“Have you ever wished you had sold the strip?”
“No.
“Not once?”
I had a hot drink of Gatorade. “Once or twice, I wanted to be the kind of person I could.”
He nodded as he understood.
“It would have been easier,” he said.
“Maybe.
“But then every time you look over there, you would know.”
That was exactly.
People talk about maintaining the position as if they are always proud and clean. It’s not. Sometimes it is expensive, lonely and ugly. Sometimes it makes you seem unreasonable to people who only see the surface. Sometimes you destroy something that looks beautiful because the way you got there was wrong. Sometimes the cost of peace is too high because it requires you to lie down every time you pass the place where the line used to be.
I lost something in that fight. It’s not a surface, because I kept it. No money, because the court helped with that. I lost the easy belief that common sense would win before things became formal. I lost the assumption that the neighbors would correct themselves once they showed the truth. I lost the illusion that “good faith” means a lot when pride and money have already rented machinery.
