Losses

"Ted," a friend of mine since my first year of college, told me once that April is the worst month of the year, filled as it is with pain and losses.  She would know.  She is from Littleton, Colorado, and while she did not attend Columbine, she had many friends who did, and lost many of them.  As for me, I had my own experiences with April losses: my beloved cat Weezie had died April 19, 2000.  Weezie had been my constant companion for ten years; I picked her out at the town shelter only three months after my father passed away when I was six.

And now we come again to April, a month where K rapidly departed from my life, a month where LB is struggling severely with depression, a month where a grad school classmate I have befriended, "JR," is struggling with a personal tragedy of her own.  And now we have my cat, Mousie, who is in the end stages of renal failure and will be put to sleep tomorrow, by the same vet who cared for Weezie for so long.  "One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow."

Life has been passing along.  I do not cry each day anymore.  Last night was, I believe, the first night K did not come to me in my dreams.  In my dream, a young man I have never met in real life befriended me, flirted with me, made me feel special and wanted.  By the end of the dream, I had fallen into an easy rapport with him, and felt loved and protected.  When I awoke, feeling confused and an ache in my chest of experiencing another "loss," I realized that that dream served an important role for me: it allowed me to "try on" the concept of allowing another man to care for and about me, to let someone besides K into my heart.  It showed me, in such spectacularly realistic fashion that several times today I had to remind myself that I was still single, that when the time comes, I will be able to experience with someone else the closeness and love I felt with K.  That time is a ways off yet, but it has instilled a small bit of confidence in me that I will be able to recover from this pain and move on.

The moving on thing has caused me no small amount of grief.  Similar to what I will likely experience in the days to come, when I will feel guilty for smiling, as though I am dishonoring Mousie's memory in finding some small pleasure, I feel guilt at the thought of moving on.  Moving on seems to signal that I never cared for K at all, that my love for him was fleeting or shallow, that if I do not spend the rest of my life in mourning for what I have lost, then nothing I felt for him was real.  It's a destructive mindset, to be sure.  I believe that K wants me to be happy.  I believe that Mousie wants me to be happy.  When I am ready, I want to find another young man who will love and support me, share life with me, grow with me, grow old with me.  I still want that person to be K, but if he does not want that, then I have no choice but to let him go and wish him the best happiness life can offer.  He is and always will be very dear to me, priceless beyond all accounting, and I hope to the bottom of my heart that he will know nothing but joy and good health until the end of his days.  Even after everything, I know for sure that that is what he deserves.  He is a good man, the likes of which I will never meet again.

I have been meditating and practicing yoga with a fervor not seen since before I met K.  (These practices fell by the wayside once things with him became serious.)  For weeks now, I have meditated by lying in my bed, cozy under my blankets, and placing both palms over my heart.  As I breathe in, I feel light gathering in my hands.  As I breathe out, I let the light from my hands spill through my chest, like dye being fed into a glass of water with a dropper, and let the warmth and light surround my heart, nourishing and healing it.  My heart, you see, has been a sad, gasping, dying thing, black and lying lifelessly in a pool of blood.  K tore part of it away, and that part of it will never return: there is a gaping wound there now; there are many cuts and holes besides from the other losses I have endured.  My heart has not so much clung to life as watched the life ebb away, closing its eyes, awaiting death.  But death has not come, and I do not know why.  It is my job now to nurture my heart, give it strength, show it how to keep beating even when this big piece is now gone forever, held in K's hands, maybe tucked in his pocket, maybe sitting on a shelf to collect dust.  Amputees can perhaps learn to walk again; my heart can perhaps learn to carry on.  With this breathing, I felt the heat in my chest, except this time, it was a healing heat, not a destructive pain.  Every night I have meditated this way, laboring to bring color and life back to my wounded organ.  The cold grip of sorrow still holds court, but it will not always.  No; the light will conquer the darkness.  In time, I will have the strength to send my beams of light to K, to, perhaps, help him heal, too.  I do not know what he is experiencing right now, but I have nothing to lose in sending him my caring and love, even if it is not needed anymore or never was.  He, after all, will hold a piece of my heart unto the final end.

Panaceas

I poked around on Google today to look for some wisdom on how to recover from a broken heart.  The advice ran the gamut: go party and get wasted and sleep with tons of guys so I forget my ex!  Or get all dolled up, go out with my girlfriends, and remind myself that I'm fabulous.  Or buy this program that will guarantee I'll feel 100% better and ready to date again within a week, or for this much extra, our foolproof method will have your ex begging to come back.  I have tons of people pushing antidepressants on me or encouraging me to trash-talk K because hating is easier than hurting.  The better advice out there talks about deep breaths, yoga and meditation, baby steps, gentle self-care, cry when I need to but otherwise carry on.

The truth is, there is no panacea.  I either put a bullet between my eyes or I continue to exist.  What that existence entails is another matter altogether.  Some people seem to think that the fact that I am alive is more important than whether I am living.  Some, I guess...don't seem to much care whether I'm around or not.

