This conversation keeps running through my mind, or maybe my mind keeps running through this conversation. This was back when she and I meant to make a decision about our future together, but we couldn't bring ourselves to make one. The decision just sort of happened, even if we couldn't see it. I had been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We were sitting on the couch in her mother's living room. The selfsame couch we were on when we were first getting together, and honestly thought that nobody knew.
So we're sitting there, and at some point she says, "I'm only upset with someone until I understand the reasons behind their actions." I respond, "Isn't it enough just to know that resons exist?" She stops listening. Maybe she never started. Eventually I say, "A belief should be based not on what supports it, but on what it supports."
The conversation never really ended. It was still thrashing about months later when I told her to read two dogs. Now it stands out clearly as the end of us.
You think if there's anything that can't be taken away from you, the past is it. I thought I spent a year of my life talking to somebody, but it turned out I was just talking. I suppose you can never really have an event, but only hope: The hope that something might happen, or the hope that it actually did. That's what the second noble truth is all about.