Tag: heartache

I’m a Lover & a Fighter

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You can’t leave love without being a willing participant.

When men have broken up with me in the past, it’s not like the love just stopped that same day. I always loved until I was forced to move forward.

I have spent so many years lamenting over lost love and puzzling (wildly) over why they always leave.

I think I finally have my answer: It’s not that I just wasn’t good enough or what they wanted. I just had the balls to love harder.

I had this bathrobe that was a total comfort item. My step-grandmother had given it to me for Christmas when I was in my early 20s. It was the perfect level of fuzziness, and I would often wear it to bed or even out on my deck, in lieu of a jacket, when I was cold. This glorious pink and white plaid robe lived with me in three different apartments over more than 10 years. By the end, it was thread-bare and a continuous joke among my closest friends and boyfriend at the time. I had worn the butt of it so thin that you could see through it! I didn’t care. I knew it wasn’t as warm as it used to be, but when I put it on, I felt safe.

I probably held onto that bathrobe far longer than I should have. When I finally did decide to let go and move on, I clipped a tiny piece of the belt off, so I could sleep with it if I ever felt lonely. That belt scrap came to Ireland with me a couple months later and dabbed the tears of joy and nostalgia that I experienced visiting the birthplace of my Nana, while tucked away in a bunk bed in a hostel in Dublin.

I am obstinate. I am reticent to let go of something I have loved so much. Something I spent so much of my energy adoring. This is much like my love for humans. Not always to my benefit, because there were times when I was too naive or afraid to let go. I was a little too tolerant of abuse. Then, there were the times I just loved and fought a little harder than they did.

In a world where you can just buy another bathrobe if the old one is getting ragged, everything loses its preciousness.

I recognize and cherish the precious moments in life. If that means I must get out my needle and thread and do a little patchwork, so be it. If that means I may be left behind because someone else couldn’t put in that drive and energy that so naturally occurs to me, then, so be it.

I’ll be the one who stays and fights. One day, instead of being the girl who was pitied for always being left, I will be loved the way I love, because he chose to stay and fight, too.

Discarded

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The strange thing about heartbreak is that the loneliness never gets easier.

Yesterday at lunch, my coworkers talked about ravioli.  You and I will never make them with your grandmother’s pasta maker.

I haven’t watched the newest episode of “This Is Us” and often feel compelled to wait for an imaginary time when we’ll watch it together.

I think about making pizza in the flour-filled air of our kitchen. I miss the taste of the seasonings you melded into the crust.

I drive by the old apartment that we lived in for less than a year. Soon someone else’s bed will be where our bodies held each other every night.

I want to tell you how there’s no way to lose the “Zen” mode in my Bejeweled game. How that’s why I have millions of points.

Or how my car starter battery was only dead and now it works great from far away.

Or how Aum was being so cute the other day.

Or the fact that I had my parents pick me up from a party last Saturday because I was too sad to be there.

It’s been over three months, and it literally feels like yesterday that you were mine.

I have moments where my deluded mind tricks me into believing it’s not done.

And the crash to reality from those moments is always so indelicate and raw. Like poor stitching being pulled apart so it can be redone crooked and wrong.

I’m full of pockmarks and broken threads.

I live in this loneliness of forgetting that you are never coming back and that when I wake up in a panic, it’s because you are not mine and never will be.

That I was just another tragedy. Scrap swept aside to become trash.

Somewhere in the landfill of my toxic thoughts and brooding heart, I am lost. Unless reclaimed, garbage never becomes anything useful again.

That’s the kind of lonely this is.

Miss You (7/30/18)

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I miss you.
All the goddamn time.
Even when you’re in the room,
I miss you.

I once told you this,
but now that luxury is gone.

I suffer alone
with the immensity,
the missing.

The knowing that everyone now gets
more of you
than I ever will again.

Always Been (8/16/18)

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I think of the irreversible damage of a mother not holding her child;
of blame and abuse from birth–
and I know no one really is ever okay after something like that.

Then, I think of myself,
loved and rocked from womb to walking–
showered in affection and praise.

I naively fall right onto men’s laps and into their arms–
not understanding the harm
that is incurred later in life when you used to trust
and now know it’s always been a lie.

