Sheelah

Three years since you found her, 9 months since we last saw each other and you asked for me back. Told me you were so wrong, I was the one, your muse. But I heard things in what you said that let me know that you were looking for rescue as much as my love back. She turned out to be crazy, boil the rabbit crazy. I could have told you she was. Your midlife crisis - my midlife release. I have moved on, dating good men, loving myself, ready to fall in love again. I am happy. But tonight, listening to the rain, quarantined all these weeks...tonight I am missing you. Not the horrible grief and suffering I felt for so long but missing you the way an old injury can ache from time to time. I want to text, just to make sure you are doing ok in this age of Covid, wondering how the kids are, if you are making it. I finally want you to be happy. I finally wish you well. I finally accept that I will always love you. I finally want to say thank you for all the good things you taught me. I want to text just to check in but I know it wouldn't be welcome. So Universe, take care of this man. He is a good man drowning in all the bad that his life has held. And I love him. So hold him, care for him help, him find happiness.

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” ― Anaïs Nin

I hate you.

It's been 9 days of NC but really three weeks of nothing substantive. So this is it. Some days I still can't wrap my head around ending twenty years in this way. I still can't wrap my head around your deciding that it was all worth throwing away. Still can't wrap my head around how just a few weeks ago you were thinking it was just too hard with her so you might break it off, telling me that as if I would empathize, testing the waters by saying - but what can you do, just come crawling back to me? Maybe I never will wrap my head around all of that - a forever wound you inflicted on me. What I have to wrap my head around is that it was you, not me. You who never recovered from your childhood wounds and now they have reared their awful head in your midlife. I don't know what the future holds for you. I imagine you can hold out with her in chaos and intensity that you confuse with love until she too is wounded and broken and used up. But know this - we WERE worth more than your crisis, I have better love than what you reduced us to in your mind in order to be open to her. I miss loving, I miss knowing I am loved. I miss your music, I miss your hands, I miss your eyes. My heart aches for your company, for the ease of feeling you. Even now when we get together, I know you still feel the ease, the way we fit in each other's orbit. That confuses you now since you think she is the one - why are you trying so hard to go to her? I don't miss who you have become and maybe that is enough to know that I can move on now. I don't want who you have become, I don't want the man who is capable of hurting me like this, without forethought. I don't like the drinking, the man who thinks that no healing can ever take place. She has helped you lose hope even as you think she has brought "real" love because it is so intense. I want to believe that love is not that. I have to believe it. And I have to believe that someday, someone will love me purely, imperfectly, deeply, truly.

A life can change in a phrase - "I met someone". I will hate those words until my dying days.

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” » Edna St Vincent Millay

My heart is shattering again.

How did I go from being your love life to being the complication in your love life? How can you destroy us saying you had met your "once in a lifetime" love to now saying you think about me every day, miss me, love me, AND you are still seeing her, unsure if you should stay with her as if I am the one keeping you away from the love you are committed to rather than SHE is the one who complicated our commitment? And more than anything, how did I get back here again? 6 months after you shattered me, I was slowly coming back to myself. The you came back and 2 months later I am grieving deeply again. I hate this. I hate you for this. I hate myself for this.

=

I saw you today. After all these months. You were texting me. I let you back in. You said you love me. You miss me. You wish you could see me. So we did. You're still seeing her you tell me today. You say more often than not you think you should break it off with her, that everything is just too much. You say that everything is up in the air - that you don't know what to do or say or who you love. I think you can't believe you left me but you can't imagine not being on the path you are on with her. Why did I agree to see you today? The facts are still clear. You are seeing her. You can't seem to stop. It is not the right thing but you refuse to admit that because it would make you feel so bad about everything you've done. You can't let me go. This is all messed up. Mind games. I read a poem today that struck a cord: Loving someone who hates themselves is a special kind of violence, a fight inside the bones, a war within the blood. This is true of loving you. I have to stop. I have to let you go. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have you back now. I have to believe what I said that I deserve better than your love filtered through her. But I can't imagine not having you in my life either. In the end, I will not take you back. I can't. But its not the end yet and I don't know how to survive to get to the end.

Ah, you're ripping me open again. I'm letting you. We're texting today. After four weeks of no contact you write to say you love me and think of me every day. And in spite of the pain, the awful feeling in my gut, the need to run from you, I seem to need more to talk to you. To have you tell me you were wrong, you miss me, you want to end all of this and come back. But none of any of this can be erased and I know there is no going back. I am giving us today. Just today. Maybe just now. a few more hours. Then I will choose me. You cannot suck me in again. You do not have good intentions. I know that in my head. I hope I have the courage to let this be the last text I send you: I wrote a poem for you. Finally I deserve better than your love after it has gone through the filter of her.

What?!!! You just texted me think of you every day. How’s the convalescence? How are you? I love you….xo.” WHY?? Why did you do this to me? Did she tell you we saw each other? You have to know this would tear a hole in me. Think of me every day? Love me? THEN WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME??!! I can't be ripped open again. Please don't rip me open again.

I ran into her today and it knocked the wind out of me. I hate you for doing this. I hate you for doing it with someone so close to my life. I hate that she is a good person. I hate you.

I miss you and I hate you for that. I hate that things are getting bearable, even better, then I am slammed with pain out of the blue. Only momentary pain but that place where the hole opened up in my chest is still there, more closed but identifiable. I know you would be hurt by this but I can't wait for the day that I feel neutral towards you - no love but no hate either. I hope that day comes soon.

So many ways to feel the sting of rejection. I'm thinking of you with overwhelming pain less now but I still feel the pain. I can barely use “us” anymore in reference to what we had. That makes me sad as I so cautiously used it to begin with and then with such joy. I wish you hadn’t made me believe in “us” then I could have stayed protected. I wish you hadn’t because I don’t know now that you believed in us and that's just more to overcome. I still can’t wish you well and that makes me sad too.