The strangest thing I've observed about myself is my gravitational pull toward avoidance. I write that knowing full well that I am a deep human being. Surface conversations bore me and I enjoy cutting straight to the quick of any human heart. I want to ask you about your childhood. I want to know your illogical fears. I want to understand what prompted you to pursue one path over another. I'm an ever-interested party when it comes to observing and analyzing humans, relationships, and behavior.
That said, I also sway on the edge of avoidance. Having done many a deep dives into my own trauma, I fully comprehend and have made peace with where this was born and how it has impacted my life over the years. At times, it still does, I'm just better at walking myself through it.
When I'm writing, though, crafting worlds out of words, cushioning hard truths with descriptors, I've noticed that it takes me a long time to get to a place of writing openly (read: the internet) about personal experiences without dressing them up in poetry and prose. A descriptive, deep writer fumbling.
So, here I am, ready to challenge myself and write about my most freeing experience of 2024.
Have you ever been haunted and not realized it? I don't attach myself to many things or people, but if and when I do, it's difficult for me to pull apart the intricately intertwined roots that spread during the time being in sync with another person. So, to say that eight years alongside the only man I've ever loved as deeply as I did would be a feat - is a grand understatement.
A helpful factor in that was his commitment to misunderstanding me. Or, perhaps, he never really knew me outside of the day-to-day idiosyncrasies we collect when we cohabitate. It's hard to say, and I'm not interested in speculating any further on that.
Either way you slice the cake, the party was over before it actually ended, at least for me. I think somewhere deep down, he knew too, but chose denial over redirection. In conversations post-split, we've both admitted a lot of things that could have been different but weren't. And that's the part: were not.
I spent a lot of time pouring over the nooks and crannies of our flat line. I threw on overalls, got down in the mud, and dug up ALL-OF-THE-BODIES. And not just the ones we'd buried together (figuratively, guys - chill out, this isn't an episode of YOU). I threw myself back in time to figure out all of my shit. Though I don't believe any of us ever morph into some saintly and wholly healed being (ever), I did as much work as several years of harsh reflection and many stages of alone can grant you. And I still did not realize I was being haunted.
It was not until we came back in contact and met up in person for the first time in two years that it all clicked. Do I think the realizations would have come had we done this all sooner, yes! But, I am also grateful for the timing, as it was, because it provided an inarguable backdrop for me to examine things against - change was not present.
See, after doing so much work on myself; I'd often wondered, had I held the knowledge then that I coveted now, could we have made our way through things? This, thought, accounts for the large disparity in growth between us. That statement is not a knock as much as it is a realization that everyone has their own path in their own time. It wasn't for me to rush him into a space that I felt was aligned with my own. It was painful to know that it existed, though, and further still to fully understand that it would be detrimental to my own health and wellness to stay and wait for something that was not guaranteed. Adulting, am I right? (Big sigh)...
So when we met up, I had zero expectations of feeling anything. We'd been in contact post-split many times, even attempted to share a dog, and I felt nothing. It often felt as though I was looking at a stranger while interacting with a friend. It was the weirdest experience I had at the time. Now, I walk the park alongside him, feeling that there were so many things unsaid, so many pieces still a question mark. Like an inexperienced high school girl, I revisited the question of friendship. I'd hoped all the time that had passed, he might be open to finally moving to a space where we could be in each other's lives from a comfortable distance. As a recovering bridge burner, I romanticized the notion of having someone who once held such an important space in my life - in my heart, still exist and still be accessible.
The joke was on me, as it so often is, and my father's words rang through my head like tower clock bells: You will be a hard individual to be friends with. You're a trophy to them, My (my parent's shortened name for me because four letters are far too long), added to a case.
I quote that without context; my father wasn't being cruel or careless with his words when he said them. He was being honest and a man.
My request to my ex was met with a sexual joke, once again minimizing my existence to purely physical attraction, revealing his emotional laziness and aim for his own gratification. He then relented and said we could try. The conversation continued past the park and into text messages, back and forth for a short bit from both ends. The excitement of reconnecting on any level overtook me like a demonic entity in an open vessel. I quickly latched onto his follow-up text, calling me "beautiful" like a baby clutching mom's t-shirt, inhaling the comfort of familiarity.