Dysphoria

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The heartbreaking ease of going to sleep with tear drops blanketing my face is like a familiar song. Although I feel so alone in those moments, I know every verse, every note.

I’ve hummed it my entire life.

This has been the longest breakup. He broke up with me July 8th, and it is only today, September 26th, that I wake up no longer having to worry about the old apartment, the storage unit, or any of that. Of course, there are still a couple loose ends to tie up, but it is so close to being final.

I have been telling myself for months that things will be better once it is all done and I am no longer breathing in the air of purgatory—stale, tepid, and apathetic. I also knew that once all the pieces were put away and our lives were once again separate and unknowing that I would feel the panic of isolation, erasure, impermanence.

Both are true.

So, I am left in a wind-swept tunnel, clear of the physical presence of him, but every molecule in the air is vibrating with the verse I sing myself to sleep with.

I will slowly forget the words, and new words will fill that space. The song will never be gone, but it’s nice to get it out of my head for just a while, if I can.

Forever Heart

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For a few more hours, it is your birthday. I don’t know what you’re doing to celebrate or who you spent it with. I didn’t ask.

I couldn’t.

Knowing that yesterday you saw my hand-writing in purple Sharpie on the package I mailed you, that your hands opened the card and held the letter–imagining you feeling the soft plushness of your gift as you gave it a gentle squeeze–it’s the closest I’ve felt to you since we last saw each other and shared those three sacred words.

I’ve lost something immense.

When I really think about what I’m letting go of, I can’t handle it. But I also never really had you, either. Yes, I may have had your words of devotion, your insatiable kisses, your loyalty, in a sense, and we shared a deep intimacy; however, you were never my boyfriend, I never met your sister, you didn’t tell your friends about how this amazing girl stole your heart. No vacations were spent together. No mundane moments. No walking up and down aisles of a grocery store looking for the right kind of mustard, or asking each other where we left our keys. We never spent an entire Sunday afternoon lying on the couch watching cartoons.

That’s what I lost: The chance to ever experience more than a handful of sultry, passion-soaked hours together. I missed out on the every day. On being yours–and not in the possessive, derogatory sense–in the this girl only had eyes for you and wanted you to be proud to hold her entire heart sense.

Even though I didn’t get to wake up next to your sweet-smelling bed-head and drowsy eyes more than a few times, and even though I have no idea what you’ve been doing these past months or what thoughts gather in your brain moments before they trail off into slumber, I feel so much love for you on this day.

I’d like to think I know you in a way that no one else does, and I don’t need to know how many reps you did at the gym, what you are wearing, or what the last errand you ran was to know this.

I may have missed out on so much of your life, and perhaps, I was cheated of the experience of being immersed in your world as your girlfriend, but one thing I haven’t been kept from is your heart.

Just knowing your day has been wonderful, without any other details, fills me, because when two hearts have the connection ours do, that is never lost.

I can no longer ask you how you are doing and I can’t tell you how I feel delirious on opiates whenever we speak or touch, because if I can’t have your open, vulnerable love and commitment, then I can’t know how you are.

Just knowing you are out there is enough. Maybe it will be different someday.

I feel warm with the satisfaction that my words and my gift touched you last night, and today is yours–just for the very special you.

If I can no longer tell you those things, then I’ll just let you know, from time to time, here.

Transitioning from being in love with you to just loving you is hard. Stubborn and persistent memories douse me in a perfume of belonging and fixation, and my selfish sorrow of your erasure thrashes at my body so violently sometimes that I have to force the thoughts out before I am weather-wrecked and broken.

Yet, it is also just so very seamless to love you in any capacity, because you’ve bared yourself to me. I might feel gratitude on this day because you were torn from warm comfort and exposed to the unyielding swinging axe that is the very nature of this life. It is an unforgiving place at times, but the day you entered my world, my heart was forever changed.

