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eechay-blog · 6 years ago
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Can you write yourself out of heartbreak?
It is hard to be the person who decides to leave a situation, to draw the boundary, to know exactly when enough is enough, to leave behind everything and start fresh.
You can pour love into someone and pray for them and give every bit of yourself to them, but you can’t make them love you the way you need.
Even so, every morning I wake up and check my phone—sometimes I pull myself out of a deep sleep before my alarm even goes off—but it doesn't matter what time of day I click the side button to illuminate my screen or raise it up just to see if anyone has texted me, I am only looking for you, your number, your name, your words.
Every day I spend on this earth is spent trying to be better than I was the day before, to not make the same mistakes again, to let go of the past, to clear space for something new. My greatest failure has been my inability to let you go. I can't forget you, but I can't do this to myself.
It always felt like we just knew each other, like I didn't really have to explain myself. But maybe we never really knew each other at all.  
I used to…I still, think to myself, What could a future life be like with you? What of our beautiful, dark-haired, curly-headed children? When I met you, it wasn’t hard to imagine. It was a picture that was so easily conjured that I wondered if it was something that always existed in me waiting to be activated. Something genetically encoded in me.
When I got pregnant, I was simultaneously the happiest I had ever been and the most scared. I knew the end would come soon. I knew as soon as I told you a gulf would emerge between us, never to be fully traversed again. I wanted to keep it a secret, I didn’t want anyone to know. I knew what we were doing when we made it though. I knew what the outcome would be and I didn’t care. Acting with reckless abandon...it would be our undoing.
Sometimes when I watch movies or listen to music—especially ones with real tragic themes—I think I might still give up my whole life for you. I can’t explain it, a feeling that developed from our first meeting. You would die for this man, my brain would whisper to me.
I remember the day I realized you were an alcoholic and you could not be pulled from it. I pondered out loud, “Can I do this?” It did not matter if I could or not because my heart had already decided I loved you, I would do it and I did not care. It felt like a responsibility, a duty to…someone or something more powerful than myself. I would pray every day that you may know comfort and safety and love. I would do anything if it meant a life together.
Then it began. The anxiety and worry eating away at my body. The thought stuck in my brain: I might die in the same way my grandmother did. An eroded esophagus from years of being married to an alcoholic.
Then the shock and denial, the anger and bargaining. What if...maybe...the best of me and the best of you be too powerful? Is that why we can never seem to get it right? Why can’t we get it right?
If you tame me, know then that you must keep me. I say it to myself like it’s a proverb and not something I read in a tragic fairytale.
If you tame her, know then that you must keep her.   It should have been a rule. They should have made it a law. I still want it tattooed across your forehead so that you may never forget it. If you tame this heart which has been impenetrable to so many, you are supposed to keep me.
More thoughts racing in my brain: Am I cursed then? You tamed me and now I am to love you forever? Receiving nothing in return? Only memories of what we were and wishes about what we could have been.
That is all I have left of us. I can never again return to those happy moments, for they are marred by the knowledge of how I gave my power away. I gave every bit of myself to you, including the power to wound my pride and to make me feel less than.
The memories come to me randomly, sometimes at work, sometimes in my classroom, while I am doing the dishes, driving down the road, at night as I am drifting off to sleep.
I am facing towards you on the bar stool, my hand on your knee, with one of leg between both of yours. I have something important to say, I have finally gathered the courage to say it. I am delirious with endorphins coursing through me. I thought this day would never come.
“I have to tell you something,” I divulged. “You’re in love with me?” You quipped back at me ever so quickly, reading me just like a book. It took the air right out of my lungs. I know shock, surprise, and righteous indignation are written all over my face.
I submitted to you at my own detriment, but…I could not stop myself.
And Oh—God—I felt what it was like to really love someone. To know that my love was unconditional. That no matter what you did to me, no matter what had happened to you in the past, that I would love you anyway.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. 
I used to ask you about your ambitions, your hopes, your dreams. I could tell it made you uncomfortable. It seemed like you were scared that I might hurt you if I knew what your truth looked like. 
I wonder, Was it scary to know someone loved you that much? Did my love frighten you? Was there something disingenuous about me that made me unworthy?
“I love you but not like that,” you said as you held my body against yours. I couldn’t believe the words coming out of your mouth. I should have known then, but I wanted you so badly. That was the first true break and it broke again and again after that. That was the birth of the growing ache in my chest, the sting in my eyes, the clench of my teeth, the balling of my fists.
I want to forget these things because that is what heartbreak feels like and if I ever want to love again, I must forget.
You told me once that I wasn’t the only person who had ever been in love, who had been heartbroken. My inner monologue still answers, “So fucking what?” You told me I’d get over it. I still don’t believe you.
The anger in me rages. Mad at you for things I couldn’t control, mad at you for not loving me. Why didn’t you wait for me? Why did you go down this road before I met you? Why? Why? Why?
I somehow remember the first time I saw you. I remember my mother of all people pointing you out. I was so close to leaving for school, to leaving this place forever. Here in this place we come from, that I was pulled back to by some cosmic force, we both know what it is but don’t name it.
But it is time to start telling the truth. Mutual trauma and shared histories don’t make a relationship. I have to at some point accept this. This dark part of me…it says What if it does? What if someone with the same trauma and same history is the only person who can really understand who you are? The part of me who has been to therapy, who wants to heal, wants to be happy again pushes these thoughts back into whatever crevice of my deeply fucked up brain they came from.
Yes, I am tired of explaining myself, of getting to know new men over and over again. All of my life I have wanted to meet a man who I didn’t have to explain myself to. Yet when I find them, it doesn’t last. I wonder, Is this the relationship pattern I am meant to put to rest?
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eechay-blog · 9 years ago
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I felt like writing today. I wanted to examine my identity for the umpteenth time. I am constantly confronted with it. Some days I try not to make eye contact with it and duck when I see it coming. Other days I sit with it and try to make sense of our problems. 
I came back home from a place that wasn’t enough, where I felt like I was too much.
But now, 
Home is too much...or rather, it’s just different. Not the way I left it.
The chasms between families seem larger. The ties that bind us are loose. Things seem to be getting harder, not easier.
One thing is still the same. I have the looming feeling that I am not enough. It’s a cloud that hangs over me. You’re too light, you’re too pretentious, you’re too other.
I cannot apologize for the parts of myself that I had no control over. 
I will not apologize for /my/ lived experiences.
Its funny that I felt the need to write that because no one has explicitly asked me to apologize for these things. Its just that...ndns are implicit.
Their implications are as follows,
“Is that your married name?” // (That’s not an ndn name so you must be white)
“Who’s your family?” // (I know you’re not full blood, let me size you up)
“Where did you grow up?” // (You’re not from here)
“Do you dance? Do you bead? Are you NAC?” // (Do you do anything that makes you ndn or are you just a box checker?)
Each question is like acid rain. It chips away at my identity. It makes me feel deficient in some way. 
I find it laughable that I find so much exhaustion in affirming who I am. I see the questions for what they are and what they are meant to do. 
At the end of my writing time, I am back at where I started. Sitting with my identity, not knowing where to go from here.
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