A free cookie to anyone who guessed the meaning behind the title of this post before the last sentence of this paragraph. Anyone reading this this might have guessed it is some kind of a timeline, and they would be correct, but a timeline for what? This is the last chance for anyone to guess the meaning of the title, and the topic of today’s post. The title is the timetable to one of the most valuable things in this world: trust.
Trust is unusual in the sense that it takes approximately a minute to form, a second to break, and it can take up to a lifetime to be rebuilt. Though perhaps the first part of that sentence should be amended to say it takes that long for someone without trust issues. However, for the sake of argument, let us assume that it was said by someone blessed with a less cynical point of view than my own.
In some cases, trust can form over the short period of a conversation, other times it might take a few nights of hanging out to try and gage whether or not one is deemed “trustworthy,” though that itself is a little deceiving in its phrasing. There is a line I have stashed away for the right plotline where Character A asks Character B if they think that Character C can be trusted, to which A responds with something along the lines of saying that C cannot be relied on if their lives depended on it, however A trusts C to react in a way that aligns with C’s motivations. When I use it in the right story, I promise it will come out less clunky than that; I just kept the actual phrasing private to avoid anyone stealing it before I officially use it in my work.
One of the more somber memories I have from college was losing someone I considered to be a good friend over a stupid argument; an argument that to this day, I can’t remember how it started. Backing up about seven months for context, I had asked this person to a dance, and due to possible romantic feelings I had for her, I was thrilled to hear her say yes. However, she had overbooked herself, and the person she had agreed to help out would not let her off for that one night. When we talked about it afterwards, she said to me, apologetically, that she always did that sort of thing; said yes to fun plans when she had previous commitments to attend to at the same time. Thinking about it now, all it would have taken for me to have completely absolved her of letting me down then was a simple addition to what she said: “but I’m working on it and trying to be better.” In lieu of that statement, I figured that was just who she was, and I didn’t ask her to try and change that, I just made a note of it that she shouldn’t have been trusted in that regard again, not without rebuilding that trust, and as was previously stated, that could take up to a lifetime.
Although we never discussed it, she apparently had a different view on the timeline of rebuilding trust, or perhaps she thought the lifetime of a Mayfly was enough time to earn that trust back in its entirety. In the following months, no opportunity presented itself that made me think she was trying to earn it back, no signs of any altered behavior to avoid a situation like the one that arose with me. She didn’t understand that just being a good person meant that she deserved that trust and should be forgiven for breaking it in the past, so when we got into that argument, she took offense to it. I sometimes wonder if I had explained to her why she didn’t have my full trust if we’d still talk to each other today, but I was impatient, and knew I was in no condition to talk about such things at the moment, so I abruptly ended the conversation. I would regret that decision for over a year.
I did everything I could think of to try and earn a second chance; to be the kind of person who deserved something of that nature. I quit drinking; I started going to therapy in hopes of learning some other method besides repressing to deal with the anger that I felt to those closest to me, and I even turned somewhere I hadn’t seriously thought about in about two or three years.
I started attending a weekly religious group in hopes of growing in a spiritual manner. For months and months before speaking to her again, I tried every method of bettering myself in the hopes to earn that second chance I craved. I strolled through the campus at night, through all the drinking and shouting to get to a nearby beach, where I could sit and listen to the crashing waves, enjoying the smell of salt water, reflecting on if I was making progress or not, but telling myself the real test would come months later, when we would finally speak again.
I never got my chance. I was told the best thing was to let go of that friendship. I was told that she knew who I was and that I wouldn’t really ever be happy around her if I had the second chance I craved. She might have been right, or she might have been wrong, but it tore me apart that she made that decision for me. After all this time, I have no idea why I wanted that friendship back; I gave to her that second chance without asking for her to do a single thing to earn it, and there I was trying everything I could think of to earn one from someone who thought she was entitled to that privilege for simply being a good person.
And what is my opinion of trust now? If I seemed pessimistic then, now I am downright cynical. Nothing in this world is free; time is the thing that must be spent in order to deserve a second chance. I still hold to the timeline of trust as stated in the beginning of this post, but I must add something else; the visualization of trust…perhaps more accurately, the visualization of mended trust. I imagine trust is a vase, and someone breaking it knocks it off its place. Even if the act was unintentional, the vase is no less broken, and it will take time for all the pieces to be put back where they were. Despite that time is spent working on it, even if every single piece goes back to where it was in the original shape, the vase itself will never look as it did before it was broken. Unfortunately, too many of us think it simpler to buy another vase and throw out the old one, rather than taking the time to repair what once was.