We stand out on my porch under the pretense of parting, but as the minutes pass, it becomes clear that he is getting no closer to actually leaving.
One random conversation flows into another random conversation and his half-hearted attempts to depart hint at some looming thought.
Men communicate with other men in odd ways, which is to say that they don't really communicate at all. We are a generation of confliction, taught to be stoic and proud, then encouraged to be healthy and sensitive. At some point, this little-boy armor becomes nearly impossible to remove, and the contents within become pressurized to the point of structural failure.
This is what causes people to shoot up schools and set themselves on fire. Society gives us toolkits that contain only hammers. Everything else we must invent on our own.
I have empathy in surplus, but I generally choose to ignore what my senses tell me about a person. I suppose that means that I lack sympathy, but all semantics aside: I just don't want to become involved in someone else's mental quagmire.
Almost all people, while open to the concept of therapy, are often resistant to the actual practice of it. In truth, we generally accept the evil that lives within us rather then to exorcise the demons.
The devil you know is preferable to the one you don't. Sometimes that can work for your relationships as well.
I could drag him into a discussion of what's bothering him, but I know that he has to make that leap himself. At some point, a person has to take responsibility, and so I will allow him to torture himself for as long as he sees fit to do so.
In the middle of a story, he mentions that he has decided that he is a homosexual, a slight laugh imparts the option of a joke, and the context leaves room for plausible deniability, but I know that neither are truly applicable here.
I brush it off without transmitting any sense of interest. If he is expecting some larger reaction from me, then he will have to be more confrontational. Confiding is not a coward's task.
He leaves soon after with some sense of unfulfilled disappointment.
I know everything he wants to say to me, but those words will only serve to complicate my life even further.
