love | interstalking

Adrift

Several months ago I wrote about yearning for the untethered existence of my youthful poverty. Having nothing and therefore everything to learn and gain. Missing that freedom.

My fortune at this moment is to have been set afloat emotionally. All my stability feels like a curse, like I was sent backwards a year but I’m missing the bravado I carried with my independence then. Because I’d added someone I became deeply attached to into it, that same life, without that person, feels empty even while full of the same old good things. Nothing else has changed; the one new special thing I had is gone. I feel lost, and it’s not that romantic feeling from when I was twenty three. I’m lost inside this structure that took years to build up. It just feels very lonely.

The lessons of this particular heartbreak won’t be clear to me for a while. All I can think now is I have a ton of work to do that I was scheming in the background when the most important thing to me involved whatever would make my new best friend happy. Somehow that made me feel very happy, and important, though never exactly secure. But also never bored – which is what I feel right now. I’m so bored. And now the idea of all this work I must do… well it just seems dismal.

My life over the last few years has been marked by death. My Dad. My nephew the next year. My Godfather this year. I’ve practiced these forced goodbyes. I’ve proclaimed that life is too short to protect your heart from everything that might hurt it and also bring you joy. I tried so hard. You can’t regret that, because it’s what you have to do, right? Or you’ll never get anywhere, and you’ll never feel anything.

I got to the point of being able to let myself feel such nice, potentially temporary things. I become healthier and more balanced in a relationship, and I continued to grow and evolve individually, a lot, in this last one. I’m so scared of backtracking into pointless bullshit. I have so much time now – I can’t remember when I had this much time. Life for a while was a blur of travel and work and dating. I now have copious moments to play guitar, write, work on personal projects, plan for the future (the thing I’m most anxious about), make and save money, sleep. I know how to do this – including the hangovers that come with a single girl’s social life – I have been amongst the best at it for years. But I’m so over it. None of it seems particularly exciting, or important, and it’s hard to feel motivated about building your future when you just feel kind of sad. Being in love felt important and progressive. Especially sad is the thought of potentially going back to dating guy after guy after guy. I just want someone to force something on me now like the breakup was decided for me. It seems unfair that I have to make this part happen myself.

I have to change my patterns and get off the hamster wheel of meaningless social interactions to fill time and supposedly create opportunities for more significant connections. I had stopped, and I was truly content in myself and my life. But that was before I knew what I was missing. Now that I do, I’m not sure I know how to be me alone anymore unless I rewind to a less evolved self. At least that’s how it feels today, almost a month in, now that my heavy grieving period is over, and I’m recreating my life, and it’s sinking in a lot more that there was someone beside me who’s gone for good. The hardest thing to manage is just being by myself.

Any other break ups, I still had all this growing up to do. I’m always learning, but real maturity has me in a different spot. I know the next lesson is a new kind, something that I can’t expect, maybe harder than anything else, like the emotional work I’ve done because I couldn’t live not doing it anymore. I’ll keep working, and slapping my own wrist when I reach for instantly gratifying noise. I’ll keep looking for healthy ways to make myself feel better. There’s just a space that I’d created, and he’d walked in, and right back out.

Take Care

“Take care” is my least favorite thing to hear from someone who just broke up with me. I get it; when you break up with someone, you’re leading them on if you tell them you still love them. I’ve done that, because I meant it, and the person I was breaking up with said, “then why are we breaking up?” Time and experience tells us love isn’t actually enough. I get it. I get it. I get it. But still – take these words away from me, they hurt too much. No one can stop loving instantly, or maybe ever. And thinking that, or pretending that, makes me wonder why we even try, or why we even pretend, to be in love in the first place.

Literally a week before he left me, I told him, “I really am so in love with you; it’s scary.” And it had been scary. Our conversations lately had been scary. I take responsibility for my part in those – I fully illustrated in color the things we were both worried about, that mostly seemed to point back to our age difference and stations in life related to it. I voiced for him every detailed reason he may have thought he should end the relationship. Though at that moment, we were both (or at least I was) still in denial that those reasons mattered. He told me, “you don’t have anything to worry about; I’m yours”. So of course I believed that.

Days to come, I realized I needed to figure out what I actually wanted. I never thought I knew what it was, but keenly felt I probably wasn’t going to get it, so maybe I did know? Distinctly I felt there was a break up in my future because of this. Maybe my belief that our love was too strong to be affected by trivial societal pressures was a faulty one. Maybe I didn’t want to admit that the things I didn’t like that were going on probably weren’t going to change – maybe not for me or anyone. But, I thought I had some time. Instead, I soon felt the rug pulled out from under me. The love and affection I was holding on to like a sail wasn’t enough of a save for all the doubts and worries he now fully affirmed about our future, or, more importantly to him, his own. Meaning that what he actually wanted did not involve staying committed to being with me and the perceived sacrifices it could involve.

I’ve never had a break up before when I still thought we were in love. I have had a breakup with someone who was smothering me who I pushed away for months prior, with someone who was abusive I ran away from, and with a couple really nice guys after a major fizzle, when I didn’t particularly feel like sleeping with them anymore. It was so much easier, and I was always the one who dug the grave after a long death rattle.

I’ve been the dumper many times, and thinking about how I felt and what the person who just broke up with me may be feeling in light of that, is painful. The last major one, I felt as if I was leaving my family, boyfriend and dog on the couch in tears as I rolled my suitcase out the door. But, I also knew truly I did not want to be with this person anymore. It could not be overcome. And I never went back.

What I’m going through now: so much worse. I think, was this worth it? My last love, I truly entered into the riskiest relationship ever. I told myself and him: “I am sacrificing tomorrow for today.” I felt truly that now was worth any outcome, maybe because I viewed this heartbreak in my future for a long time. And the point when I thought that maybe I’d been wrong was when it became true. I did my best to love him. I showed myself that I could. And it was good for both of us until it wasn’t enough.

I know vulnerability and pain are where we find our biggest growth. I know I can’t regret it, but right now it’s hard to know it was worth it. Despite what was wrong, I just miss what I lost, what I gave so much of myself to in faith and hope that I wouldn’t be here, or that if I was, I’d still feel grateful somehow for what I’d experienced. And I know all those feelings come from me – me when I’m able to open my heart. I’m responsible for that, for the good and the bad.

Forget the immature fantasies of him seeing you now that your stomach is frighteningly flat from heartache and deciding he wants you back despite you both knowing your futures don’t align, even if you’re both unsure exactly why. Worry about what your actual future actually is. Forget the idea that one last little hurrah will cure this horrible feeling even though you know you’ll leave each other again. Do your best to let him go with love and compassion, easy and hard because you hadn’t stopped loving him enough to break up with him despite your agreement that this is ultimately best for you both. It’s over. This feeling sucks, but it will end too.

In this instance saying “take care” is the exact opposite of what you want it to mean. It just means to take care of yourself. And of course you’ve always known how to do that.