Rick ended up forgetting about our dinner date due to sickness and mishaps at home with his kids.

Roll to 745PM, me sitting in the waiting area, legs stretched across the aisle to rest my heels on the bench opposite, book in hands.

I got there early. There was a store nearby that I wanted to check out... that I did not know would close at the ungodly hour of 7PM. Arrived at 658PM, thirty minutes to kill before he was supposed to be there.

I haven't been stood up in a long time. Actually, I can think of one other occasion, and what was simply, like this one, a reschedule.

When I called him, and he relayed to me that the babysitter fell through, he was sick, had completely forgot... when I called, he didn't pick up the phone with an apology or an "oh my god" it was more of a "hey, what's going on" and then I had to remind him.

Yeah, that bad.

The emotion that followed that was like a spear through my side.

It's... it's a lot. He said we'd be best friends, good friends, for the rest of our lives, once we had enough time to separate our emotions, move on. Cue a couple years down the line, we're both over it, and yet... best friends? No. Good friends? No. Close friends that occasionally happen to talk? Yeahhhhh. Nearer to that.

We share too much history not to be close.

But there's close because of shared history and there's close because you connect, or you're without barriers.

It makes me feel like a discarded doll. He has his life, his wife, his kids, his houseful of random animals, and I am, rightly so, a relatively unimportant feature. He makes time for his guy friends, but not so much for me.

This is why, when GV8 told me at our December break-up, that he'd always be my friend, always be in my life, I told him, "Sure. I'll believe it if you're still around a few years from now."

It's motive, motive derived from value.

Too many times, too often. Cast off for others that are also cast off themselves. Another life comes by, and they've disappeared because I no longer offer value to them. Or not enough to compare to the potential of what they may have.

And should I be that important? When in the face of their future? No, probably not.

But I do not want to be told of a future that we're going to have when it's based off of emotions that will fade. I know they're not lying to me, they have full intent of being close friends... but then when the love fades, followed by the guilt of not living up to what they promised when still brimming with connection, they go on. I go on. That's the way it is.

Because time is sparse. We can only devote enough of it to each person that comes by, and we do so by measuring value. We make time for people we get more value from, and that value is defined differently from person to person. When you have a relationship where the main value lies in building a future together, and the emotions that link the two of you, once there is no longer a future together, and once that emotion is put onto another... where do you derive value?

I value Rick because he's the one person whose opinions and input I trust. I might disagree with him on certain topics, but he will make sure I understand what I'm disagreeing with. So I make time to call him.

The ending we had was, while incredibly painful, was not nearly as damaging to me, I think, as the subsequent promises of close friendship that were abandoned when he met his wife.

And even though I can go through the logic of why that happens, as above, logic I truly believe, I cannot stop myself from feeling abandoned, hurt, and betrayed.

He knows this.

And he felt awful that he had forgotten our dinner plans.

But that does not change the way things are, nor should it.

I don't like this feeling of abandonment. I don't like feeling like I've been shoved into the corner of the closet in his mind, to be taken out when impulse strikes, which it rarely does. It tosses everything we shared out on the street, like a freight truck with its doors flapping open, boxes tumbling out.

It makes me feel less. Makes me feel little.

And I keep telling myself that I should not derive my value from others, but who among us does not? Who is entirely self-contained and happy? I know so few, and I keep preaching to myself to stop picturing my own worth by who loves me, who wants me, and that is not a safe thing to do.

But oh so typical.