Space

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It was better when there was space

and mystery

You didn’t know the contours of my thighs
Nor delighted gasps when fingers find 

I didn’t wait for your words with bated breath
Like a child’s Christmas Eve
I didn’t feel the hollow in my heart
Every time you come and leave 

Survival of the Ill-Fittest

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Based on principle
I’ve been cast away
Not fit for the role of your go-to lover
I’ve always dreamed of more

All of the love notes
All of the quiet kisses
All of the hours spent
Wishing we were near each other

The phone calls
Where our voices aroused the other
The support
The effort
The time
So much damn time

It was all for nothing
For the very thought of commitment scares you

Not the forever-longs
Not the incomparable
Not the most beautiful and special girl
Not the way we feel high whenever we talk or think of another

Not even finally finding someone worth your time is enough

It’s all a matter of principle
Your rule you’ve made to survive

Disintegrating

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I am sitting on my couch, alone in my living room, thinking about all of the people I care about and how I haven’t seen most of them in so long that I can’t remember their voices or how they smell.

My heart is breaking into a million pieces.

It might be my overly active hormones at play, but it is still real just the same.

My chest aches and my lower lashes feel the kiss of tear drops, because I miss these people. But it is more than that. I am proud of them. Real damn proud.

I think about acquaintance friends with whom I haven’t visited in many years—how they are married now or having kids. I can watch them through the filtered screen of social media. I see their lives growing and changing.

My old best friend from grade school is a successful fashion consultant with her own company in NYC. I was just visiting her website and admiring how professionally and elegantly done it was. My old best friend has accomplished so much. I can hardly believe the magnificence of humans, sometimes.

The first man I said “I love you” to recently got engaged.

Everyone’s lives are just branching out like a well-mannered fractal into outer space. These lovely branches curving and splitting, and my heart just wants to burst with genuine excitement and joy in the happiness that is others’.

I don’t know if my mind is searching out these longing memories tonight because my hormones are peaking for a window of time due to PMDD, or because I’ve experienced loss so near in the past.

I might not have another Tuesday night with my best female friend. Tuesday was our day. She’d come over with beer or wine and we’d sit and talk or watch a girly movie. There’s been a rift between us, and I haven’t even had the chance to explain myself or talk to her, because she has protectively boarded up her emotional walls and shut me off like water lines in the middle of winter, so the pipes don’t burst.

I said goodbye to a man I have loved fiercely and passionately for over a year. I don’t know if I’ll ever smell his hair again or try hopelessly to get him to open his eyes wide enough to stare into mine for more than two or three seconds.

And he—this man—has accomplished so much. I haven’t been able to be there for any of it, but I’ve cheered from the sidelines and been supportive from the other end of the phone. I’ve pushed him to fight for what he loves, and I’ve lost everything I could have ever had with him to the gamble of his potential success, hanging out there in the future like an amorphous, looming question mark.

I want to take this palpitating heart of mine and shred it up into tiny fibers. Little thread-like viscera. I want to connect myself physically to all of those people who have ever mattered to me. The friends I haven’t forgotten. Loved beings who have amazed me all this time.

Yet… I can’t.

I can’t, and that’s why it’s paining me. To have to stay whole when I want to be a part of everyone. To have to continue to live my own life when my memories dredge up nostalgic yearning to be close to others. To walk my own path, knowing I could never see any of these people ever again. And that I would just have to be okay with that.

Who can always just be okay with that?

Not even the strongest person is truly at peace with the reality that something they love so much might never be close enough to them again that they can just reach out and touch it; embrace it; breathe in the essence of it, whether it be their voice, their graceful demeanor, their smile, their laugh, or just the comfort that is silently acknowledged between two people when they are relieved to be in another’s presence.

And since I am only little Amanda and possess no tool set to cope with this massive sense of loss—this deprivation of familiarity—I wrap up into myself in the fetal position in my bed and cry. I write. I love everything and everyone I can while I can. I hug tightly, say I love you genuinely, and kiss like I’m nominated to win an award for it.

My body is the glue that holds me together, while my thoughts and tears scatter across time.

Not all of these people, or even most of them, probably know how much I hold love for them still in my heart.

One knew. He told me so. I whimpered to him through desperate, emotion-laden declarations that for so long I was afraid to tell him how much I loved him. Right then, he cut me off and said, “You didn’t have to say it. I knew.”

There’s a calming feeling that comes with the knowledge of his heart knowing my heart so intimately all this time without me ever having to verbally confirm that what we felt was real.

For those I’ve lost or not seen, and may never see again, if they could know my love is expansive and unyielding in its many forms, then I am connected to each, instead of my fear of disintegrating into a pile of ash, like every time the one I love steps out my front door.