It feels like it was another lifetime ago that we were together. Like I was trapped in some sort of terrible dream I couldn’t wake up from, where the past just kept repeating itself over and over. The last “conversation” I had with you was asking for an apology for some of the behavior you displayed while we were together and instead you apologized for how we were together. This admittedly made me feel angry. I had always felt that you didn’t take responsibility for a lot, but at the time I also wasn’t taking full responsibility for my actions either. I had apologized for the things I had done or said in reaction to one of our many fights, but it wasn’t until I got distance that I could sit back and see why it was such a powder keg. I was a girl who had been previously abused and had PTSD, and who ran when things got to scary as a survival tactic. You were a boy with abandonment issues and very bad anxiety. That is a dangerous combination. Mind you, the woman I am now and the girl I was even a year ago are worlds apart. I don’t react to hostility, aggression or control like I did before. I don’t feel the need to leave to calm myself down and stay centered, which means I don’t have to deal with someone trying to prevent me from going anywhere. I also do not accept behavior like that from anyone, and never will ever again. I only need to be present in the moments in my life as they come, and there is no shouting or negative energy everywhere. I could write a novel on the analysis of bad behavior you and I displayed, but that’s not really what I want to write.
It doesn’t matter to me if you read this or not, as to me this is just sending a last remnant of thought off into the world. I’ve had two dreams of you since I left you. The first you came pounding on my door, knowing I had let someone love me just a few months after we parted, demanding to be let in. I told you to go, but you persisted. Upon opening the door you told me “you belong to me” and I discovered you had been watching me. You were there to let me know there was no escaping you. In the dream you swallowed me up in a sea of darkness. I woke up from it shaking. Realizing how some of the events that transpired between us had been truly traumatizing. I can imagine you maybe had a similar experience. Well, not literally with the same dream, but in possibly feeling haunted by those past feelings. The second was over Sammy being sick. He had to be put down, but I was adamant that you had to know. The vet kept reassuring me that you did not need to know, and that she would take care of it. She would do what I couldn’t. I resisted and somehow ended up back with you. You went to touch me to draw me towards you and I sobbed. My heart had the purest sadness because I knew in the depths of my soul that I never wanted to be with you or near you again, and I told you as much. That dream left me in a state of clarity. Also I hugged Sammy for ~1 hour because of the very thought of losing him wasn’t something I could stand. I had realized that I wasn’t owned by you anymore. My love, my body and my heart were all mine to give to whomever I choose. I was past feeling like I was cheating when I would sleep with other people, because I had reclaimed my identity.
This year, away from you and the situation we were in…has been the best year of my life. I am so grateful for the actions I took, and only regret not doing it sooner. If I prayed, it would be that you are having a similar experience. That all the things I told you came to be. That you would find love, or have found love. That all the things you deserve would come to you, and that money while helpful isn’t everything. I’m unsure about the last one for you, but the rest I know is a certainty of life. I hope you’re sewing oats and being present in your life too. We both deserve our happiness.
I have reflected upon my life greatly this year, and while I do not think many of the things you did were appropriate, normal or ok, I forgive you. I didn’t have as strong of an understanding of anxiety or your own traumas that caused you to to react how you did, or try to control me like you did. I think if I had, things may have been slightly less tumultuous, but…I doubt it would have changed our future together, I think it would have just eased the present while we lived in it. I hope someday you forgive me for my short comings and behavior too. I am not proud of my words or actions and reflect on them to ensure that I am a better partner and person to the people I love. Friends, family and the great loves that have come into my life this year have been amazing lessons in compassion and self acceptance. I needed this, to be alone, to grow independent and strong my entire life. It’s made the relationships I’ve found much more satisfying in many ways. I’m glad we got the change now rather than later, and am so entirely grateful that we never eloped like we had talked about. God. I hope for so many good things for you. I hope you repair your relationship with your family. I hope you get a job that pays you what you deserve without working you to death. I hope that you find the girl of your dreams, if you haven’t already, and I hope you love her with every once of your being.
