on command—anything he asked her to do she’d do. Willingly. Expecting nothing in return, except a shot at the Bigtime one of these days. She, like the rest of us, thought if she tolerated him long enough, he’d finally let her in and she could prove to all his ex-fans that he wasn’t uncrackable, that you just had to have the right combination and he’d open up like a bank vault. And that we were the stupid ones. What delight I took in watching the whole thing, her whole life’s work, come to fruition the day I heard him give her the speech he’d given all of us.

I wonder if she took solace in learning that she had just misunderstood his intentions; that he never liked her like that; that she had read far more into his actions than he ever meant. And I wonder if it came to her the way it came to me: like a lightning bolt out of the clear, blue sky.