What Happens When Forever Goes to Never

Like the dark wraiths that form from the shadows in the movie, Ghost, to steal a person’s soul and take it as they scream. My very heart has been dashed. My soul rendered apart. My dreams removed forcibly from me. Even when I said that this is how things should be, that we should be apart, I never believed them, and now my heart can’t begin to feel that you do believe we should be apart. Obviously I do think you think so, because I have never felt hurt like this. Tears welling up, unbidden, at the most inopportune time. Stripped down and exposed for a fraud. Brought into a coliseum of fingers pointing while his voice reverberates through my head, chanting that he doesn’t love enough, care enough, that I am as nothing to him. In the burning spotlight, alone. Like the sun moving down beyond the horizon, you have left my life. And now I remain, solitude forced on me. Left, like trash on the beach after spring break, alone. Alone as that solitary hanger left in a closet after the move has happened.

And yet, this is how I knew it would be. From the beginning I knew that I would not be the love of your life (although I hoped, and even believed you when you said it was so), but merely your first true love. Everyone has their first true love, that love that marks a life forever. A love so strong and true and amazing that can only ensure that the loss of that love to be the most awful feeling a person can experience. I tried to not be that love for you. I tried to place a barrier between us, to have you insert another love to be that first true love, so that ours would not be that ill-fated first love, but an enduring love. But it did not happen so. So it happened so.
I only wanted to be special to you. I only wanted to be the most important person in your life. All I wanted you to do was to love me. I only wanted you to see me as I see you.

My love for him had turned into dark quiet thing in our separation. A gladiola bulb, waiting for that time to return to stretch up and reach beyond the hope of a promise, to fulfill it. A love that had lain quietly dormant, but full of possibilities. A love that will forever remain in that bulb, as the sun has dropped from my sky, forever. No bulb can grow alone.

I feel a slow suffocation. The air supply was slowly turned off when he began, and now that he is done, the air has been removed. Remembering to breathe is a difficult thing, especially when the enormous weight of regret and heartbreak fill your throat, not allowing anything to pass, and sits heavily on my chest, decompressing the lungs that refuse to fill with air that cannot pass by the lump in my throat.

It is an agonizing thing, this. It is a feeling so raw, that one can only experience it by distancing themselves from their body. Only in an observational stance can one not become consumed by this. Consumption would allow the loss of life. Require the end of a life not good enough to be as important to him as he is to me.

Already I feel a change, a loss of the person I was with you. This cannot be the lightening, the return to happiness that you bespoke. This is much more of a turn to darkness and silence, for speaking hurts.

I guess I know, now, why he didn’t want to plan anything for the wedding. He never meant his proposal and was happy to draw the reigns back on the wedding as he could. All I wanted was to return home and be with him. I believed him when he told me that he was the one for me, that our lives would be intertwined forever, that he was my one true love. How could I? Why would he say such things?

Time, distance, communication, replacing of each other as confidantes - things that have led to this downfall. All I wanted to do was to close up shop down there and return to be with him. Now, this fall. I would have written from home, and traveled down to PR to conference there. Not that I could talk to you about that. Why were there things that I couldn’t talk to him about? Why did I feel so constrained? Why do I feel so lost?

My body is a knot. My stomach rebels against the idea of food, my eyes rebel against light, my ears against speech, my tongue feels as stone, my reaction to the world feels hampered by an unwieldy stone dragging me down to bad times. I can’t move except to let the tears stream down my face. Soundless, racking, dry heaves of sobbing.

I am drowning in my skin. Puddled inside a form that is left only to represent the shape of a being that I used to be. Your words turned my solid beating heart to liquid, that was then burned off by the cold heat of your toneless statements that you don’t love me enough, that you don’t care enough, that you aren’t in love with me anymore.

All that was the person I was has fled; banished by a dictator that has no love in his heart for me any longer. Used and dismissed, sentenced to burn forever in a hell that will eternally wound a heart that cannot burn away, yet has turned to ash.

Empty shell. No reason to be. Purpose removed. Aching need to quiet the hurt that won’t leave. Just want to hold him and be held by him. Want to fall into each others arms crying and figuring a way beyond this. Being at the bottom, but finding a way up, never to return to that bottom. But he won’t even consider it. He found a door at the bottom, letting him out, so now I exist here at the bottom, in a dark, heaving, curl of a person with no door out, and no one to move up and away from this pit with. For he left. He reached the bottom and left.

Why do we fall? So that we may learn how to get up. But sometimes, I guess it is just easier for him to crawl away than to try to get up.

Stifling, suffocating, emptiness stretched out before me, a vast wasteland of my future, lying bleak before me. Tears are expensive. Words are cheap.

I always believe you would do what you said, that is why I always felt so let down, because I have a trust that you will be the man you say you are.

Delicate wrists and slender neck as broken as my heart, in my head. The visuals of a life left, in my head. No reason to be, to exist in this shell that you have issued me. All fear has left me, replaced with a knowledge of stretching nothing. And eternity beyond - alone and empty, all goodness seeped out the cracks.

