repentance accented with dissent

subject: two despondent responses to one correspondent
style: helpful
source: Mr. Cellophane, Chicago

"Everyone gets noticed now and then,
unless of course, that personage should be
invisible, inconsequential me.

Mister Cellophane should've been my name,
'cos you can look right through me,
walk right by me, and never know I'm there."

Well, in that case,

I'm sorry I ruined everything.

There is just one more thing.

I still fail to see

why you know what's best,

why I should have to act

according to your standards,

do what you want me to do.

It's a shame you want to give it up.

I have a feeling you would have made

a really great friend.

[And now it gets even better.]

"I didn't want to talk about it because I wanted to see what would happen between us. I wondered what it'd be like. I didn't want to think about my parents or anything."

I completely understand what you were aiming for. And ideally, it would have worked, if I hadn't known. If I hadn't known about your religion, I wouldn't have held back, and you could have seen "what it'd be like." That's what you wanted. You wanted me to be unaware of the restrictions holding us apart, so you could discern whether we'd work together. But the problem was that the initial conditions changed. You didn't want me to, but I found out. And once I found out, your plan was no longer valid. You wanted things to happen naturally. You wanted to see if we could have a healthy, normal relationship. (Shame on you for thinking we could ever be normal.) Honestly, I too would have loved for it to have been that way. I too wanted to see how it would unfold naturally. But unfortunately, when I have to deal with that sort of ly information, when I have to know it will never work, it sort of prevents anything from happening naturally.

Frankly, I'm with you. I wish I had never known. I wish she had never told me. Because then your plan would have worked, and we would have been normal. And we might very well have been able to work up enough faith in fate to be able to overcome these hardships.

But instead, we are stuck with this. With nothing. We just have to forfeit our wishes. We have to make do with never being able to see each other again.

Funny, how one little scrap of knowledge can utterly spoil everything. Funny, how religion can transmogrify a happily-ever-after into the suffering and eventual death of an ideal love.

What is it I have been saying all along ?

[How's one last addendum, for the road ?]

So many people fritter away their lives with on-and-off relationships.
I don't want to do that.
No. What I would like is an on-and-off-and-on relationship.
I like the sound of that.