I’ve never had a forum for this story before now, but I guess now I’m going to put it out there for anyone and everyone. Enjoy, I’ve held onto this one for 2 years.
If you asked me what was wrong with her I would have told you, “Nothing. She’s a lost girl just trying to figure it all out.” When she asked me what was wrong with her I simply told her that we’re 22, and there was no reason as to why we had to figure it out just yet. When I asked myself what was wrong with her I just sighed. There was a myriad of ideas that flowed so rhythmically through my mind. She was lost. She was fragile. She was hopelessly beautiful. She was reckless. She was self-destructive. She was naïve. She was closed off. She was cold. She was stubborn. She was malicious. It was as if there was no end to what was wrong with this typhoon of a woman.
To know her was to be completely engulfed in everything that she was and in all the things that you wished you could be to her. Loving her was like drowning. The water thrashing you around and you felt as if you were caught in a current that you’d never be able to escape from. The more you fought it the more it pained you. In those last moments before you allowed her to consume you completely there was calm. In that moment there was just the two of you, and it was beautiful. This was the ending that you chose. You chose her and it didn’t matter what the end brought as long as it was with her. This wouldn’t last. This wouldn’t a mutual end. Life would not be a beautiful disaster.
Let’s start from the beginning.
To fully comprehend who she was and what she meant you’d have to know a little about me. I was the girl who loved too much and too frequently. I was fickle. I enjoyed the chase. I didn’t know the meaning of loyalty. I was lust hungry. I needed to be someone’s everything and I needed them to make me feel worthwhile. My identity was derived from who I was dating and how much they loved me. I was a selfish person. I manipulated people and situation for my benefit. To be honest I played games just to see how far I could take things. The worst thing about me is that it was all a point of pride for me. In retrospect, I blame it on being young and immature. Too many years of having to do what I had to just so I could to get by. A terrible life can make you into a terrible person if you let it. I allowed myself to continue this behavior far after the craziness had stopped. I craved the chaos. I didn’t know what to do when things were just good. I was always waiting for the other shoe to fall. I was very undeserving of the affection I got from others, but this won’t always be the case.
Enough about me…this isn’t really my story. It’s hers.
She was angelic. She looked up from what she was doing and I saw the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen in my life. They were the most amazing shade of blue with strands of yellow in them. To compare it to the most awe inspiring sunsets was to discredit the wonder that were her eyes. It was like seeing the first morning rays of sun as they reflect off a deep blue sea for the first time. You can’t help but appreciate the beauty of it all. Then she smiled at me. I melted. She had a smile that could change your whole mood. It could change the way you looked at your life when you walked away. It was as if everything was illuminated. I had never set eyes on anything more captivating in my entire life. The day I walked into that room I knew that this girl was it. In that moment I was absolutely certain that this girl was going to completely ruin me.
The beauty does not lie in the details of how or why we met, but in the wonder of how deeply I fell in love with this complete stranger.
If we jump forward a few awkward weeks you’d find me completely in love with wonderful woman who loved me back. I never knew what it was to make love. To give yourself in ways that you didn’t realize you were capable of. I’d get butterflies touching her face or reaching for her hand. This was the kind of love that could save your life. She was the kind of woman that could turn things around for someone like me. I adored her and the look on her face when she would glance at me just weakened me at my core. I wanted so badly to deserve her love. In my mind to fathom a greater love story than the one we were living was doing a disservice to what we found with each other. There are simply no words to truly define the feeling that you experience when you believe you’ve found true love.
As we all know, good times must all come to an end. Problems arise as in any relationship and it tests the love that you’ve built together. We fall in love and we fall out of love. We share intimate moments and sad goodbyes. We exchange words filled with angst and animosity only to return and share words so emotionally pure that to do more than whisper them would destroy their sanctity. She told me that we were fighting to keep us together. If there was anything in the world worth fighting for it was her. I shared moments with her that will resonate with me for the rest of my life. Finding her was like catching lightning in a bottle; losing her threatened to completely unhinge me. In the ups and downs I found new reasons and ways to be happy. She’d leave and come back. She hated me and she loved me. She thought that I deserved more, and maybe I did, but she was all I wanted. Throughout the roller coaster that preceded the end I was just happy to be able to hold her hand through it.