Do you know what it is like to dream a dream? It wasn’t my dream, but he showed it to me and encouraged me to take ownership of it. Only to deliberately snatch it back, dashing all that is good in the world. Forever, empty. Empty of reason, empty of hope. A meaningless existence, only taking up space in an overcrowded world. Eradicate the useless, the space-takers, those that have lost all ability to contribute.

I love him. I hate him for stealing our tomorrows. I love him from the very moment he told me I should, and proved that I should. We used to be so happy, but I poisoned our love by leaving. How I regret that decision. How that very degree turns my stomach, and sickens me. I want nothing more to do with the thing that ruined my very true love. I can’t do anything more with that island, that school, that place, or anybody or thing connected with it. I have to leave it all behind me. Instead of leaving in the fall to reunite with my true love, I need to leave to escape the murderer of my love. I have to leave forever. I have to leave it all forever. As I have been left. No chance of reconciliation for me, then no reconciliation for the life that has ruined me.
You’re face smiles back from behind a glass, a glimpse of a happy time in a happy Hawaii. Hawaii is the sign of a coming relationship death. I have to put the picture down, because looking at it makes me cry. I can’t cry at work. I can’t cry. I am crying at work. I can’t not cry.

I cannot feed the body that houses a soul that has died. The plug would be pulled if I was in a non-responsive vegetative state, but no one will pull it. Can’t anyone see that this is a vegetative state?

Being with you has distanced my friends, and now that you have left, I have no one left close enough to share this pain with, no one. No one knows this hurt because I can’t tell them. I can’t share because I can’t speak ill of someone that I love so much. How can someone I love so much, care so little for me, do such harm?

I am a guest stayed too long in the body that was once a lovely house, a loved home of a heart that was warm and full. You have broken my heart, a heart that I offered up to you to keep after you stole it – a heart you promised to keep well for all times. A heart that you carelessly dropped along the way, then returned to turn under your shoe when you thought that the apathetic drop wasn’t enough.

The cosmos that has turned against me, letting me love so intensely a man that cares not for me, has come to see my pain. The world has turned grey and weeps outside with me. The same abrupt tears that can’t be stopped echo in the sudden showers out my window. The cosmos that has turned against me can’t help but feel my pain, as it echoes my cries through thunderous claps and weeps down on the earth.

Everything that was warmed by your love and opened into feeling has been ordered back into the dark depths of sense. If there was anything left of my heart, I would know that it wouldn’t be enough to ever love again as I have loved you. But as it is, ashes have no capacity to be filled with warmth and love, so I can gather them up in my hand and leave their former place empty and aching. A phantom ache, like that of an amputee. The heart is gone, but still it is so filled with hurt that it burbles out of the chest into my throat, choking me, and into my blood, poisoning me.

A chill drapes over me, drapes over the world - the coldness of a shadow of a turned back. Silence, except for the screaming in my head, echoed into the clouds out my window. Stillness, except for the tears that I can’t still, either on my face or the window.

Part of me wants to be able to share this pain, to show him how powerful he is over me. But the other part must hide this all from him, from all. Place it all in a box and place it into the vacant space in my chest. I gave him the power to hurt me so thoroughly, by loving him so much. One can’t be touched so hard by this if one didn’t care this much. I should never give anyone this power over me again. I trusted him when he said he would never hurt me, and here I am again. I shouldn’t give him even more power over me by letting him know how badly he hurt me. He should be cut out, like a cancer. But how do I live without him in my life? I can go through the motions, but what kind of life is that? I can live without him, but it isn’t the life I want, it isn’t the life he promised us.

I never told him that I loved him enough. I never shared my fears of this very thing happening. I never could convince him of his importance to me. I never told him of the miscarriage.I didn’t tell him that I was coming home this fall to be with him, to start building our life. I never told him how I wanted to build a family with him. I never told him that the only reason I didn’t want a family was due to that feeling of loss of self. I never told him that we had a family for a little while. I never told him of the pain that followed. I never told him how much I wanted his family to like me, and how much it hurt that they didn’t. I never told him that I wanted to build a family that would be everything that we had searched for in our own families. I didn’t tell him how I thought I had to be so strong, but how scared the distance made me. I never told him how I started to see that I was trading my education for my love, and how that frightened me. I didn’t tell him enough that I loved him. I couldn’t make him believe that he is the most important thing in my life. I couldn’t convince him.

I want to believe that we will get beyond this. If he would just give us one more chance to be back to the people we used to be together, before distance, time and distrust pushed us apart. Back to the time when I would drive 4 hours everyday just to be with him. To the time where we could sit out on a bench chatting forever. Back to a time when we could just be, and be happy. I know we could be there, but I don’t think he cares enough about us, or loves me enough to try to get there again. And that kills. Why can I put the hurt, pain and disappointment aside to try this, and he refuses? Does he think that I am not hurt, not angry, not let down, not in pain? Why am I willing and he isn’t? Another cosmically cruel joke. If we could just try this one time, I know that it would be back. I know it.

I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.