Firsts

 

You emailed me on Friday and I spent all today trying to understand - trying to cut you some slack - trying to see it from your point of view. I think you think that if you do enough things, change enough things, keep saying the right things that I'll come back. You still don't understand why I did this. Maybe you never will. I know you don't understand it because you're still in that blaming yourself phase. You're picking things out that I say and 'working' on them. I don't want you to work on them for me - I want you to do it for you. No matter what you 'fix' I'm not coming back - because it's over - for me. 

You think this was easy for me. You think I woke up one morning and said to myself "It's over" and since then I've just been skipping along, carefree, happy and single. What you still don't understand is that it almost killed me to say it to you that Friday at the end of May. It almost killed me again to see you a week later. I thought that it would be easier to go to the apartment and clean out my stuff, that writing you a letter of goodbye would be cleansing, that it would bring me that little bit closer to closure, but no - again - it almsot killed me. 


I wish you still had as much faith in me as when we were together. I wish you trusted me like when we were together. I know it's my fault that you don't. I know it's my fault that this new Megan that you've created is the type of person who is unaffected by your feelings. That she is unaffected by what happened. But what you don't realise, or maybe you don't care to realise, is that I'm still me. This still hurts, this still feels like the world has ended. It is just still so hard. You want me to keep explaing it to you - but I can't, because everytime I have to say it a little peace of me dies. The little pieces of you that you gave me to hold and mind - they die. They die everytime I hurt you and I keep having to hurt you. 

I know it's not fair for me to say this - I know it's not fair for me to say "Get over it" or "I wish you'd just accept it" - so I haven't said that, because at the end of the day I'm still me - the old me. The me that loves you - that wants you to be happy. I'm  just no longer the girl who can make you happy. I made a choice and I have to live with that. Trust me when I say it wasn't easy, it was nearly impossible, and I didn't know it was possible until I said those words. I didn't know it was possible to love someone as much as I love you and still hurt you so much. And yet I did it.

In amongst all that anger I missed you. Today was the first day I admitted I missed you. Maybe, today was the first time I felt it.  For a brief moment in time all I wanted was to be with you. For you to scoop me up, to rest my head on the left side of your chest, above your heart - my place, I wanted you to hold me and tell me it would be okay. But you can't, I can't, we can't. It's not my place anymore, that spot above your heart, I no longer have a claim to it. I missed you - because you were my best friend - because you were the love of my life - until you weren't the love of my life - then you were just my best friend. I wish I could talk to you about this - I wish that this could just be you and me. I wish that you would just let me put my head back in my place one more time. I wish I could listen to the soothing tone of your heart beating in your chest. I wish you'd tell me - just one more time - that things are going to be okay. I wish I could tell my best friend that I miss him - without my ex boyfriend thinking it's about him. 

I can't though, I can't say those things because to say them would be to keep hurting you. I can't keep hurting you and I can't keep hurting me. We're going around in circles and we just can't anymore. There is no back for me, only forward. Today I miss you. Tomorrow I might not. Today I wish I could take it all away - today I wish my best friend was here to hold me and mind me. Today I wish we had never dated because then my best friend would be here. Today I wish I didn't care. Today I wish this was over for you the way it is for me. Today I am sorry. Today I am glad. Today I am angry. Today I am sad. Today I miss you.

The Monsters

We talked about the future. I suppose, it was never really our future, it just was just the future. A future I never really bought into - not fully. I had always wanted you, more than I wanted it. I wanted the present, the you and me, the safety of things being ok, now. That was the problem really, the present was easy, the present was you and me, nothing else. But when we talked future, that's when the panic started, that slight quickening of the pulse, that tightening of the chest. 

I had always believed, or hoped maybe, that it was about the past, not the future. That I was marked. That my scars prevented me from seeing a time when I wouldn't be scarred anymore. I wanted so desperately for that feeling to go away. I wanted to believe, as you did, that we would be perfect, or at least our version of perfect. It was your version though and I suppose, by the end, I felt that it was your version of me. The version of me that had been broken, but would be fixed. Or was fixed? Maybe you thought I was better. Maybe I was, maybe I was better, maybe six years of therapy, the loss, the self discovery, the career, the relationships, maybe they were better. But still, the idea of better was predicated on the idea that I had ever been broken. 

I was never broken. Hurt, yes. Hurting, yes. Sad, yes. Lost, yes. Depressed, yes. Lacking, yes. But broken? No. Never broken. My past was there, yes, sometimes it was right in front of us. Sometimes the past flared between us like a fire; threatening to burn us both, to engulf us and our relationship. I had a fire blanket though, I always had a method to extinguish it. I would highlight it. I have always been self aware, too much so maybe. 

My self awareness was my shield. Yes I was commitment phobic. Yes I had Daddy issues, intimacy issues, family issues, love issues, self worth issues. Issues with a capital I. When they came between us I would say "Those are just my issues". I would take ownership, I would say this is my wrong, this is my fault, this is me. When I said it, when I said these things I detracted from the us. The issues with us. I threw such a big spotlight on me that I threw everything else in the shadows. 

The shadows were where the monsters were though. The monsters that were us. Our monsters. They were part you, part me, but they were all us. Our monsters. Never mine. Never truly yours. They were ours to fight, together. I can't take all the blame, but I can take a large porportion of it. Self awareness. I was so self aware I never thought outside of myself. I never thought about us, or you. I just thought about me. What was wrong with me. What I needed to fix, what I needed to change, what I needed to be aware of. 

It's the funny thing about shadows and monsters, you can ignore them all you want, but at the end of the day, they're still always there. Waiting. It's just you make a choice, to not see them, to ignore them. Or sometimes, sometimes you shine a light so far into one corner that you forget about all the other corners. 

The monsters. Always there. Waiting. Ready. In the end, we turned our heads so far we didn't see them sneaking up behind us.