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| the first day together, june 2019 |
I used to turn to my words when I was lost. It was a habit I picked up quickly and off the cuff way back in the MySpace days of like... 2006? I'd give anything to go back to those mini-blogs and see how melodramatic they were, because I am certain they are just absolutely groan inducing now. The problems of a 21 year old seem to pale in comparison to a now 36 year old, at the time having never actually been in love and not really understanding the intricacies that came with being so. During love, after, and then way way after... when you've had a few years to reflect and learn... you can see the minutiae of it all. When I picked up the pace on blogging again in 2011, here in its current form, I turned back to writing in my lost wanderings after the first of my three great loves had ended.
Even with writing my books, scribbling thoughts out is a habit I have let drop by the wayside in subsequent years. Maybe because I would choose to turn toward other distractions instead, rather than dealing with things bothering me. For example after Derek, I bought the Manor, and I spent a full year with my nose down renovating it as a distraction. It worked in the sense that I eventually pulled my head up and realized I was in a different place than I had once been. It didn't work in the sense that I when I did eventually lift my head up, it was to lock eyes with Andrew.
I don't need to re-tread the steps of our relationship here, I've done that enough and kept you all updated as much as I was willing to do. When we broke up for a second (re: final) time in March, I jotted down my thoughts and figured that I was quickly and tidily wrapping everything up. No muss no fuss, a place for everything and everything in it's place, whatever metaphor you wanna insert here. Yes I was sad that it ended, as was he, but it was gonna be fine and we were gonna be fine and I was gonna be fine.
Flash forward to July 1st and whoops, no one was fine.
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| october 2019 |
Y'see, the first month after our breakup wasn't an issue. We took a couple weeks before we stopped sharing a bed before he moved to the guest room, and then we took a few more weeks for him to move his closet and dresser into another room. I wanted it this way, because after our first relationship ended so abruptly, I never had any closure from it. This way, it was a slow slide out of what we were and into what we would eventually be, with no rushing and just a gradual letting go of things. Then everything slowly dematerialized into a status of "friends".
Only we never were actually friends... the relationship aspect of things only ended in the sense that we stopped saying "I love you" 50 times a day and there was no more cuddling on the couch/physicality. Everything else stayed the same. He would pick up random things at the store for me he thought I might like, I did the same. He'd make dinner, I'd make dinner. He'd buy some drinks, I'd buy some drinks. We always viewed it as a form of yin and yang, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, but there was a thought and devotion to it also that lay just beneath everything. Just beneath the surface.
We did these things because we still loved each other, y'see. Maybe we weren't "in" love, but that also is hard to quantify, right? After all, at some point being "in" love just turns to "unconditional" love, and you do the things you do because it makes the other person happy. I've had a lot of mental health struggles over the last 8 months and I talk about this with my therapist pretty frequently as I attempt to sort through the bog that is my mind. By early May and after a bout of Covid for both of us, I was starting to crumble. My mind was stuck in this sort-of revolving door of thoughts that I was still in a relationship, only I wasn't, but I couldn't move on, because I didn't want to and also because I couldn't, because I was still in a relationship... only I wasn't? I had not made any progress forward and I was feeling constantly like I was going out of my mind, feeling like Andrew was setting a lump of limitations on me as an individual, even though he wasn't at all.
I still felt like I had to check in all the time, to tell him where I was and who I was with and what we did. It just wasn't healthy. So then I told him we couldn't live together anymore, and within a few days he had found an apartment in Madison that he'd be moving to July 1st. That was that.
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| december 2019 |
From there, we did what we do best. We put our blinders on and just moved day to day, planning things for the move and largely ignoring everything that the move meant. It's easier to ignore things... to not write about things... than it sometimes is to confront and understand. For my own part, I kept telling myself "you're going to feel great after July 1st, you're going to be free and feel like you've got a new lease on life and who you were BEFORE you got back together is gonna come right back in, and hey! You're gonna instantly drop weight! You're gonna be HAPPY! Everything is going to change when you drive away from Madison, just wait and see!"
Only things are never really what you anticipate, right? You have a high hope, and the reality of it is that you land somewhere amidst the dirty feet of said hope.
A week before move day, I got sick again with Covid. Then Andrew got sick again with Covid. I spent two full days face-down on my bed, navigating fevers and chills and coughing fits and essentially feeling like I was going to die. I couldn't eat, I couldn't smell or taste anything; any plans for that "final week" were out the window. No grilling out, no going to a restaurant for a nice goodbye meal, it was just sitting in the house and mostly him taking care of me, and then a little bit of me taking care of him. Then on Thursday night it was both of us struggling to load up his car and my truck, fevers and all. And then on Friday, it was kicking off our 4 hour drive to Madison through America's bullshit independence day traffic.
