"I don't even know what to say to you."
"I am deleting all your messages."
"Do you even want to see me?"
"I don't understand you."
Before she announced how you wanted to break up with you, these are expressions I remember. Expressions that I reflect back in shock of how I could love someone so insensitive to me. How though she wanted me to ask me for clarity before coming to conclusions, she could so easefully conclude me. Conclude me in a way so abrupt and only pillowed by a mere: "I know you might be really upset hearing this."
When I heard these expressions from her, I really questioned who was receiving me. Was it the person who once was sensitive enough to give me the space to open to her? Or someone I did not quite know? Someone that I am only learning of in this emergent exposure of moments of conflict unspoken to? Someone who once told me that she felt sorrow for when someone could come to a conclusion and not express at any of the moments before that their needs were not being met?
It was moments like those where I started to understand that her plea of "Please respect me." really meant "I do not have the capacity to hold respect for you." after seeing how though she was asking for space, she could not even bring herself to directly communicate with me. With how she was uncomfortable with me writing about her, speaking to her need of privacy. Though I wanted to respect her, I did not want to privatize how I felt with how suffocating it was to not write. Because I love writing about those I love and I am not writing about her in a way that holds how I was so fulfilled and nurtured in relationship with her alongside the moments of disconnect and hurt.
What I want to turn towards is how, throughout our relationship, I could see how in moments where I was feeling intensely she could only relate to me through a strategy of responsibilty. Of choosing to bear the weight of being this mechanic or fixer of the problem I was going through. Or wanting to find the cause in hopes it would alleviate me. And I saw this with how she related to the others around her. She was sorry to cause her mother to cry and drained when she realized she was taking up the gravity of her struggling friends.
And I am morose reflecting in how I could not make it clear to her that she needed to turn within rather than toward. Because I did not want her to stretch her heart in ways unfathomable when it was challenging to even stretch for herself. To have herself be fully included in what she saw as within her circle of care.
A moment I remember so deeply was when I asked for compassion and received confusion. Because I did not recognize how she was not available to feeling with me, suffering with me, and attending to my intense emotions seeing how she was drained herself. Drained of the waters of her own self-compassion that I saw she so needed with how she had distanced and blunted herself from her body's gentle cues and signals.
I feel heartbreak reflecting on those moments, hearing the pain of her and me both echoing. These moments that I realize I so contributed to when I slowly withdrew my vulnerability to her from the hurt of not being listened to. To my feelings not being received in a way fulfilling to me. As I am starting to recognize I have distanced from my sensuality and the romance of consistently being in touch with my feelng world and expressing that.
As something I noticed when I was with was how her wound of longing to control how she felt started to bleed into me. And it was with blood that we started to split. Because I started to notice that longing to control how I felt more consciously with her, not realizing how much I had let seep into my heart's circulation.
I did not want to contribute to tension in her psyche when she was realizing how space away from academics led her to realize how out of touch she was with herself. Yet, I was hurt. I was hurt how did contribute to that as I realize all of creation holds tension. A creationary tension where what is held together only stands through conflict.
With the world of us burning down, I really am being revealed to how losing someone has this finality of an apocolypse. In witnessing a world I so trusted, felt sustained by, and joyously reciprocate collapse. Collapse in the falling where I once had this diving partner, as in the fall I reach out and find no one. No hand. No touching, reassuring contact. No eyes that gave life's falling a bit of flight. And no one who I once knew. Because I cannot say I really know her any more, and I am in deep sorrow from that.
In the emptiness of where I reach, only finding the ghouls of what I remember. There is this phantom pain that comes from reaching out to someone familiar and to only find everything foreign. Though, I am also reminded of how in every heartbreak, there is this crack. This exposure to how the heart continues to want to stay open and to widen into places of uncertainty.
In this space now, I reach out and find this air that is reassuring. I am still whole and still flexible enough to bend in this storm. Willing to honor the grief within me, knowing how to leave it stuck would be to forget the love present within me that allowed me to love her in the way that I had. I loved her not like everyday would be our last (something I remember she told me when I said farewell with embracing hugs and wistful gazing) but how everyday was a first. As for me, I feel most fulfilled when I greet the day in birth. In feeling the openness of the world by opening.
Today, I was so reminded of her emptying presence. The moments where I can experience how the split was not just in her expression that one day but of how I so could easefully imagine her accompanying to events, places, and activities where we could have been together. And my heart is aching.
In those moments, I feel suddenly alone. Silently attending to watered eyes fertile with sorrow in how we could have been together. As I am coming into deep contact for how distant and isolating reality can feel when I look for someone and find loss.