I’ve been thinking about how to write this entry all weekend. I’ve been wondering exactly how to tell you that I broke up with my boyfriend, who is now my ex-boyfriend, I guess, and that I am now single, as of last week. I’m trying to figure out how to adequately express all the pain and misery and just plain weirdness I’ve felt since I got back from the trip. I don’t know how to do it. He’s all over this journal for the past three years; hell, he was the one who encouraged me to finally start my own after gushing about all the others I read. How do I talk about him now, here, now?
I don’t feel comfortable getting into the details here, but that doesn’t leave me much to write about, does it. I can say that Carl was my first true love, the love of my life, and that my greatest hope was to spend the rest of my life with him. I can say that I fought really hard to stay with him, for as long as I could, and that I now believe I stayed too long and should have let him go earlier. I can say I have not been very good to him sometimes, a lot of the time, maybe even most of the time, and that I’m truly sorry for that.
I guess I could get into how I always hoped to be writing an engagement entry for this journal instead of this breakup entry that I’m writing so poorly. I can tell you that I went to a wedding on Saturday at which the bride called me by name to catch the bouquet and that I was a little ungracious about it but I stood up anyway and watched with no emotion as it sailed by my head. I can tell you that I used to really really really want to get married and that maybe is part of why I lost this relationship, because I insisted on labels and timelines and schedules. I can say that even though that it was, I guess, technically me who said the breakup words last week, that I feel completely rejected, and that to some extent I’ve been mourning this relationship’s end since January at least.
And of course you know from your own life how hard love is sometimes, and how you can have a relationship with someone who only exists in your head, and how you can close your eyes to reality in the name of love, and how love and companionship and compatibility and a secret language and mutual friends and time spent with family, all those things I thought we had, just aren’t enough. I can’t even think of the answer to “Enough for what?” but you know. Enough, enough.
I feel untethered and strangely calm and quiet inside. I’ve done a lot of crying about this but it feels far away and as though it has nothing to do with me. I keep talking about it as though I’m talking about a dear friend going through a rough patch. I’ve had a very nice weekend that involved chocolate ice cream sauce, a little dancing, much DVD watching, talking on the phone, a visit with a tortoise names Joachin, and a fantastically overpriced brunch (four bucks for a glass of orange juice, can you believe it?). I’ve danced around the living room in my unmentionables and read some books (I’m reading Peter Pan right now) and made dinner and gone to bellydance class and made more plans for the Summer of Fun. I still love Carl but that love is buried under a lot of pain and rage and shame and I can’t tell if I’m pretending that this isn’t really real or if I’ve been so sad for so long that it’s just a relief now or if it’s all going to blow up in my face in a couple of days or weeks or months or what. Sometimes when there’s too much to think about and feel I just shut down for a while. You know how it is.
Anyway. If you have been through something like this, and you know how to talk about it and write about it without getting ugly or maudlin or annoyingly evasive, or even if you know how to convince yourself that your life is really your life, I wish you would tell me. Right now all I’ve got is this: I lost someone I loved very much, and that hurt is going to be with me for a long time, I think, but I just can’t feel anything at the moment.