It seemed daily that we exchanged blows to harm the others ego. We chipped away at whatever was left after the years we had spent together. She hated me for being weak and I hated her for being damaged. The love that kept us together was replaced by something terrible and ugly. I became what I thought she needed at the time. I challenged her malice with my own. I told myself that she couldn’t help it. I was too pathetic to see the hurt on her face when she hurt me, so I changed. I turned into the person who treated her like shit. I did what I had to do to keep her from feeling badly about herself. I could never hate her as much as she hated herself for the things she had done. It was a sick circle between the two of us. The stress weighed heavily on my heart. In my delusional state I thought this sick act of affection would stand to be a testament as to how much I truly loved her. I would do anything. I would be anything. I just wanted her to be happy.
The end came swiftly and knocked the life out of me. It pained me to wake up. It hurt to take a breath. It took everything I could muster to simply get out of bed. I self-medicated with booze and pills. From my point of view she was fine. She moved onto someone new and we spent months going back and forth trying to forge a friendship of what was left of the wreckage. We spent more time not speaking than we did actually talking. I accused her of so many things that year. The truth is, you can never know what someone else has to endure.
We all get so used to playing victim and focus solely on our own pain that we can’t see that when things end everyone hurts. We never take a moment to consider what kind of effect our actions had on the other person.
One night I received a slap to the face that changed my perspective on relationships. I would wait around for a phone call for weeks at a time. I wanted to hear that she missed me or that she needed me. In her despair I’d find some peace of mind. When it came there was no peace to be found in the aftermath. She was crying and I tried to be calm and talk her down. She told me that she was in her room while her girlfriend was in the living room. She wasn’t happy and she missed me. My heart dropped and I felt the tears form in my eyes. I searched for the words to say, but I found none. I knew that what I wanted to say would hurt her. I wanted to tell her I missed her. I wanted to say that my body and soul ached for her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her. Instead I told her that it would be ok. I talked to her until she fell asleep. I cried myself to sleep that night. She wanted things to be this way and I thought that there was no way that this could be hurting her like it was hurting me. Everyone is a victim. Everyone gets hurt when things end. Just because a person can’t show you or share with you how they’re feeling doesn’t mean they feel nothing.
She was my robot. She was the type of girl that put her feelings into a box and buried it in a place that she’d never visit again. You could see the discomfort in her face when discussion began to get serious. She would avoid confrontation at all costs. She was physically unable to deal with anything that was emotionally heavy. Everything in her told her to shut down. And so she did. She hid herself from everyone and became whatever it is that she thought that they wanted. She adopted new ideals, new hobbies, and new interests all in hopes of that it would compensate for what she couldn’t offer emotionally. I told her once that I didn’t want to fix her. I wanted to make her feel safe enough to tear down her own walls. I wanted to support her in becoming stronger. I saw what she was and what she wanted to be. I invested in her potential. It took a very long time for me to realize all the obstacles that stood in her way.
Terrible things happen in our lives and something’s are too substantial to deal with at the time so we wait. Our body and mind goes into defense mode and we shut down until we feel that we’re better equipped to process it all. At a certain point we continue to do this until everything we’ve bottled up threatens to destroy us if we try to bring up again.
She had been hurt so badly and so many times in a short amount of time that I when I found out the extent of it all I was frightened that it would consume her. There were so many explanations when she started to open up. She started to scare me. She became fragile in my eyes. There existed tenderness that only she brought out in me, but with it came naivety. From the moment she let me in I knew that I could never walk away from her. I loved this woman like a little girl. I wanted to take care of her. I wanted to shield her from all the ugliness that the world would throw at her. I wished so badly that I would have met her years before. I wished that I could have saved her from these things. I wanted see her put her back together.
Thing would continue to be rocky for us up until I was scheduled to leave. I needed to see her before I wouldn’t be able to for more than a year. I had loved since her and I taught myself not to need her like I did. We planned it out and she came to me. It’s amazing how she could make me so happy. It was mind blowing that in a few minutes she made all the happiness I thought I had felt the year prior with others seem insignificant. I consciously took steps back to just feel fulfilled for a few days. I wanted to be completely overcome by her existence. I wanted to be filled with that hopeless optimism. I wanted to be able to envision a future again. I wanted to feel complete for the brief period that she’d be here with me. And I did. When she told me that she hadn’t been happy since I had left I felt my heart break. There was this knot in my stomach and I didn’t know what to say. I knew she was lying to me. I wanted so badly to believe her that I told myself to do so. I held her face in my hands and kissed this girl that had decimated me. In retrospect we were both pretending. We both wanted it so badly that we convinced ourselves and each other that it was something we could make work.
I didn’t know that the next time I saw her that it’d be the last time we’d break up. It would be the last time I’d see her until a year a later. I didn’t know that this would be the end of my part in her life. This would be my end scene. This would be a defining moment in our history.
