Final steps

Well, I've finally deleted my father from my Xbox Live Friends List. Contrary to how it may appear, this step is a huge one. This hails back to a long time ago, when I first got online to play my favorite video game over the Internet. I told my dad at that time that it would be a great way to spend some quality time if he joined up. (He was already considering the idea.) Well, to make a long story much shorter, he said we would have to discuss the meaning of quality time.

Then, as they say, everything came tumbling down. My dad tinkered with the bottom of the Jenga tower we had built over the last 8 years (to be further outlined in a later post), and the whole tower fell. It seemed to take forever, endless scenes of slow motion falling, like in the Return of the King when the ring is destroyed and Sauron's castle is shattered, in annoyingly slow motion.

During this time of slow motion destruction, he went ahead and bought an Xbox 360 and called to share the news. With dismay, I considered the ramifications. He finally broke down and bought something that could have helped bring us together even more, but he did it when we were falling apart. I also considered the option that my opinion mattered little to him. See, my sister got married. Her husband and his father and brother were both on Xbox Live, and these people also pestered my dad to join. In my reasoning, he apparently joined to play with them, not me; he and I were barely speaking at that time. I wonder to this day if my dad understands how much this rankled. When it was my idea, we needed to have a discussion of terms; when it was someone else's idea and he and I were having problems, he went ahead and joined up.

So, anyway, I added him to my Friends List, where I could see when he was on and what he was playing and who he was playing with. I had no intention of playing with him while we were at odds. But I assumed that some day, things would be better. Instead, they continued in like manner, and I did not witness the evolution needed for us to reconcile.

The Xbox Live nettle drove deeper and deeper with the passage of time, until one day I decided that he may have ruined many of our important relationship building activities, but I could not let him ruin my Xbox Live experience. It had been mine alone before. It would be mine alone again. I had taken the steps of deleting all the destructive words he sent to me; one last thing remained. If seeing his name on my Friends List served only to remind me of the family I lost, then what was the point. I'm not masochistic; I take no pleasure in being abused or dominated; I have no taste for suffering. So I deleted him.

Time will heal my wounds, unless I stuff them full of bitterness. So in the name of freedom and healing, I erased the last and simplest of vestiges, not out of feelings of anger or frustration or vengeance but out of a need to let go of those feelings and cast off the sins (of my own personal thoughts and emotions) that so easily entangle. I feel more clean and ready to move on than I have for 8 years.