This led to me boldly asking if he would be open to getting to know one another with the intention of dating, but only if what I sensed about his current state of unhappiness was true. And that if I'd misread, I'd back off and perfect being an amazing friend. Sure, a tale as old as time - I knoooooow!
Spending an hour with the only real love of your life while he laments about the woman he's seeing while simultaneously telling you that you're still the one in so many words or less and ultimately not sounding very happy where he was at will have you questioning all sorts of "destiny" and "fate" and have you wanting to take your newly acquired understanding and emotional maturity for a test drive.
Spoiler alert: You can be a skilled driver, but sometimes the vehicle still crashes out.
He said, "Yes!" Honestly speaking, I was a little shocked. Here was a man who was so set in his ways that he was often blinded by his staunchness. A man who'd avoided me the past couple of years, like my hair was made of snakes, and he might turn to stone if we shared a common space for any amount of time. Now, he's saying yes.
The romantic asshole that made a house out of my heart wasted no time barreling to the front porch with pom-poms and a sign made of glitter: I KNEW YOU'D FIND YOUR WAY BACK.
He proceeded to text me after the call, asking about whether or not I was still a vegetarian, with a brief and dribbling exchange following.
Two days - I send a quick end-of-day text.
A three-day weekend - I send a good morning, how are you feeling text.
The response: I'm driving.
This told me everything I needed to know. I had already clocked the shift before the weekend dissipated. Not for any other factual reasoning except a random inner knowingness or knowing a person for eight years, take your pick.
It felt as though he was still hurt, and after sitting with it longer, my guess, he was afraid to try again. Totally understandable.
Me being me, I cut to the quick. I directly asked him about the shift. He replied that he would always love me, but he couldn't go down this road again. And I was left with one curiosity and only one - Why couldn't he just say that? It took me addressing it for him to come clean, and I did not understand. I wasn't even upset about not moving forward; I was disappointed at the exact behavior I'd known from him throughout our entire relationship. Why did I hold these expectations of him being different? I wanted so badly for time to have changed the tide.
I had prayed for the very thing I always request when making tough life decisions: PEACE and DISCERNMENT. My only real want was to get to know who he was today, which is exactly what I had proposed to him - whether that ended in friendship or a path back to one another, I just wanted to know who he was. For a few days, I thought that would look like getting to text, hang out, and spend time exploring what each of us had been up to.
Life reminded me that some of her reveals come wrapped in Christmas paper with golden bows just as we'd envisioned, and other times, we get the exact gift we asked for in an Aldi brown paper bag.
After an hour on the phone listening to him talk and walk me through why he couldn't inform me that his mind had changed (dressed up as him saying that while he was open to dating, he wasn't trying to turn around and jump into a relationship the next day). That made me chuckle. I never knew two text messages over the span of five days was a race to be tied up again. I listened to him attempt to answer my questions. I cautiously tried to unravel contradictory statements. I sat still while he talked about the woman he was now "in a relationship with" (before it was casually seeing and 'could take it or leave it'). Once again, he said no nice or complimentary thing about her. He reiterated how she wasn't me, my large shoes to fill, the only woman to break his heart...
But hearing all this broke mine. Not because he was still hurt or because I wanted anything more, what broke my heart was that he was revealing he'd spent two years with a woman who was a seat filler. He didn't let her know how he felt, didn't tell her he didn't want anything serious; he let her believe things could be serious... He could admit all of this to me, but she was in the dark (though probably not, because we can feel that). My heart was broken for this woman because a few years ago, I WAS HER. With a different title and more of a commitment, we were the same. He spent so much time being married to me, yet not being honest about his feelings. He was able to tell other people choice things about me but couldn't say them to me. He ran out the clock telling me things like, "I'd rather have continued living in misery with you than make a change." (This is NOT a compliment in my book, but rather insulting instead).
