Falling

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Life has been full of lows lately – tears in public, anxiety about moving abroad, work dissatisfaction – but the worst of them have been in my relationship.  I was finally getting used to using the word ‘fiancé’, to talking about wedding plans and thinking about vows, when cracks began to appear.  Big, jagged, terrifying cracks like the ones that earthquakes make in asphalt.  The kinds of cracks that seem bottomless, that you hope won’t stretch or widen, that you hope you won’t fall into – but then you do.

The cracks started in April, with a trip home to visit parents whose unbelievably hideous behavior sent the first obvious tremors through our relationship’s crust, but the fissures had been there in the core for months.  Something had been happening to him, and those fractures in his mind spread fast and deep into the bond between us.  April and May were rife with cruelty and tears and torturous indecision, until I felt split apart in so many ways I couldn’t even picture being whole again in the same way I was ‘before’.

And yet, when the torment of ‘yes I do’-‘no I don’t’-‘yes I do’ ended yesterday, I felt even less secure than I had for the past few months.  When he packed his bag and left to catch a train to his mother’s house, when my angry shouts and broken sobs were only echoes in my head and the door closed with a loud click and I sat on the sofa in shock, I felt like the million pieces into which I’d been split, the pieces I’d hoped could be sewn back together with time, had been scattered all over the scarred earth.  I burst into tears, proving myself wrong: I did have more reserves, did have feelings and saline left in my body.

The cracks had widened, and I fell in.  And now it’s all blackness and emptiness, a kind of emptiness I’d never truly understood.  I’ve been alone before – I was alone my whole life before I met him and learned how to be not-alone – but this is different.  I don’t know how to do this kind of aloneness; even as I know in my logical mind that I’ll eventually be okay, my heart feels simultaneously empty and shattered.  How can a thing that is broken up into so many tiny pieces ache with such a heavy wholeness?

Two and a half days ago, as I sat on the cold tiled floor of the dark bathroom, sobbing, and he begged me to give him another chance, I promised myself this would be the last time.  And not 48 hours later, he proved how little he wanted the chance he'd fought so hard for.  He left, and I stayed, desperate and hurting and hating him for having family to run to.

Maybe we will work it out… he seems to think we can.  But for now I’ll just keep falling, trying not to knock into jagged edges on the way down.  I thought I’d hit the bottom so many times, could have sworn there could exist no 'further down', but now I’ve learned my lesson.

There is no such thing as rock bottom.  There is only the falling.