The Coward’s Exit

Something happened recently, a rash decision made in the heat of a moment by someone close to me. It isn't mine to tell, so I won't. But watching it, I felt the familiar thing you feel when someone acts too fast, that wince, that oh no, that wanting to reach out and slow their hand before it lands. I tried. I really did. I attempted to calm everyone involved, take a beat. But to no avail. It happened, and it couldn't be taken back.

But who am I to judge? I've made harsh, rushed decisions too many times in my life to count.

I have made many, and if I were to think them all through we'd be here all night. Most small. Some not so. And one of them, dear reader, I want to hand to you now. Not as a penance, not because I'm looking to be forgiven, but because I paid for it, and maybe if I lay it out plainly, you won't have to.

I'll call her Kelly. Not her real name. She deserves privacy, especially after all these years, so I'll give it to her.

Again we go back to the eighties. This time, the late eighties. I was young, and I was not the man I'd like to think I am now. Kelly was beautifully kind. A genuine person, uncomplicated, compassionate, the sort who wanted something real and wasn't ashamed to want it. But I wasn't ready for real. Bottom line. Nothing more complicated than that. I wasn't ready.

My crime? Nothing. Not that I did nothing. That I said nothing.

I did what happens in bad movies and TV shows. I just disappeared. I stopped calling and closed my eyes. I let the unanswered phone calls do what I didn't have the spine to do myself. Today there's a word for it, ghosting, and everyone agrees it's a crap thing to do. Back then there was no word, and it was much easier. We didn't have cell phones. There was no social media. No trail. You could simply step out of someone's life, and once that door shut behind you, it was done. And the quiet would eventually tell her what you were too much of a coward to say.

The guilt I carry to this day, forty-plus years later. Not that it ended. Seasons change, as they do. It's how I chose to end it.

If only I had met the man I am now back then. He would have known the proper way to do things. He would have told her the truth. "I'm not ready for this. I'm sorry." It would have hurt her. It would have been a hard, ugly, honest conversation, and she would have cried, and I would have been the bad guy, because in that moment I would have been.

That would have been the better way to hurt her. That kind of wound heals. It gives a person a reason, the what and maybe the why. The silence I chose does not. Silence is a person left standing at a train station with no answer, turning it over, wondering what she did, when she did nothing at all. I chose the thing that was easier for me and harder for her. I told myself, exactly the way cowards do, that avoiding the conversation was a kind of mercy. It wasn't. It was fear wearing a coat meant to hide what I truly was in that moment.

The lesson, in all of this, the whole reason I'm telling you any of this.

The kind thing and the brave thing are almost always the same. And more often than not, the harder thing. That's how you can tell you've found them. The easy way out, the silence, the slow fade, the text you don't send, the conversation you keep putting off, that ease is the tell. In matters of the heart, easy usually means you're about to make it someone else's problem to understand what you couldn't say.

I'm happily married now. I have a good life, one I'm grateful for every single day, and I would not trade a single moment. So to be clear, this isn't longing. I do not wish anything were different. Some decisions plague you through life, for the simple reason that they taught you who you didn't want to be.

Forty plus years on, and I still think about Kelly every now and then. Not with wanting, but with a kind of apology that falls on no ear at all.

So consider yourself warned, dear reader. That moment will come one day. And when there's a hard thing to say and an easy way out sitting right next to it, do the brave thing. Say the words. Take the ten, twenty harder seconds.

The silence costs more. The brave thing is priceless.