Bruce/Nat
I don't know if you're deliberately misunderstanding every single thing I'm saying, or if we're having two different conversations simply because we've managed to slide onto diverging tracks. So: let's try this.
I left for about eight hundred reasons. You were as much a part of it as was anything or anyone else. (Which, I'll do the math for you: one eighth of one percent. Is that still too much credit? Just let me know.) I don't think you were trying to trick me, or do anything, really, other than trying to do what we all always tried to do. It never occurred to me that it might have been part of some plot, as you seem to be implying I believed; because whether you decided to do it in that second, or an hour before, or a week earlier, makes no difference whatsoever. I understand why you might have done it. I don't even think, in the scheme of things as we were given to understand them at that point in time, that it was a wrong thing to do. (That's a very, very clear sign that we were wrong about everything, but that's a different conversation.)
I am extremely pissed off about it. I absolutely do not want to talk about it with you after this, ever, any more than I want to get a tooth drilled out. But it was at most an exemplar of all the underlying reasons why I wanted to go. It was not important in any meaningful sense. It was just extraordinarily shitty. And now it's done.