The Toughest Part
Posted on August 19th, 2008 in Romantic Entanglements
The hardest thing about what I’m going through is that I have to do it 100% on my own. I mean, my friends can talk to me or take me to Target or buy me some Thai food. But I cannot hash it out directly with the person involved because frankly, I find it inappropriate.
I’d love nothing more than to be reached out to. I’d love to have dinner or a drink or just an opportunity to see him again because I guarantee you I probably never will again. (Cue: Heart! Shattering!) I want to be able to say what I need to say and probably cry into my food. And I’d love to be told that I am still a lovable person, that I will always have a place with him and he wishes me the best. I want to know for certain that he is marrying for the right reasons, that he is blissfully happy, that he is very much in love, as much as that will kill me to hear. I want closure.
But really? This exists in my own mind. As I said before, my violent reaction to this news is no one’s issue but mine. It is no longer his responsibility to take care of me, to look out for me, to fix my problems. And it is unfair to ask him to do so. I’ve fretted with writing an e-mail or picking up the phone but I still feel fragile and I don’t know what that would accomplish.
The options are to send him a note and wish him well or to declare my undying love for him and beg him to marry me instead. And since both of those things feel false to me because, well, I’m too sad to congratulate and I’m still not ready to move to the suburbs and become a wife, not to mention break up an engagement, my only action is inaction.
And so, for now, I grieve alone. There may not be anything else to say about this whole situation. So, maybe together we can look forward to moving past this, knowing that pain only makes us stronger and eventually, it does fade away to make room for boundless joy.
[...] Two years ago, I got an e-mail at work from an ex of mine, letting me know he was thinking of proposing to his girlfriend at the time. It was such a complicated story, one I tried to write about, broken down in pieces and scribbled messily on this blog. But there was so much I had to leave out. To protect his now wife and him. So I wrote what I could, still overstepping the boundaries, no doubt, twenty-five years old and overcome with grief and closure and sadness. [...]