Just the facts, then, before I start crying again: Saturday, when we’d arrived in Taupo and had come back to the new, strange hostel after dinner, he told me that he didn’t care enough for me. He’d had doubts, he said, since Wednesday when we’d had a very difficult, bloom-off-the-rose, real-and-imperfect-relationship day together. I’d said then that I wasn’t sure if I actually should go on the trip, but he asked me so sweetly to spend that last couple of days with him that I agreed, slightly against my better judgment. I’d remembered someone saying or writing somewhere once that if someone tells you he doesn’t care about you, pay attention to him. And then, willfully, on purpose, I chose to trust him, and to trust the part of me that wanted to open my heart to him fully and prove I am not completely broken, that loving is still something I can do. I decided I would go on the trip and that I would give him all the good parts of me, that I’d send him off to Asia with as full a heart as I could imagine. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said Saturday morning as we got into the car. “Otherwise this would be our last day together and I’d be saying goodbye to you now. That would be quite sad.”

At first I couldn’t believe it was the same person. Once I understood that it was really happening, of course I cried and cried. I called my friend Bridget, to force myself to be accountable, so that I wouldn’t twist things around to make it somehow okay for me to continue with the trip. I finally told him how much I’d cared for him, how important he’d been to me, how I’d come to love him during the weeks we had together: exactly what he was rejecting. “I’d hoped I’d been overestimating how you felt,” he said, blinking. “I thought it would be all right.”

He left at about one that morning and I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead, though if I turn down the melodrama a little I suspect he’s arrived in Kerikeri as planned. “I don’t love you enough,” he said, over and over, “and that’s the truth.” I hid my face from that truth when he walked out, covered my ears so I wouldn’t hear the door shut. The first thing I did was delete every text, every picture, his number from my phone so that I wouldn’t be able to call him. I guess I slept a couple of hours; I didn’t know when the bus back to Wellington was and I was afraid I’d miss it so I wanted to get up early.

On the way back down the bus stopped at Mt. Tongariro, where we’d stopped the day before and taken pictures. I didn’t look out the window or get out, just closed my eyes and turned up the volume. “I need you so much closer,” sang Death Cab For Cutie, and I felt the map of the North Island being carved onto my chest, his car bleeding north and my bus bleeding south. “Someday you will be loved,” Death Cab promised me, five or six times, and I shook my head and told them no, you are absolutely wrong about that, and didn’t bother to wipe the tears. Now it’s eight hours since he left, I counted, now it’s ten. This day is almost over, and then it will be twenty four hours, and then forty eight. Every hour is a step closer to being okay. “If you don’t love me let me go,” begged The Decemberists, as I tried to lie down in the bus seat in a semi-comfortable manner. I listened to some bhangra for a while, for a change, and thought about wearing my skirts and hip belts, feeling the floor under my bare feet, about entering the music and leaving my brain behind for a little while.

“Isn’t it better to say this now,” he said, “then to just email you from Vietnam and tell you thanks but no thanks?”

Bridget was there to meet me at the station, Bridget who hadn’t been able to believe it the night before, who thought there had been some sort of mistake. Bridget who told me “I know I’ve only known you a few weeks but I really do love you.” We met Miriam and Shona for coffee and I cried shamelessly in the booth while the barista tapped his feet and waited for us to leave so he could close. “He’s just scared,” they said, hugging me and holding my hand. “He doesn’t know what he wants,” they said, concerned and compassionate, and “You have to be strong for yourself, you’ll find the one. ” All the things you say. “You just need to cry it out,” they said, and I let the green waves of the beach we’d been to the day we said we liked one another wash down my face, clear and perfect.

I took a cab to my new flat, opening my eyes as wide to the truth as I could every time I passed a place we’d been together, reclaiming my city. I saw him on Lambton Quay, surprised and happy to run into me on a Friday afternoon. I saw him on Courtenay Place at a corner table at Espressoholic and at the x-ray room in Te Papa looking at whale skeletons. I shocked my new flatmate A, who hadn’t received any of the texts or messages I’d sent and was in the middle of painting my new room when I walked in. She stopped what she was doing to make me a cup of tea and hug me and find the animal channel on Sky for me. “Thank God you’re home,” she said. I had to turn off the nature show when his meerkats came on and wished there was something about lions eviscerating wildebeests or sharks dismembering seals.

Five weeks, not five years, I said in the shower this morning, using the last of my conditioner. Five weeks, not five years. “I’m so lonely, and I wish I were the moon tonight,” Neko commiserated as I walked my new route to work. Soon I will have been here in this city, in this country, longer without him than I was with him. Soon it won’t be as bad. Soon this will be anecdote, one more story about how I cannot do this, how I cannot have this. “I want want want to be your love, want to be your love for real,” mourned Rachel, and I wasn’t even that embarrassed that I was crying into the wind and the rain as I walked down the street. Five weeks, not five years.

Oh, my heart: shrivelled, empty, cold and alone, small and scared.

Posted on September 24th, 2006 by Chiara
Filed under: Everything, Wellington