The specifics of this visit are known by both parties and to play them out again is something that pains me far too much to revisit. I realized at this point that I can’t win. She cried. I cried. She took me home. She looks hurt. She doesn’t want to hurt me, and she tried hard to get me to see that I deserve better. She needs to hurt me to get me to leave. I can’t hate her. I look at her after everything that she’s done to me and all I can manage to say is, “Why don’t you love me?” I wonder what I’ve done to deserve this from someone that I’d do anything for. She walks me to the door to get me out of her car. I just stand there and she holds me as I tremble like a child in her arms. I watch her leave and I stand there for a half hour hoping that she’d turn around. She never did. As to torment me I get a text telling me that she might realize that this was the biggest mistake of her life. She might end up back there because she was wrong. I didn’t realize that I would hang onto that line for a year afterwards.
I go away for what seems like an eternity, but I still think about her every day. I write her every chance that I get. This all happens while not hearing from her for months because of her new relationship. I’m never allowed to forget how insignificant our relationship was and how I pale in comparison to this new girl in her life. My hopes and my dreams for what my future was going to be were smashed to bits. She never gave me any reason to hold onto it. She wasn’t a monster. I was just in love with someone and nothing would have made me give up on that. I live in this fantasy for months thinking that one day I’d have the opportunity to show her how much I love her. This would be a testament to my devotion to her.
Slowly I let myself find happiness elsewhere. I stopped believing that being interested in someone else was in some way cheating. I gave myself a chance to be happy, and I was…for a spell.
I get home and it all seems to be going well. I stop trying so hard to hold onto the angel that haunts me. Things start to look up for me. I found new ways to make me happy. I found healthy outlets for my pain and emotional exhaustion. We’re on the same page for a while. The weeks had turned into months and the months turned in a year. I’m proud of how far I’ve managed to come.
With one phone call it all crashes down. Of course I recognize the voice. Your face, your eyes, your mouth, your laugh, your voice…it all haunts my dreams. I start lying again. I lie to make things work. I manipulate situations and feelings…mostly my own. I convince myself that I can exist in her world because I so badly want it. The closer I get the more I feel like I need it again. I talk about other girls when it was always about her. I listen to the sadness at the dissolution of her relationship. I feel selfish for wanting to be with her at all when her voice is filled with such pain. I listen to terrible decisions, but I worry about whether or not to voice it as to not upset her. In a few months I’m back to being special and it makes me feel safe enough to let go of my ex’s because it was suggested that I do. I let go of my safety net to be a better net for her. I didn’t realize that she wouldn’t need me because she had no intention of letting go or falling.
In the end we’re all bound by guilt. She feels guilt in the pain of her past. She feels like these bad things happened because she allowed herself to get too close so she doesn’t anymore. Love was a funny thing and it was shown in ways that would confuse other. This ultimately led to her only feeling important and special when controlled. To her that meant that someone was trying to protect her and that means love where she’s from. She blames herself for things never working out. She thinks that had she done certain things differently that they would have acted differently in return. Her guilt allows her to justify the poor behavior of others. Everything is cheapened by accusations of romantic feelings because who could truly love her without wanting anything in return? She has nothing to offer another person. She’s an emotional sponge. She will soak up all of your love. This isn’t something she can be faulted for. We all want to be treated well and we’ll take it as long as it’s being given to us. Our deficiencies were perfect for each other. She would take and I would give until I had nothing left.
As I packed my things I came across notes and pictures that brought tears to my eyes and made me nostalgic for the madness and passion I had once felt for this woman.
As it turns out I was but a small chapter in her life, but she’s became the most significant thing in the story of my life. For years I just wanted to start a new chapter in my life, but I felt like I needed for it to end a certain way. I couldn’t have changed what was going to happen anymore than I could have made her love me. This was always what it was going to come to. This was how things were going to end. It was written before I ever set eyes on her. There are no fond feelings to look back on anymore. We ruined it all. We don’t wish each other well. Not every ending is going to be a happy one and we can’t change that. Sometimes the best thing we can do is just to let it go. I was never meant to be happy with her. I was never going to be the one that changed her. She wasn’t made for me. Maybe I wasn’t made for her either. I’m letting go of the guilt. I’m giving up the struggle. I’m disposing of the hope. This is all of it. Our journey is over and in the end there was no love between us. There was simply her need to be loved and my need to love someone completely and without reason. This is her story put to paper. This is all that’s left and I’m leaving it here.
Awkwardly Kissing Fish | The Lesbian Fundamentalist 