I don't want to go on antidepressants again and have been resisting this call no matter how many times it is raised.  To medicate once more will seem a defeat.  I was so happy to have met K in those early days last year that I felt confident enough to begin weaning myself off of them.  It was a long, difficult process, but I made it through, and have not experienced any withdrawal effects in some time.  I suppose, to return to them now, would make me feel as though the months between late May 2010 and now never happened.  Sometimes it seems that they didn't, like my time with K was a brief, joyful dream, and now I have awoken once more to the cold shadow of dawn.

I do things every day that are supposed to be helping me recover.  I took a walk with Mom.  I saw LB, my friend of roughly sixteen years.  We all had dinner together.  She brought me a bouquet of flowers.  They are sitting on my dresser now, and remind me of the flowers K used to buy me.  She did a yoga routine with me, but it didn't help much.  I'll meditate again before bed tonight, but that will not help much.  None of this is helping me much.  Nothing takes away that stabbing emptiness of loss, not even sleep, where K visits me in my dreams every night, sometimes to sit with me, sometimes to tell me again that he does not love me anymore.  Nothing will bring K back.  This is my world now.  This is the reality I do not have the courage to escape.

Are We Dreaming There Are Better Days To Come?

I began this blog some months ago in order to chronicle my recovery efforts from an emotionally abusive relationship.  I started it a bit too late, however; most of my recovery had already been completed.  I was happily in a relationship.  I began grad school.  My life, in many ways, was upended, but in ways that I was largely able to foresee, in ways that I welcomed.  I navigated those new waters as best as I could.  I felt that I was doing well, and this blog, suddenly, seemed irrelevant.  I stopped posting.

One week ago, K broke up with me.  He told me he had fallen out of love with me.  We had had our issues, as any couple does, but what I felt were simply bumps in the road, he felt very deeply.  I did not know how bad things had become until late February.  K is not one to make known his grievances, and so I had no opportunity to redress many of them.  He told me that he was thinking about breaking up with me.  I managed to convince him not to do so, and we continued on uneasily for another month, with me on my best behavior.  In late March, he actually did try to break up with me, but again I convinced him not to do so.  Last week, he did it for good, holding fast to what he believed was best for both of us, and I have not heard from him since then.

To describe this place I have inhabited for the last seven days as agony would be to vastly understate the matter.  It seems that the tears do not stop flowing.  I have had panic attacks, been unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to function.  My hip bones are jutting out.  This is pain of a magnitude I never thought it was possible to experience.  When I lost RJ, as painful as that was, I knew that I was, in actuality, ridding myself of a boy who was selfish, immature, cruel, uninteresting, and most of all, not worthy of me.  None of these things apply to K.  This is an actual loss, a loss causing me so much grief and pain that I feel sometimes like I have forgotten how to live.  K was quiet, tender, caring.  Intelligent, talented, perpetually fascinating, and worthy of a respect I do not give many.  Handsome, fit, strong enough to defend me from harm, but gentle enough to wrap me in his arms.  He almost single-handedly restored my faith in humanity, and in love.  This was not only one of the few souls on Earth I knew I could be with forever, but one of the even fewer that I wanted to be with forever.

All of that is gone now.  It is completely unclear to me if I will ever see or hear from him again.  He knew I was planning my suicide, and yet has not contacted me to see if I am still alive.  It feels like I am being treated as though I was unfaithful, or committed some horribly cruel act.  I made mistakes in our relationship, yes, but they were not large ones.  I do not know what I did wrong except to love someone more fully and wholly than I ever have in my life.

Suddenly, sadly, this blog is relevant again.  I still do not know if I am going to kill myself someday, but I do not want to.  It is not that I want to stop living, it is that I want to stop living with my heart in so much anguish.  And so, though it is early days yet, I find myself turning to those things that somehow, against all odds, carried me through RJ's departure.  I will need them more than ever; this is a far vaster undertaking.  K did not destroy my self and my sense of self-worth as RJ did.  In the ways, unique to him, that he was able, he helped build me up again.  Losing that, and in what still seems to me such an arbitrary way, has of course shaken my foundations.  I wonder many times if I am lovable at all, and what is wrong with me that even a man I gave everything to still rejected me, and why I am so worthless that K has not concerned himself even once with verifying that I am still on this Earth.  All of those things hurt in ways I cannot describe, and no amount of other people telling me how great I am can drown out K's silence.  Maybe he doesn't even platonically care about me anymore; maybe he never loved me at all; maybe he is not the man I thought he was.  But I do not want to believe those things.  I do not want to have my trust in others shattered again.  K's parents raised him and his brothers well.  I never saw evidence that they were the sort of sorry excuses for human beings that RJ was.

Perhaps, right now, K is suffering, too.  Perhaps he has stayed away from me because it is too difficult for him to be around me when he knows I am hurting so badly because of what he's done.  I don't know.  Maybe I never will know.  But I hope that my understanding of him, of a wonderful, smart, handsome, funny, loving, utterly irreplaceable man, will shine brightly always.

With a heart weighed down with darkness, I now must set about picking up the pieces once more.  My life depends on it.