Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Truth.
I don’t know that anything rocks me more than discovering something hidden about someone. Some people will go to any lengths to keep things hidden.
I think about past relationships—friends, romantic, spouse, family—and things that were hidden, sometimes even from themselves. The first moment of realization was surreal. Once it sank in a few inches, I took a glance at history through those new lenses and suddenly every- thing came into sharp focus. Then I had to re-look at my entire history, in detail, through those lenses and see what was really going on that I’d missed. In general, those have been…bad.
But I’m just as shocked to discover something hidden that someone’s tried to tell me and I didn’t understand at the time.
We base our perceptions on what’s presented to us and what we’ve had experience with. Then along comes something unexpected. Something so unexpected and out of our realm of experience that we don’t know what to do with it. We look right past the real truth at what’s “obvious.”
I’ve been feeling a little dumb in the past few weeks about something someone tried to tell me—gave me a bazillion hints at—and I missed it. He was waiting for me to say it was okay, and I didn’t because I didn’t know.
Walking along the lake today, watching several dozen dragonflies mating in the air, I put those lenses back on and looked at old scenery, replaying conversations of long ago, re-examining the words spoken based on what I now know.
Damn. At the time, I judged those conversations based on every other relationship I’d ever had. Based on past attachments. I didn’t know any other light to judge them by.
This was such a sweet man, and too often I blew him off as ignoring me.
He wasn’t. I just didn’t know what was going on be- hind the “obvious.” At times, his comments hurt my feelings because I misunderstood, because if I’d heard them from any man in my past, they would have meant the “obvious.”
Now that I know what was really going on—at least, it seems I do—the “obvious” takes on an entirely new meaning.
A rather intriguing facet that sparkles in my memory.
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