For seven years, I’ve been in love with the same man. It started as an insecure, whirlwind
infatuation, then grew into serious affection and concern for his future happiness and
well-being, and by this time five years ago I had stopped using every bad argument
as an excuse to look up flights from London to San Francisco – convinced by his
conviction over so many months, I was finally operating under the assumption
that we would share our lives, or at least as much of them as we could bear to share
before things got too hard. A couple of
years later I dropped the caveat. I was
all in: my future family became our future family, my dream home our dream home,
my career plans inextricably linked with his, less flexible career plans.
I did the one thing I’d always said I could never see myself
doing: I gave myself over completely to another person. I was proud of how little my pride had come
to matter, after years of extending arguments in its favor; I was only slightly
ashamed of how happy I was at the thought of simply being his forever; I felt
safe, cradled in the nest we’d made of our intertwined lives.
But I wasn’t safe. I was
relieved to finally be comfortable with my happiness, and I was perhaps a bit
too secure in its permanence. Now that
it’s all fallen apart, quite spectacularly, in the hands of the one person I trusted
with my whole life, I feel stupid and naïve.
I wish I could take it all back: my logical, cynical brain wishes I’d
never cultivated the false sense of security in the first place, but my heart just wants to erase
his actions and the searing pain they caused and the resulting destruction of
everything I held dear – I shouldn’t, but I just want to forgive him and move
on.
But even if I could get fully behind that option,
circumstances won’t allow it. He’s going
off to a job in Bumblefuck for a year and I’m headed back to the States. The flights have been changed, the flat has
been rented to someone else, and my mother has even come over to help me
pack. So as badly as I want to push the
memory of his cruelty down into the recesses of my heart and just have him back
in my life, I can’t, not right now. And that means I have
to muddle through this misery alone, as best I can, lying awake at night with my heart
aching, pushing through the heat wave and my tears to gather the pieces of my life
here and pack them into insufficient boxes for the long journey back, and
crying like a child in the bathroom at work when I just can’t take it anymore.
All the while, I’m still in love with him. I’m still texting with him and sometimes
talking on the phone, needing him to soothe my broken heart even if that means
forgetting for the moment that he’s the one who broke it. The shards of my pre-relationship personality
periodically join forces to try to convince me to cut him out of my life,
excise his presence and influence and learn to be whole without him, but the
shreds of my heart, tiny as they are, are many, and together they prevail. They need him, and what’s more they want him,
and for now their collective voice is the louder one.
Days like today, I am certain that I’ll never feel normal
again, let alone happy or secure. I’m
doing my best to believe the friends, family, and kind strangers who tell me I have
something to offer, that I won’t be broken forever and that someone will want
to make me feel safe again one day… but right now all I can think about is him,
and how ardently he swore that he would never hurt me, that his first and
foremost goal in life was to take care of me, emotionally and in every other
way I would let him, until the day he died.
And how he broke that promise, and broke me along with it, into a
million tiny piercing pieces.
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