I was on the couch minding my own business, doing the emotional equivalent of reorganizing a junk drawer, when I felt warm cat breath on the back of my neck.
Which was impressive, given that I do not own a visible cat.
“What are you doing, Karen?” asked Bizness, my invisible one.
I sighed. “What does it look like, cat?”
“Wallowing?”
“Hardly. This is called contemplating.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “They apologized.”
I stared straight ahead. Silence is very educational if you let it be.
“Same betrayal?” Bizness asked.
“None of your business.”
“Same apology?”
“I’d rather not share.”
He made a thoughtful noise somewhere near my left ear. “You really need to stop taking other people’s behavior personally. It’s not about you. It’s about their relationship with honesty.”
I looked out the window. Annoyingly, the invisible cat had a point.
“Look,” Bizness continued, “there is something you need to understand… preferably before lunch. Repeated betrayal is not confusion. It’s consistency. One betrayal might be a mistake. Two could be bad judgment. But three is a pattern doing jazz hands and hoping you’ll notice.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly.
“This is not a warrior moment,” he added. “You don’t need to go all scorched earth. You don’t need speeches. You just need to stop giving chances to people who keep tripping over the same moral shoelace.”
I nodded. He was right. It was, indeed, time for final boundaries. Quiet ones. The kind that don’t argue, don’t explain, and don’t reopen old issues, because I am no longer confused about who I’m dealing with.
“You know,” I said, “I used to think forgiveness meant letting people back in. That grace required access. That if someone apologized, I was obligated to try again.”
“An understandable mistake,” Bizness said. “But growth is realizing you don’t need to keep attending lessons someone else refuses to learn.”
“We agree on very few things,” I told the empty air, “but we can agree on that.”
There was a pause.
“Now that you’re done auditioning for the role of Human Emotional Recycling Bin,” Bizness said, “can I have some tuna?”