You are a good man, and I am so sorry if I ever had any part in making you feel like you were less than fantastic. No one deserves to be disrespected, and I wish that in the face of the things you said to me or did, that I had remembered that. We tore each other down instead of building each other up, and I think it was due to the fact that we just…were never meant to be together and resentment is a real thing that can sneak up on you. Well, I’m done apologizing or explaining myself. I no longer “beat a dead horse” as you used to tell me. Just promise me, or yourself, that you will never let your anxiety become so bad that it damages another person or yourself again.
So, I hope you love yourself and finally see what other people have seen in you all along. You will always have a special place in my heart, but you are part of my past now, the same as I am a part of yours. I hope your future is bright, and that the bet was wrong and that you make it well over the age of 33.
-Goodbye
3 Comments
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This sounds eerily familiar… very sad to read but it made me think a little differently about my own previous relationships. Well written.
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So, this is a haunting, haunting letter full of old ghosts. I don’t know who you are, but, it reads like it’s from someone I used to know. There are so many things I’ve written and never sent, so many prayers I’ve prayed, so many times I’ve wanted to hear some of the things you’ve said, and so many times I’ve wondered, what I could or should say, and how best to heal and let it go.
I don’t have any answers, I never really did. I did the best that I was able during the time we were together. If she was right here in front of me, this is what I would say:
I was hurting when we first got together, and I needed time to understand, to heal, and to figure things out. I was anxious, and deeply ashamed of things that I now tell as stories and lessons learned. Further, I did not know, the things I needed to know to love you as I should have. For all of those things I am deeply, profoundly, and sincerely remorseful. I know you loved me and I know I hurt you more than you loved me. Some days it feels like I drove away the only person who knows me better than I knew myself and that I blew my only chance at happiness. Some days I remain angry at you for the things that you visited on me because of your traumas. Some days I love and miss the ways you could make all of my anxiety go away with a word or a touch, and some days I hate you for being the source of many of those anxieties.
If it had been up to me, we would have ended a long time ago. When I moved away to go to graduate school. I’d never broken up with anyone before, and instead of having the hard conversation that needed to be had, I used every form of indirection at my disposal to tell you I didn’t want to be with you. But, you graduated from school, needed a place to stay, a home for your dog, and a place to land. Further, you told me how you had changed, over text message, how much being with me had shaped you. And, after I had cheated, when I said “work is the only thing left,” and was ready to make my peace with my situation, you felt sorry for me and I was trapped.
Still though, I did the best I could. I supported you, I met you with kindness, I took really good care of you financially, and I tried really, really hard to make myself love you as you deserved. When you have to force something that shouldn’t be forced, it’s just another way for the heart to break. I knew in my head and in my heart that you had decided I was the one and I wouldn’t be out of it unless you decided that I wasn’t anymore. It was that way with so much of our relationship. I don’t feel that you ever really saw me for who I was, or, respected me as a whole person.
There are moments, footprints in the sands of time and space, which crystallize, and clarify these feelings. The first Christmas gift, when you said “that’s romantic” and later said you loved them. The time at my parents, when you told my folks I looked like a down-syndrome baby, and then put the same baby picture on your fridge. The times I didn’t feel in the mood, or whatever, and over my objections you went right ahead. The marriage proposal where I had to say things four times until I said the words you wanted to hear. All of these things hurt, they still hurt, and together with the incident with my ears that crystallized, for me, how I needed to leave, the sum total showed me that it never really was me you were in love with, but, what I was able to give to you.
