This heart is still sad. Even in the unwanted assurance that I found in my journal, it is still sad. Each of those entries also contained record of the good and the great of the relationship. So as I sat down to process in my journal, another wave of it rolled over me.
Here I thought I'd come to accept that this is where we are, but another bout of reality also came to me: it was something special. I had devoted hundreds, probably thousands of words to the excitement, connection, and joy, aside from the struggles and worries.
Lately, my thoughts and feelings seem to be rolling around in my mind like clothes and one of those rubber ball things in a dryer. Not many people have been able to really understand what it's like, to mutually love and then let go of that in spite of a mutual desire not to. It makes so very little sense, when you're in it. I have the unfortunate privilege of having broke off this relationship once before, myself. I doubted and ultimately reversed my decision, if you will. But in the time I contemplated the validity of that separation, I was honest with myself and a few others about the complexity of everything going on in me, as I questioned giving up what I'd had. My mom has been there. Her and my dad went through a breakup of a few months after years of being together before they were married. She told me that you'll know because you can't live without them. Those words tumbled around in my mind along with all the memories and feelings about all the memories...
I'm an independent woman (shout out: Destiny's Child, I'm throwin' my hands up at ya). Just before I started dating Shawn, I was beginning to feel really, truly alright being single - which now I think of all the times people have said that's when it comes along... I don't really love the idea of feeling as if I can't live without someone, but it is true in an emotional sense. Upon returning to my singledom, it felt as if my life had quickly become hollow. It seems everyone else is paired off, and I'm the creature on land that will inevitably go extinct because I'm not part of a pair. You realize after a breakup, that people fit you in when you're single, but no one prioritizes you. And so I missed it.
I missed him. In revisiting all the stress-points, I also passed by the sweet moments and the giddy infatuation. The type of things I could write about, because they're charming and special, but they were ours, and so I won't. I missed the things I liked so much about him, from his eyebrows, to his giggle, to the way he parented, to when he got choked up, his smile - even the way he so often fell asleep at random times (which drove me crazy)! I missed the ease with which we could be together and talk. I missed waking up to an affirmation. I missed having someone to share every day with, not only that but someone I loved.
At the same moment that I was trying to document my coming to terms with where him and I are, I was feeling, again, the loss of so much good. I thought to myself, how will anything ever compare in my heart and my memories?
It's as if I'd found my needle in a haystack. I don't really expect to find another, nor do I even want to try.
