Let’s not pretend I haven’t been avoiding this; that the hours of the day don’t drag like nails across a chalkboard as midnight draws closer like the edge of the world and I fall off.
Let’s not pretend I know why, or enough to have easily made this better.
I’m coming apart.
Earlier today I forced myself to sit outside and stare at the clouds; one of the most beautiful days of weather we’ve had for months. I couldn’t think of any work to do in the hour or two before the proscribed number of hours I set for myself were up, and I’d taken a break in the middle of the day already.
And I was itching, crawling with little seeds of self-loathing, frustration, contempt - unforgivable sins, crimes of misunderstanding against the self, the kind of black poison that eats people alive and leaves them empty, hollow, wasted. I’ve seen enough people go down that road to know - it’s to be refused at all costs.
It’s been like this for a while now, I suppose. But this was enough to make me stop, to force myself to think.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know why that’s so hard right now.
I managed to stay outside for a half hour or so - fidgeting occasionally, sending texts, checking email on my phone. This isn’t like me. Only a month ago I’d sit out there until the sun went down, lost in thought and happy for it.
…
There’s plenty of reasons for me to be having trouble. Part of it’s work stress - getting close to finishing my doctorate, worrying if I’ll be able to get everything done in time, worrying about looking for a job and what my life will be like after. Part of it’s that some of my friends have been distant, and the longstanding fear that maybe this is the beginning of us drifting apart.
And on and on… the same stresses and fears that have plagued me on and off for my adult life. Am I breaking? Has time not hardened me to these problems, but worn me down?
Of course it’s obvious - these are the easy problems, the scapegoats, the stresses you worry about to distract you from the real problems.
It’s all about her. It’s always, fucking, about her.
…
We go up and down. I see her again, I feel warm and fuzzy, things start again - it seems like she’s always there, just waiting for things to start again. And then time wears on.
The weight of our history, the pain of our memories - they’re too much. They don’t just go away, and somehow we can’t talk about them.
No. She can’t talk about them. She won’t remember, she doesn’t want to go there, she doesn’t…
We talked. Three weeks ago? A month ago? We’ve been talking regularly, but it’s been bullshit. Empty, one-sided conversations.
The week before… we really started to get into it. I pulled out the pain, the misery, the endless sense of betrayal and I showed it to her. And she shut down, she couldn’t keep going. I mean, I get it. We’d been talking for hours, she had a very painful ear infection, it was much later there and here thanks to the time difference.
We tried to pick it up again the next weekend, the important one. We spent three hours talking about bits and pieces, about the words we could remember, without touching the feelings they’d evoked, what they really meant.
Then she wanted to call it for the night, and I broke. It had been a bad week in between. We exchanged some texts about it. It was hard to get the time to talk. And nothing had changed. I couldn’t do it.
I let everything out, the kind of honesty that only comes from pure, simple-minded desperation. The last resort in for my devastating need to be understood by her in this moment.
Her cheating on me. What it was, what it meant to me - that it still fucking matters.
See, here’s the thing. The thing we finally said. See, she cheated on me - not physically, but emotionally - only a few weeks into our ill-fated relationship. And she did it because she couldn’t open up to me. She was scared of revealing herself, of exposing her real thoughts, fears, worries. Scared of what I’d say or think if I really saw her. So she opened up to some guy she met instead.
That’s it - she started talking to this guy because she was too afraid to try talking to me. And that led to everything else, to the widening gulf between us, to her needing him more than me because her life was going to shit and she needed someone she could really talk to.
And here we are years later, after so much bullshit, her still saying she wants to be with me, she wanted me all along and just fucked everything up, how she has problems but she’s working on them and that was what went wrong.
And she’s still never opened up, not the way she couldn’t then. She’s still hiding behind those walls as I’m screaming for her to let me in or let me go.
We get through all this. She says all the right things - how she’s serious, she wants to make this work, she’ll do it. I’m skeptical, I’ve heard this before - it’s one thing after I’ve kicked down the door, after I’ve forced the conversation, after I’ve made it all immediate and central and clear.
The next weekend she wanted to talk, but it ended up not working out - the timing was bad, it was okay, but part of me tensed listening to her chicken out and say she wasn’t up to bringing up anything serious.
Last weekend I text her after it’s clear she’s not going to reach out, surprised she didn’t want to talk. Her response is relaxed - she doesn’t see what it means to me.
I think she’s already forgotten again. I think I’m waiting for nothing, but…
I have to. I have to end this. I have to let it get bad enough, and not run away when it’s too much. I have to let it snap and rip and tear until there’s nothing left to go back to.
But I hate this limbo. I hate this feeling, where wanting something - someone - else would be a betrayal. Wondering if it’s possible, if she’ll surprise me, if there’s something good for us left after all…
But I’ve carried this for too long, my life’s been built on the bedrock of my despair for what died between us.
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