I cried to that ceiling. Overwhelmed at the realization of my own selfishness. Suddenly very aware of how awful it must have felt. Every ounce of heartache I had couldn’t justify it anymore. Hormonal or not, I had see it. Felt it. Spent the past months empathizing and trying to rationalize the feelings away. But they remained.
Just moments ago my dad called me to tell me someone I had lost touch with was separated from their spouse. He didn’t have details. I didn’t need them. They were the last two people on earth I would have guessed to not make it as a couple. My tears dried instantly. It was all broken. Everyone. Everything.
As humans I think we have an aspect of selfishness we dedicate to our empathy. When we hear the worst we try to feel the worst. Either that or we ignor it. I try to feel things with them stemming from my own experience. I’m not much for ignoring things. I put myself into the place of greatest pain I had ever felt, selfishly wanting to relate, and then I stay there until I can put myself in their situation with those feelings too. As if they felt what I did. Forcing my emotions on them. This time it was easy, because prior to the call, that’s what I was reliving. My greatest and most raw pain.
Myself.
To put it in more context, myself nearing the end of my previous relationship. I’m an analyzer. I started looking at what went wrong, and yes I found a great deal of things, which is overwhelming enough for one person. It wasn’t until I stopped looking at the him and us stuff, and started looking at the me half that I realized…most of it was me. I was the one getting in the way of us. I was the one who was fearful of our future. Fearful of the money and the bills and the medical stuff and the employment and the distance and the flaws and the family and the drama and the potential children and the struggle…oh the deepest darkest fear of all…the struggle of everything all at once. Then the fear after all of it…having him just leave, because I would be so wrapped up in the issues of me…I would have forgotten there was even a him.
I had forgotten there was a him by the end. In my mind, I had him leaving me 5 years into the future of our marriage. It was so fearfully ingrained in my mind that my soul believed it. Circumstances reinforced it. Things fell into place. Or rather, we seemed to be falling into different places. So I guess, rather, things were really just falling apart. I had told myself that it would hurt less now than it would later.
It struck me here. At 9:43pm on a Tuesday night. Alone in my apartment. Tears in my eyes and lightning in the sky.
I lay here crying to a ceiling I hope isn’t keeping God from hearing me. Wondering if I will ever be loved again or if I am doomed to that painful loneliness that struck the moment I hung up that phone on the one person who knew me the most of anyone else in the world…and still cared. I had been so wrapped up in me, that I forgot he existed.
That is so painful to admit, especially over someone you told you loved them.
We aren’t getting back together. I know that much. I have more of me to work on. He has his life to get together. I have mine. In my mind he already left…and that was how things would stay. It isn’t fair for a person to have to live with a person who was running away from the fear of being run away from. He’s better off without me. I just hope he is out there having realizations of his own. Trying to mend those broken places with God instead of me…or even more painfully for us both…someone else. Because you can’t fix an open wound with broken glass.
In the morning this will all be a painful memory. I will learn and grow from it eventually. For now, I’ll let it hurt a bit more and try to sleep.
