So this will be a loss blog. I don’t know if it will cover a series of blogs, but it will be long, I can promise that. Within this year, I have lost much. I won’t use names, but I will use truth, and I will use emotion, which is my own perception of truth as I try to walk through this healing process and deal with the broken edges and fight lines along the way.
I won’t apologize for the way this will ramble, the disjointed nature and shape that it will take. I already know this, I already am familiar with the curves it has, the juts and the ravines. You aren’t yet, but you will be. It may be familiar to you as well, or it may be as foreign as a distant land. Either way, this is real. This is my life.
I cannot say when it began. It feels like its just been. This year has torn me to shreds and created scars so deep that even the superficial makeup of a smile I try to wear to hide them every day is beginning to crack. And in all of this, it centers around the loss of people who made me me, who I identified solidity with, and who shook that solidity to the very core. Its forced me to see me, and often, I don’t like what I see, and I feel crushed to the point of being unsure of where to start again. This is a journey, the journey of a loss.
When I met him, I felt like we would be forever. I know when it changed, and I will never understand how. I did what I could, but I think in it all, I was not her. I was not the chaos to which he was accustomed. I was a different kind of chaos. I will never believe she stole him, I never had him to begin with. As apart as they were, when she threatened to leave, I was a mere fleeting memory of someone to whom love had once been professed. I was the secondary prize when she decided that she wanted and deserved more - and so I believed this of myself when he returned to me. I never again trusted a movement, a word, an emotion or an intention. I suppose, it was me that pushed too hard. I think I will probably use that sentence a few times in the course of this journey.
Its been near a year now since he walked away, without looking back. He has moved on, and I cannot. I miss his smile, his laugh, his touch. No one understood why I loved him, but I did. I saw what we had once had, who he had once been, the way he had once loved me. I could feel it every now and again, when we could reconnect on a walk, or in a simple note, or a surprise lunch date. But I also saw myself as invisible. Not in his mind if I wasn’t there … and I felt the weight of that cloak as though it were real. I wanted him to see me all the time, and I pushed to far in finding it from others, lingering over admiration and respect I was given at work… the way people paid attention. I fell too fast and too deep into the pool of attention, and suddenly, abruptly - though really, there was no other option for him - my world uprooted in a night. Inevitable, yes.
Even more the loss of him to me, I feel the loss of him to them. I hate to hear the tears at night as they cry in their beds, the whimpers of “Daddy” in their sleep. The questions as the oldest one ages, doesn’t he love me, why isn’t he here, I miss him, I want to go to his house. I don’t know what to say, so I just hold, and wipe the tears off their soft cheeks. And I cry too. I offer to her to call, and she shouts back at me, he won’t answer. I don’t know what to answer to that - because she is right, he rarely does. And he never calls. She doesn’t understand, she knows she is lovable. I want to call and tell him - to make him show her… but I can’t, and I know that. I have her call anyway - hoping against hope that he will answer, he doesn‘t - and her voice is a mouse-whisper as she leaves her tear-filled fearful message. I try not to think it, but she knows as well as I do that it won’t be returned. And the little one, she knows not. She doesn’t remember life with him here at all … I’m her entire world. I feel for what she doesn’t know.
There are so many questions unanswered. And the way he fought when he got home, as though we had a chance, I feel as though he was biding time, knowing my weakness for him, until he found a replacement. It hurt so much when he started dating again, the way he plastered the proud announcement over his pages online, and I could imagine the way he looked at her. Then he wrote to me about how he asked her out, and it hit me that he had done and said things that in 4 years I had never come close to hearing or seeing …. I was not enough, to earn or have these things to him.
I can’t write any more on him for now, the thoughts are jumbled and angry and confused and bittersweet.
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