Of course, I wasn’t any better. I drank too much. I was severely anxious and afraid of failure. I ignored you and left you at home too often pretending to be working but fighting with you and fighting with myself. I needed you in deeply unhealthy ways: I came to depend on you. I felt trapped and helpless. I didn’t trust my own judgement. I was ashamed of myself, ashamed of the cheating, ashamed of my failures, ashamed of how I needed you. I didn’t know how to tell you the truth in the big things, and so I became a liar. I avoided conflict. I said yes, or nothing at all, even when I knew that maybe we would have problems. I ignored things important to you, like birthdays, valentines day, and so many other things. I regret all of those things. What should have been a mutual partnership and a coming together of equals who challenge each other and make each other better, became instead, a tearing down and a breaking off. Instead of looking for ways to appreciate you, I resented you, and instead of talking about it honestly, I took my vengeance by the pound with a million little paper cuts.
I lost my way, and, somewhere, I threw away my moral compass. It pains me now, to think about it: that I, someone who once had his ass beat for twenty minutes because he wouldn’t lie about a window he never broke, could become a liar in word and deed. I am not proud of that time in my life. I re-visited the abuse back on you in a million small ways, and instead of building you up and reassuring you, I tore you down. In the end, we stayed trapped in a mutual cycle of dependence and abuse where each of us became the worst versions of ourselves. I regret all of it.
But, regret, as they say, is merely memory teaching by example. The time away from you has been hard, necessary, and good for me. Sometimes I think you would be so proud of me. I drive now, every day, in a city with more traffic than I ever thought I would be able to drive in. I quit drinking after my mom passed, and it’s a promise I have kept. I am still smoke free, another promise kept. Slowly, I am learning to take responsibility again for my actions after a long hiatus. I am learning to keep a cleaner house. I am, slowly, getting my time under control, and, learning to accomplish a certain number of things in a set amount of time. These are all things I needed to learn that I don’t think I could have learned had I stayed with you. Or, perhaps, I could have, but, I don’t know. The cards never seemed to fall the way we think they do, and what matters is that we play the hand we are dealt and make the most of what we have been given.
I don’t hate you. If I’m honest with myself, and I tend to be the most honest when writing things such as this, the hatred was a defense mechanism because it was easier to blame than to take responsibility. I don’t know, given each of our personal histories, if we could have ended any other way than the way we did. I know leaving each other was for the best. I know you, and I know, and tell people often, that there’s a wonderful little school with a great teacher and three kids that have a wonderful step-mom. Sometimes I wish I could go back, and armed with the knowledge I now have, reassure you, find the part of myself I needed to give you and watch you be whole with me. But there is no going back. And, if I didn’t have these wishes, these regrets, I would not have the lessons that they embody. Someone told me, that every relationship you’re in teaches you things that you needed to learn about yourself, to make you better for the next time. Someone else, told me that we become the reflections of who the most important people in our life think we are. I told myself, about you, that if you had loved her as if she was the person you wanted her to be, she would have been.
These are the lessons, distilled painfully teardrop-by-teardrop, that I hope to take with me as I continue down my road. I love you, and I still miss you. You know me, you know I don’t believe in meant-to-be. At the end of the day, there are only the choices we make and the lessons we learn. I hope someday there can be a restoration and a friendship between us. I miss my sister. My wonderful, terrible, overbearing, kind, and compassionate older sister. I say this again, despite all of the hurt it caused you, because that is how we treated each other. We became, over-time, the wise, knowledgeable, older-sister and the foolish, young, impetuous younger brother, and I miss her dearly. Perhaps we should have never been romantically involved, because we could have been beautiful friends. But we were, and the painful, hard, deep lessons that arose came from two people who tried very hard to force each other into roles that they couldn’t fill for the other person. You were my eighty percent out of one hundred. God bless you, and may you be well. I hope you live fully, love much, are healed completely, and that you find the self-compassion and acceptance of yourself and for other that you so deeply need. I don’t have anything left to say. You have my heart and my love such as it is, and I must let you go and live my life as best I can. With all my heart, I speak love and blessings into your life. You are a special person and deserve so much.
From this life to the next.
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This was heartbreaking.
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