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.