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| july 2021 |
It took a couple hours for us to unload the vehicles, and we were drenched in sweat and pretty quiet from just feeling rundown when all was said and done. I helped him put his new bed frame together, and then we got the TV unboxed and on its stand... and then I could just feel the constant nagging in the back of my throat as it tried to close itself off from the tears I had been fighting back.
So I said I was going to go and get started on the drive back to Minnesota.
Andrew seemed a little surprised. Not that it wasn't the plan, because it was. But it was also the sudden end to nearly three years of trying to navigate and figure out what our love for each other was. What it was meant to be, what it was supposed to be, and where it ended up. It was the conclusion of a journey during which we both earned our licks. There will be no more five hour car rides to just spend a full day with one another. No more hopes for surprise kisses or wonderfully healing hugs. No more mornings together drinking coffee and just talking for an hour about everything and nothing at once. No more goodnights and sweet dreams, no more oft-quoted jokes in passing or quick checkin-ins when I get home from work.
Eventually you have to lay things down where they are supposed to be set, and you have to move on. Ours was a relationship that perhaps crushed itself, more than once, under the weight of its own self-importance. Trying to live up to a standard for the other person so desperately that there was no place else for it to go but downward.
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| september 2021 |
So I held my arms open for a hug, and I got one. And I cried. And I tried to force myself to let go once and for all of this man I have loved like no other. I tried to force myself to say the words I'd rehearsed through my tears the night before, but that was to no avail. Suddenly for every small thing I couldn't stand about him, for every small thing that bothered me and hurt me and annoyed me, there were infinite more things that brought me so much joy and happiness. It was in that small infinitesimal moment that I so desperately wanted everything to go back to how it had once been.
I pulled away and he took my hands and he thanked me for everything, in a way so sincere that I interpreted it as much more open-ended than just helping him to move. And then I turned and I left the apartment, glancing back one last time and feeling like it was the last time I'd ever see him, wether that feeling was warranted or not. I put on my sunglasses in case someone saw me in the hallway and wondered why I was crying so hard.
I habitually keep myself firmly planted between expectations and reality, and maybe because this was our second go-around, I had to let reality win this time.
Because that's how it works, right? Win some and lose some? I suppose that's the thing between expectation and how the real world is. There's reality. Or at least, there's reality as it actually happened. Then perhaps there's the reality as you were told it happened. Then ultimately, there's reality as you experienced it. What's the right one, and if there isn't one, is it wrong to prefer one over the others?
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| november 2021 |
Maybe in another life, maybe in some upside down... we're still together. Andrew and I are quoting movies into the middle of the night, staring at each other lovingly on our pillows and believing nothing else in the universe matters but us. We're sharing a pair of AirPods, their song is lulling us to our content, and we're just good staying exactly like that. But then I think of Selina Kyle in Batman Returns, and how she said "I would've loved to come live with you in your castle, Bruce. Just like in a fairytale. But I just couldn't live with myself."
Eventually you have to look at the world without rose colored glasses on and you need to take the steps necessary to start moving yourself forward again.
In the car, as I answered a myriad of text messages through my sobs, one came through from my mom as I started driving back to Minnesota. After I had asked her why it was so hard for me to let go, one of the things she told me was "the deep feelings you have for the people in your life are part of what makes you so wonderful." It's a blessing and a curse, in part, because often times for me the pain is just an inevitable part of the process.
The drive home was not liberating. The day that followed was not liberating. In all actuality, what it made me realize was that we had just broken up all over again. Stupidly, what I fear now is that my life will be boring... because it's just me now. It's me, alone, on my own, solo, yadda yadda. And it makes me so sad. I wonder if there comes a point in your life when it's too late to become the person you thought you would be? Or maybe who you hoped you would be?
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| december 2021 |
We've spoken several times already since the move, and it shouldn't be such a concept for me to talk to the person I thought I'd share my forever with, and speak in an actually constructive way that illustrates people can truly be adults. To have my emotions relayed back to me in such an honest and truthful way that I would believe what he is saying and understand that in this, I'm not alone.
I might cry about it all a lot more, but I'm not alone.
I think back to the letter I wrote for Andrew after we broke up the first time, and I had been reading Memoirs of a Geisha. I read this passage and loved it, and I shared it with him. I think it still rings true.
"...and of course, I couldn't stop from thinking of the other life I'd once led. Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it."
This will pass. Right now, I'm sad knowing it will pass, because that means putting away these emotions as they currently exist. Our relationship will continue to transform and change over the next weeks and months and years, as it has for other people in my life. For now I take refuge in the memories of what it once was, and when I feel like I've spent my time with them, I'll take another step forward. I wish I knew what that direction was, but hey... it's a direction.
But I'm here to say that I know how love endures, beyond what the obvious concept of it once was for me. And to Andrew, my Meatball, if love is fire, I'll burn for you.
Ciao for now.
