Pocket sized Ragnarock - 14

Well, this is a new experience, I must say. 

I’ve never had a relationship die, and then be resurrected, only to die again. In some ways, this is more starkly painful than the first installment of the breakup. But it’s also more of a cauterization.

That being said, this morning I sit, aching, looking through the pictures in my email that I’d saved, hearing the song that he was named after on the radio, seeing the picture and words he’d given me so many times of his own volition…back when he loved me. And if I ever believed that Love really did exist, it would have been for one, blessed year, one small increment in this lifetime, that I honestly believed he was the one.

But I can’t. It’s not real; it’s not the reality I live with now. Life stepped in and tore it, and us, apart. And I couldn’t hold something together when there was nothing but dead weight on the other end.

I lay in bed last night, completely destroyed after a long, physically and emotionally draining weekend, and ached deep in my ribcage. I can’t make it stop. I don’t know why it still hurts, after being numb for so long.

I try not to dwell on it. I’m also muddling my way through my winter depression, which has days or weeks of easygoing lethargy, but then some days it strikes with apathy and darkness that knocks me to my knees and makes me feel like crying. 

I don’t like crying, but last week on Tuesday night, I was standing out in the rain, directing car upon car full of warm, happy families, church groups and snuggled up couples who were going through a local light display attraction. As I stood there for hours, feeling more than a little miserable and tired without music to distract me, I let my mind wander back to my memories of college and thought about a snow day where my roommate and I had gone out thrift shopping together. Halfway through our perusal of one of the stores, my boyfriend came up out of the racks and surprised me. He confessed he had walked down the large hill our college was on and halfway through town in the snow to get to where we were.

Remembering that…and how his heart had glowed in his eyes and seemed to shine through his skin as he smiled at his grand surprise for me…I burst into wracking sobs, standing there in that cold dark rain, wondering where that light had gone and why that kind of love had died. I cried out loud, to God or whoever else was listening: “Why did it stop?! Why did that die?? What did I do wrong? WHY WHY WHY?”

And got no discernable answer. Just the sound of the cold, misting rain condensing on my jacket hood and the soft buzz of the traffic floodlight’s generator, bravely holding back the darkness.

I know that love we had doesn’t exist anymore, it was hard enough trying to feel wanted and needed when he was occupied with his own drama, much less trying to ask him to comfort me in mine. I can better see how divorces come about, having experienced these little microcosms. Little bits of the heart become chipped away, or deaden, and you end up being so apathetic to a relationship, it feels like ending it would at least bring a pain you can work to heal, instead of staying in some kind of neutral, lethargic limbo.

But that doesn’t make the pain of missing what was any less. That’s what I’ve discovered through this process. 

I don’t have to stop loving the man I fell in love with and was loved by in that year. Now, wanting that love to fit who he and I have become now, will never work. However, I can have those sweet moments of remembering just driving around his home city with him, listening to his music and holding hands, listening to the rattle of his old car, feeling the dry heat of that southern sun baking through the windshield…I can still feel the thrill of heading out on a road trip, seeing his world, showing him mine...hearing him laugh...I still get a jab of longing in my heart when I read old texts I'd saved and see the nickname he would call me....and I feel the forever loss of such comforts deep in my marrowbones.

But these are memories...deeply embedded memories that I will never have to give up. No matter what happens in life, they are mine...where I can retreat to when my desire to live grows cold and numb, and for when I struggle to find the strength to hold me through to see another dawn, I can hide in those moments and feel real again. 

I am crying now as I remember it, but I am so grateful to have those moments. So deeply and abidingly grateful to have known that him for that year...and maybe gotten a taste of what a potentially forever love could have been like.

So I bring my final thank you to that year...for those moments I was not alone.