Today is just another day

I got up, got ready for work

The ghost of you followed me as I made the bed. 

I could see you helping on your side

I pulled back the shower curtain and you were already there

My body took the space yours used to occupy

Your drawers are still yours.  I can’t bear to use them

As I did my hair I could see your exasperated expression at wasted time

I can almost feel your hand in mine as I drive to work, our silence is comfortable and full

I look over at the seat next to me expecting you to be there

I can feel your hand as you run it over my hair, caress my cheek

My cell phone chirps and my first thought is that it’s you

But it never is

Today is just another day

You are a living ghost that haunts me

I still expect to roll over and cuddle into the warmth of your back

Your pillow is a pale substitute

I tell myself this is for the best

That I deserve better

Your smile mocks those thoughts

and the memory of your soft lips on my neck makes my heart ache

Today is just another day

That I have to get through

Without you in it

I wish my ghost was haunting you

It’s been quite a bit of time since I’ve blogged, ensconced in that knowledge, I know I can pour my heart out here with relative anonymity.

A friend asked, are you still writing?  My answer was no.  I used this blog once upon a time to get through the hospitalization of my mother and her subsequent death, then put it to bed, as if continuing it would slow my recovery from grief.  I haven’t even visited it much because the pages are so full of me that I can’t face the truth of all I have been through.  Wonder who I am?  You just have to read this blog.

Now I’m facing a crisis of a different sort.  One I’m sure most of you are familiar with; The loss of a love, not by death but by dishonesty.

I’m at work today and I’m just barely making it through.  Tears overflow silently one at a time as I pretend I have allergies.

I’m not sure how much I’ve revealed of my past and I don’t really care to go back through my posts to find out.  This post Is of a different type then what I wrote before.

This post is going to be more of an outpouring of hurt and betrayal and humiliation because I need to spew out this poison before it consumes me.

I’m a single parent and my son is now a teenager.  I chose to not date most of his life. 

It’s easy to say those reasons were all for him, but that would be a lie.

When my son was very little I fell in love with a man.  I was 22, a young single mother, and he seemed to be everything I wanted.  I gave him my heart happily with the optimism of youth that everything will work out.  Of course it would, it always does in the stories.  The stories are lies.

I wasn’t what he wanted, what his family would want.  When the ending came, it left me broken.

So I didn’t let anyone get near me for ten years.  I dated but that was it.  There was nothing serious, no dreams of love.  In fact I stamped down any daydreams of finding someone with a steel toed boot.

So strict I was in not believing in Hope that I forgot how good belonging to someone could feel.

So I was ripe for the picking when an old high school sweetheart came knocking on my door.  How romantic is that?  Makes most girls swoon to think of the stories they could tell about star crossed lovers finding their way back into each other’s arms.  And for awhile it was the fairy tale.  Till HIS old high school sweetheart came knocking on his door and he left me for greener pastures. Literally…they’re in Hawaii.  Gotta laugh at that one, I can now.

Devastation is not even an adequate word for what was left of my world.  But somehow, I managed to pull myself up by the thin remnants of my pride and was able to move on.  Started dating for the first time in my life really.  Learned that you can be with someone without really loving them.  Learned that it doesn’t hurt so bad when it ends because you knew it was always just the two of you marking time. 

During that time I met a young man.  Younger than me and determined that he was going to love me.  I fought him, fought hard.  Maybe even then I knew that he would have the power to drop me as deep into a hole as the two I had loved before.  Our relationship was a tug of war.  Back and forth with him demanding my love and my resisting giving it away.  Parts of our relationship got ugly.  He lied about small things, and I knew it.  He resented that I wouldn’t fully commit and I resented that he wanted me to.  Ugly words were exchanged.  Things you can’t take back.  Wounds given and received like warriors in battle.

He went away to war.  I was glad to see the back of him.

Then soft tendrils of words would find their way into my inbox.  Distance made everything seem forgivable.  The past was easier viewed through rose colored lenses then the bright sunlight of reality.

Even while away there was still the push and pull of our past.  He was never able to let things go and begin again.  I wanted to forgive and forget; to be friends at the very least.  I wanted to believe he had been getting help for his anger and that he wanted to be friends too. 

So I did.

He came home August 31, 2010.  Home to me, home to my heart.  He settled into my soul as if the missing piece had fallen into place.

It was as if all the combinations on my heart clicked open and I was vulnerable in a way I had never been before.

Marry me, he said.  Have my baby.

Oh those words….how dangerous they are to a soul like mine.  One starved for companionship and love.  One who never was brave enough to dream of a partner, to touch on that forbidden thought.  It was like a drug to my soul.  I wanted it.  I wanted every little bit of that dream.  And for awhile I had it.

Then little things would happen.  Once he stopped talking to me, no reason.  I went an agonizing week without understanding what was happening and it took my letting go to bring him home.  He was having trouble with his anger since coming home.  He was afraid he might hurt me.  He’s better now.  We can make it work.

So we did.

Then I found emails to other women that happened during that week.  Emails that invited them back into his life.  And I questioned him.  I was open to an explanation.  I never got one. 

He walked out of my life as if he had never been there.  Two years of struggle and my final acquiesce and he leaves me there, alone, as if I am nothing.  He still loves me he says, but maybe he is better off alone.  He is good for nothing but killing.  He is not good for me.

I try to make him see that my love for him should be enough to bring him home.  It doesn’t.

I start to move on, I go on a date.  I tell him that I did.  His response is instantaneous.  So soon?  I love you, I never stopped.  We can make this work, I say, he wants to talk about it.

He never calls again.

Two weeks later I can’t take it.  I am bolstered by a little too much liquid courage and march over to his place with the intent of getting my answers.  Answers that I already know won’t satisfy anything but get them anyways I must.

I knock on his door, tears already spilling down my checks.  I can’t describe the look on his face.  Shock? Pain?.  He comes out and closes the door behind him.  He is not alone. 

Already he has replaced me, but she has not only replaced me but smothered me out.  She is living with him. 

I make a fool of myself.  Sobbing my thoughts out, incoherent questions of why.  He tries to hold me but I push him away because I just want to pull him so close.

He never does answer.

Finally he tells me quite clearly and slowly that he Does. Not. Love. Me.

My hand actually fly’s up as if to ward off a blow.

The last words I said to him were, “I hate you” and I mean them, as much as I still love him, I hate him.  His last view of me was of swollen eyes, face streaked with mascara and eye liner, with hate on my lips…

So here I am spilling my guts onto this page in the hopes that in the process of telling my thoughts, I can extract some of the pain.  As if the words were sharp little needles that pierce deep into my skin. 

I don’t plan to edit this.  I’m leaving it as raw in words as I feel in flesh.

I wonder what it is about me that is so easy to leave behind?