Heartache

I stopped by my friend’s party tonight.  While there, several of us were discussing a couple living in town, one of whom is very sick and wheelchair bound.  “What’s amazing though is that she’s right by his side the whole time,” someone said.  “She won’t leave him.”

“That is amazing.  It doesn’t happen a lot,” I said.  Everyone who knew about what happened with my ex looked at me sympathetically.  It doesn’t happen a lot, and I am proof of that.

I drove by my ex-boyfriend the other day.  He didn’t notice me.  It seemed fitting.  It has been six months and I mostly don’t think about him.  When confronted with something that reminds me of us, I feel this overwhelming disappointment and sadness.  I was so wrong about him, and it is so disappointing.

I don’t miss him, and would honestly prefer to never see him again.  I can’t unhear our last conversation, his own vivid testimony to rationalizing leaving me because I was sick.   I can’t unfeel the moment when I realized that he stopped loving me because I got a colostomy. 

I miss the life I had.  I put a lot of work into it.  I felt safe in it.  It all vanished, so fast.  Every recognizable part of it was gone.  I was alone.  I was very alone.  That is the source of this lingering pain. 

There is this thing no one tells you about heartache – that it is physically painful.  There are days when it feels like my heart is necrotic, the death radiating outward, a chasm opening under my ribs where my emotions used to be.  But this pain – I love it.  It means it was all real.  Once it stops hurting, I think I will never again feel the way I did.  Once it’s gone, it will mean that I will never get any of it back.  It will mean I have given up. 

I deserve to be with someone who doesn’t make me feel guilty for living in this body.  But if we’re being honest, someone I was with for almost five years, someone who repeatedly told me he wanted to marry and have kids with me, stopped loving me because I was sick, and I don’t think that wound will ever heal.  No matter what happens in my life, there can never be a betrayal worse than this. 

On nights like tonight, it feels like the past is trying to drown me, a constant reel of memories playing in the back of my mind.