Ok, so here’s the disclaimer…if you haven’t read The Dark Tower series of books by Stephen King then this post isn’t going to make any sense to you at all.
Really what this post is about though is life, or my perspective on it from a literary sense. You see, through out my life, I’ve been an avid reader and Stephen King is my favorite author; and the Dark Tower is my favorite series. Its a series that I felt I identified with on a somewhat spiritual level. For those of you who’ve read my other post especially my first about my life, I’ve spent the majority of my life on what I felt was a quest. A quest to find the happiness that I felt was denied me in my younger years.
Therefore, every time I read these books I always would equate myself with Roland of Gilead, the gunslinger, on his quest for The Dark Tower, and once there he would climb to the top and find victory. After all, everybody wants to be the hero right? Right. Even if you don’t admit it, you do. For me, every year that passed, every step I took, I was a step closer to finding my own tower, the love of my life. Like Roland, I kept going long after it seemed fruitless to proceed. I crossed the desert of my life. I lost friends, and loved ones. But still that Tower beckoned me. One more step. One more step. Keep going. Never give up.
Two and half years ago, I thought I had at last gained my Dark Tower. I would cross the field of roses, signifying the love I carried in my heart, and at the center…my Tower, my Diana, and I would at last find the peace I had sought all those years. But it was an illusion. There was no Tower. No love. No peace. Only emptiness. My Tower had fallen, and the universe that it held, mine, shattered apart, and I was left to face the monsters that dwelt in the space between worlds. In todash.
So as my life winds down, I’ve found myself doing the things that used to give me comfort. Watching movies that I want to see one last time. Reading books I loved. I just finished The Dark Tower series again. And a funny thing happened to me.
I realized that I was never Roland.
Instead one of the other characters (and my personal favorite) spoke to me. I saw my life through his life, and knew I had been seeing myself as the wrong one all along.
He started as an outcast from his own kind. Taken in when he was wounded, by a friend. Never left that friends side, and defended the bond they had as friends, and the love that only friends can know. Even when his friend died, and he felt like dying too, and would have, if not for a promise that he made to that friend. To go on. Save Roland. Finish his part in the story. Only then could he finally rest, and be reunited with that friend he loved. I was Oy.
Diana…I promised to love you until the day I died. I kept that promise. My part in the story is over, and I can find peace now. I was not Roland. You were not my Tower. I was Oy. You were my friend.
1 comment
Your post pulled me in with the Dark Tower reference and then I went back and read your original post that detailed what exactly your story is.
Let me preface by comments by saying I am a terrible hopeless romantic and what they say must be true that when we get angry at others we are probably seeing something in them that reminds me of us. If any of my comments sound harsh it’s just because I want better for you.
It’s ironic now that I look at it a second time that you titled your initial post “wasted life” because those two words cut right to the bone and summarize it pretty well. From a psychological standpoint, this story of yours started down this path before Diana even entered the picture. Something about your upbringing, or the life you experienced up until that point of being 17, must have created just the right personality brew for this to even happen to you in the first place. I believe in love and I myself have been known to want to fight to the death for something that I don’t want to let go of, but still, not a lot of people latch onto something at 17 years old and then have a decades’ long story about all the trials and tribulations involved in trying to love this same person.
Spoilers up ahead for anyone who might be reading this and plans to read the Dark Tower some day. Thinking that finding a lover was going to be the key to your happiness is what set you up for the same thing that Roland experienced. A door at the end of the journey that opens upon nothing. It was all an illusion and you’re just right back at the start. That’s kind of what it’s like when we decide to make the love of another fickle human being as the source of our happiness. I wish it could be that way. I wish it was safe and healthy to make love that type of priority in our lives and be able to trust that it’s going to work out. For some people it does. I think love might always be a dangerous illusion, but for some people they find the right person who wants to believe in that illusion just as much, and they spend their years together and die before ever having to find out the horrible truth. For the majority of us though, we discover the painful illusion. We scale the dark tower and find out there is nothing at the end but the same old journey we’ve always been on, looking for happiness.
Something is messed up with my brain because I can read books and shortly after feel like I barely remember anything about it. I read the Dark Tower series years ago and I still remember the ending, but not much else.
