September 14, 2021:
She rolled her eyes in exasperation, when I told her I was moving.
She communicated so poorly that it was always necessary to read tea leaves. But her pattern of oblique complaint seemed consistent. She felt I'd convinced her to move to a place she didn't like in order to be closer to me, then ignored her. So that her eyeroll signified, "Why did you want me to come here, then, if you're going to leave?"
In reality — this is genuinely reality, it's not my subjective point of view — I'd tried so many times to reach out to her that in the end I'd given up. She rejected my overtures, over and over, with sarcasm and exasperation. "I don't want to go there." "I don't want to do that." While in the best of our interactions she was either patronizing or flatly insulting.
I believe with some confidence that she had no idea of any of this. Not a glimmer. The idea that she'd rejected my attempts and hurt my feelings was foreign to her sense of the universe, as through most of our lives together she'd have never imagined I'd felt rejected since childhood.
But there's more. There's a deeper hostility which Freud would have called "ambivalence". Where she resented me for not being the "good kid" she'd hoped for, and I resented her for the rejection I'd experienced. And because she'd never learned to communicate and thus had never taught me to communicate our resentments and conflicts had simmered and festered and come out sideways for decades. So that in the end she believed I'd selfishly yet unseriously disrupted her comfortable life to no practical end. While I felt I'd ironically underestimated the true depth of her rejection.
She was right though that my moving away was in part my own gesture of rejection. I'd given up, and I set out to find my own life. Ironically, or not, that attempt resulted in the single greatest failure I've experienced.