Bridging the Gap
It is hard to resist that temptation to reach out to us isn’t it? No matter how great your resolve, how entrenched you are in your position of maintaining no contact and staying away from us, there always remains that desire to contact us. This is of course something that we designed, a pre-meditated device that was organised to ensure that we flared into your mind repeatedly. This is the effect of ever presence.
That additional manipulative good bye we leave you with. Whether we cast you aside or whether you made the bold decision to exorcise us from your life, the effect of this ever presence is difficult to control. The various sounds, tastes, images and scents that immediately bring about a memory of us – invariably a pleasant and happy one as well – have all been placed throughout your life and daily routine so that you are unable to play a certain piece of music, eat a certain meal, go to a certain place or even look upon certain view without that crystal clear memory forming in your mind of that wonderful and exciting time we had together during the golden period. These memories evoke powerful and strong emotions, both good and bad and that is entirely the intention. The effect of ever presence makes you think about us. Most people are creatures of emotion and the nature of our victims, being empathic individuals, means that you are possessed of greater emotion than others.
Once again, this was deliberate. Being governed by emotion means that rather than instantly dispel the thought of us, you allow the memory to form and bloom as you savour its effect again. You can hear our voices as we reminded you how much we loved you. You know now that it was a false declaration but the emotion which courses through your body still causes a reaction inside of you and creates the idea that perhaps we still do love you. That might be the case might it? Thus an unanswered question forms in your mind.
A particular song may play on the radio. You sensibly took the step of deleting all those play lists that we created for you from iTunes so that you would not be tempted to wallow as those memorable songs played again. Notwithstanding this purge you cannot legislate for what is played on the radio and your hand reaches for the off switch but you cannot remove the song as the first few chords are played and you are instantly reminded of how we played that song as we led you by the hand into the bedroom, ready to make up after we had rowed and fought.
When you heard that song you always regarded it as some kind of peace offering presented by us in order to resolve the conflict. You did not realise that we did this as a means of manipulating your emotions to draw further fuel from you, but we were content to allow you to interpret it the way you wanted. All we required was your emotional response. As you listen to the song, stood in your living room, your eyes drift to the chair where we would always sit as we watched television or read a book. You cannot help but wonder, yet again, where it went wrong? Why did we treat you as we did? Another unanswered question forms in your mind.
It may even be the case that you are checking through your finances and as you scrutinise your bank statements for signs of unusual activity, your eyes fall on that monthly direct debit or standing order that we created when we established a liability in your name. You are stuck with this liability, even though we have long since gone. The cost causes you problems and only goes to exacerbate the other financial problems we left you with.
You know you should throw the thought from your mind but it is so hard. The logic tries to tell you to put it to one side, to kill the thought and bury it dead, but the rising emotion will not allow you to do so. The anger rises and you scrunch up the bank statement, your hands shaking with the rage at how we hurt you, how we took your trust and abused it, how you gave us everything, absolutely everything in your pursuit of this supposed perfect love and instead we tore it asunder, we trampled on it, we betrayed it and we threw it back in your face. How dare we take your love and treat this way? Who do we think we are? You want to set us straight and tell us some home truths. There is unfinished business to attend to.
This is how it operates. We want to keep you thinking about us, we want you to contact us or we want you to be susceptible to our contacting you at some point, whether it is a week or a decade later. To achieve this, we create the ever presence so you are reminded of us. To achieve this, we create a situation where you have a need to contact us. You want to ask us why we treated you this way, you want to know whether we did really love you or not, we want to know if you are happy with the new person we have on our arm and what have they got that we have not?
You want the opportunity to launch into a tirade and give us a piece of your mind. There are unanswered questions and unfinished business and this makes it so hard for you to resist. You know that you should not engage with us but you want to find out why we did as we did because we just vanished and left you wondering and pondering. You want to understand why we treated you so badly when all you ever did was love us, because, in your world, that makes no sense. These two elements; the ever presence and the unfinished business results in the temptation to reach out to us being very difficult to resist.
If you know where we are, if you hear that we are back in town, if you know there is an upcoming event that we will attend where you will also be there, the desire and the need to contact us again looms large. You promise yourself that you will keep your cool, you swear that you will just ask the questions and get the answers (although of course you will not – we will not give them you as we want to keep that carrot dangling), you pledge that you will not fall prey to our charm.
These good intentions will invariably falter because as you reach out to us, hoping to address these pieces of unfinished business, you are allowing us to train our sights on you once again, reach into our bag of charms and look to pull you back into our world once again. You may think that once bitten twice shy, but our bite is both delicious and deadly and through these manipulations we always look to have you wanting more. There may a gap between you and us, but there is always the option to bridge that gap and resume our entanglement once again.