I’m struggling to even make my point here. I just hate to see what trying to love one person has done to your life. I hate it because I know I am susceptible to the same behavior. Although as bad as I am, I can’t say I’ve ever gotten attached enough to really still want someone over a decade later. There have been numerous relationships that made me want to die when they were abruptly ended, but I can’t say any of those girls truly have any power over me today. Or maybe I’m in denial, maybe there is one or two of them still who if they showed up at my door right now, I would fall for it again.
I think that counselor gave you terrible advice when they encouraged you to get in touch with a married woman. You were right to say that you didn’t feel right about it, and it’s a shame that the counselor’s suggestion got stuck in your brain and led to you acting on it.
It’s funny how we believe we really want something when we already have proof to the contrary. You already won this person back once, which is a pretty rare, amazing story. But when you were together it wasn’t the magic you expected because you distanced yourself out of fear of being hurt again. There’s nothing left to miss about this person because the past you have together will never allow for trusting each other again. You should finally feel free after all this time rather than feeling like you have to kill yourself.
You talk about envisioning the child you never had, but maybe you’re mistaken by thinking all these things were supposed to happen with this one person. Maybe you were supposed to have a long and successful military career that was going to lead your life in other directions, but instead that got abandoned. I’m not going to pick on the decisions when you made when you were younger, and it’s too late to change them now, it’s just a shame that the story involving the pursuit of this person didn’t end there.
She bailed on you once, she bailed on a marriage with children involved because you popped up and gave her something to escape to, she bailed on you again, she really isn’t worth pining over.
It took you a long time to learn the lesson but hopefully it is crystal clear now. The only reason I think you’d ever deserve to kill yourself is if you could ever imagine giving this person another chance again, but hopefully that’s not an option. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t have the attitude that you can finally make up for lost time and get back to figuring out what your life can mean without orbiting around this one person, but instead you are acting like you’re going to end it.
It would be nice if you could just accept that you are putting the final nail into this part of your life and leaving it behind and moving on to bigger and better things. It should be a time for celebration, not for suicide. No person on this planet is worth ruining an entire life over. In a very broad, simplistic sense, going off the sparse details you offered, it just sounds like you were a 17 year old who didn’t know much companionship until she came along, and rather than dealing with the pain of the grieving process and accepting it was over, you held on like an S.O.B. for decades. Your story is one of an extremely delayed grieving process, basically. As much as it may have hurt to deal with waiting for her and wanting her all this time, your subconscious believed it would hurt more to just leave it behind. 17 is a time when we all start to learn that sometimes people and things are going to enter into our lives and not necessarily still be there at 27 or 57. A part of you refused to learn that lesson. But it’s not too late to learn it.
Maybe the type of love you want is still waiting for you out there. Maybe this situation with Diana was just one of your cycles through the Dark Tower, you made it to the end and found out you just had to start over again. Your post here tried to dismiss any similarities with Roland, but I think it’s still a good match for your story. You’ve reached the end and found out there is nothing there but to start again. This is the experience of love for a majority of humans. Relationships end. Promises get broken. Journeys begin again.
Oh well, I’m rambling. I hope you can find the strength to keep going. You need to begin, and complete, the grieving process that you avoided for so long. It will take time but eventually you would realize that you should be jumping for joy that you didn’t end up with a person like her, not mourning it.
Food for thought, imagine things had played out differently. You could have been the one she married and had kids with, and then met someone else on a reunion website and left you in the dust. Imagine how painful it would have been for it all to come crashing down if you actually had gotten as far as marriage and children with her.
So many people torture themselves feeling like they lost “the one” when it’s actually an impossibility. “The one” is the one who is going to stay with you. Once someone shows that they are willing to walk away and live their lives without you, they can’t possibly be “the one”. “The one” doesn’t need to be convinced or won back. “The one” will want to be with you. She wasn’t the one for you. You just wasted a lot of years refusing to accept that.
I hope you’ll give yourself time to heal (I can’t imagine how much time that would take when it’s a situation that involved decades, has taken me very long stretches of time to get over people who were only around for a few years). I think your story deserves a happier ending than this, but ultimate the choice is yours.