In that hour, I listened to him verbally cherry-pick when my ambitious nature was acceptable and when it was "too much," hearing him thank me for pushing him into sobriety but chastise me for continually lobbying for a dog until we got one. Telling me how grateful he was for me helping him start his business and how he couldn't have done it without me while trying to position the conversation as if two text messages meant I was trying to drag him down the aisle again. I sat on a bed in an Airbnb, feeling as though I had time-traveled backward three years. It was astonishing and downright impressive. All of my self-work and all of my calmness were intact, but I slipped into the silkiness of feeling crazy all over again. It was wild.
I even cried for about an hour. And then - it hit me... He stated he couldn't go down that path, but when I said that was fine I just needed to shut the door now, he waffled. Leveraging my desire to move on fully as evidence that I was all or nothing. I challenged that notion, illuminating that he had basically stated there was nothing to explore - therefore, all or nothing didn't exist. He redirected the conversation to less important topics. When I brought it back around, he waivered, wanting to leave the conversation unresolved. Perhaps in his head, he said everything he thought he needed to say and felt clear. In mine, I recognized that this was a pattern he had - give nothing absolute, provide no definite answers, and leave no concrete resolution one way or another. I also realized that despite him ending the conversation by seemingly keeping the door cracked, I was shutting it for good. No declaration needed, no announcement, nothing further to be said to him because his intentions were so clear to me now.
Without initially recognizing it, I received everything I'd asked for in a hyper-driven time frame. He was showing me exactly who he was in the present time, and it was the same man I'd walked away from a few years prior. Some realizations may have come for him or some understanding might have been obtained, but not enough to change anything in a meaningful way.
The pieces kept filling in the picture by themselves. He didn't like to make decisions or face change; that was hard for him, as it always had been. The man worked his whole life at the same place from the age of 14. We'd lived in his childhood home. He hardly ever left a two-mile radius to date. Always some neighbor, sister's friend, friend's sister. If he suddenly was open to getting to know me, dating me - he'd actually have to be open. He'd have to face where each of us stood and how we'd grown (or not). If he opened himself up again, he had no guarantee he wouldn't get hurt all over. He said it himself; he feared I'd get bored because he was "less interesting" now. He'd open himself up to feeling stupid or having to explain if it all went wrong, and he'd be left without safety girlfriend. If he started talking to me, he already knew he'd have to make a choice at some point - he'd have to address talking to me to safety girlfriend, which would then cause him to explain himself and risk the comfort of what he'd nestled into over the past two years. Too much decision-making - too much-involved risk. Once again, I was "too much."
You know those memes you see about Gemini's processing their emotions? The ones where it shows some kid having a meltdown for exactly five seconds and then regaining sanity and returning to snacks. I could not paint a better picture of what that night looked like. I cried for exactly 60 minutes. I vented to exactly two friends, attempting to validate whether or not I'd lost my mind. And then, I sat up on the foreign couch and started laughing uncontrollably. It was a little scary. I laughed at how I got what I wanted. I didn't need to date him to know. I didn't need to be friends with him to see. I got all the answers right there in that studio apartment. It was great.
The next day, I went to set. I was surrounded by colleauges of craft, some who had worked with me on set for years and some who were just meeting me. Commentary about my ambition arose, one man speaking about how I'd pushed him creatively past his limits and how grateful he was for it. Another who'd spent exactly eight hours with me - speaking to my drive in the most positive way. The universe has her way, reminding me that while some may see me as a force pushing against them, others see me as one pushing with them, for them, for all involved. I needed that because I stopped looking back that very next day. I stopped looking in Jeep windows (iykyk), over my shoulder at gas stations (I don't have much practice at living in the same radius as an ex of any caliber), or worrying about whether he would text or not or what that text would say. His hesitancy and apprehension were the best gifts I got that year: real freedom. A release from the haunted territory I didn't realize I was in. There was no amount of growth on my end that was going to bridge the distance between us, and that was okay. Eventually, I'd meet someone who didn't need a bridge.
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