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2020, 28, Her Version of Events,

Words

P.S. Please listen to Kygo’s album Golden Hour while reading this.

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Words take up whatever form your mind desires for them to take up; Like when you tell me at the end of a call “I should let you go,” my mind interprets it as a reminder that you will never be mine, and when I type “Thank You,” my mind means ’I love you and I am grateful I can lean on you.‘ Maybe the words left unsaid are the ones I need to say and get everything out in the open. 

This isn’t about talking to just anyone, it is more about talking to you. I am going to make a list of all the random things that happen during the day that I want to text you about. Things that wouldn’t ordinarily be your business but, because I maybe love you, I have the desire/urgency to let you in on all my activities. 

Some days I am scared we will have after-the-fact conversations and say things we wish we had said in the moments when they mattered and we will be left wondering if things could be different had we just used our words. 

15/03/2020

We are constantly reminding ourselves in conversations that we are friends, I think we both need the reminder. We are constantly testing the waters to be sure we both remember. We say things like “you know you are my friend, ” followed by a short pause like we have more to say, “this is why you are my friend,” and then end conversations with open ended sentences like “you know you are important to me,” which can mean anything and nothing at all.  

Maybe, instead of constantly forcing ourselves to fit into the “friendship” box we outgrew many moons ago, we should have a direct and open conversation about where we have progressed to and how to find our way back to where we need to be. Because the reminders and open ended sentences will only lead to a horrible breaking apart. 

03/04/2020 

I can’t remember the last time we didn’t talk in 48 hours. I have convinced myself that if we can successfully not talk, that we have no form of communication, for 72 hours, it means that our hearts are successfully unthreading from each other. Oh, by the way you called, just at the 53rd-hour mark. I was freaking out, thinking you had forgotten all about me already and I was making peace with it, you know. It might seem a tad bit dramatic but my mind loves to make up stories and these made-up stories help me cope. But there are little things you do that my mind has decided are peculiar to you. Like how you say “I miss you”, never in those words but with the urgency in your voice when you say “Still alive and well?” 

05/04/2020 

I love who we are in the moments when we let our guard down and share freely. When we forget all the careful boundaries that are in place. But one of us always remembers and  drags us back to the boundary lines. It was your turn to steer us back last night and now I can’t get the words you said out of my head: “there really is no point to this line of conversation.” My follow up question should have been “So why did you call? Did you have pre-arranged talking points?”, because I was angry, angry at you, angry at the situation. 

I found myself in the last few weeks thinking we should just rip off the bandage and go cold turkey because, really, what is the point? 

08/04/2020 

I think the best part of our friendship (I am calling it this and commanding it into existence) is that you believe in me so much more than I do in myself. You see me and you prop me up to the point where I am convinced I can take over the world. When I lament or feel like I am not good enough, I can be rest assured you will tell me “Hey Ara, you’ve got this.” When I am tired and have worked myself to the ground, you stay with me, pull me back on my feet and help me to the finish line. You never tell me my dreams are too big, you listen, help me fine-tune them and constantly remind me to keep my dreams in focus and set milestones towards achieving them. In the middle of everything I will miss about “this”, what keeps me longing, is that it could have worked, is what stands true at the centre and is hurting like hell is that I’m letting go of someone who completely cheers me on and is always on my side and the sense of complete hopelessness that I will not have this again. I am learning to hope again, to believe that God is definitely going to sort this out for me in His own perfect time. 

9/05/2020 

I woke up this morning with the overwhelming desire to call you, to make sure you are fine and all is well in your world. 

I have used so many tricks to stop myself from calling you; the best trick is telling myself that it isn’t my place to know if all is well in your world and if you need my help you would reach out. But this isn’t stopping my need to talk with you, to just hear your voice and know that all is well with you. I am hoping that I don’t cave in and call or text. I am not feeling as overwhelmed as I did when I got up this morning, fingers crossed to see how the rest of today plays out. I missed your call this afternoon and I called you back. All is definitely well in our world but not in mine, it will not be until I lay “this” to rest 

20/05/2020

There are stages to separation. First, “we” goes out the window closely followed by “us” but because we don’t want to wrap our head around what is happening we start having placeholder positions in our individual futures. We say things like “Oh! I will be your daughter’s godfather” or “I will make sure you dance at your wedding” because, even though the separation is happening you don’t want it to happen all at once, you desire to hold on to whatever you can just a little bit longer.  

31/05/2020 

I think the process of unloving is one that isn’t widely talked about. The process of feeling your heart pull away from another’s, of asking yourself why you thought the moon only shines in the person’s eyes. I know nobody really thinks this but I am sure you understand what I mean.

You start to question if your feelings were real in the first place, you question if you even know the definition of love and can be the right judge of when you next feel it. I believe the hardest thing is how a few of the things you once loved and admired about the person become the very things you can’t stand, the things that help your heart make the decision to walk away. I guess my question is, how do you trust your judgment on your emotions when they seem to always be shifting?

01/06/2020 

All I see are cracks and the endless reasons why this can‘t work and, maybe, never worked. I think the euphoria of whatever I felt blinded me to these cracks but, aren’t we supposed to love regardless of the cracks? 

Maybe the anger that consumes me right now is born out of a place I don’t want to visit anymore. A place where, if I am being honest, I saw all the cracks but chose to love regardless, embraced all of you, cracks and whatnot.

P.S. Please listen to Kygo’s album Golden Hour while reading this.

December 16, 2020
2020, 27, Her Version of Events,

Needless To Say ….

There are two important things you have to do for me while you read this;

  1. Listen to the song Happy Now by Kygo while reading
  2. Please don’t judge me.

I wasn’t a believer in the term broken heart because scientifically it isn’t possible for a person to live to tell a story of a broken heart therefore I couldn’t wrap my mind around the phrase.

However, twice in the last two weeks I have gone from having this piecing pain in my chest to curling up on my rug and crying fat ugly tears; the type that sucks the energy out of you and you can’t but sleep right after.

I have learned to never do this type of crying on an empty stomach and to always have a face towel drenched in cold water on hand for the headache that inevitably follows it.

Needless to say, I fully understand the concept of a broken heart now. I know to cherish all experiences and learn to build from them but this isn’t an experience I would like to relive. I am sure I have learned all the lessons I need to learn from it and I have carefully documented them in my journal, written them on post-it notes and stuck them around my room so I never forget.

Here is the thing, I am responsible for my ‘’broken heart’’. I will attempt to explain how I came to be curled up on the floor, having the life sucked out of me.

It started with a promise for a free meal which turned to 10 follow up meals within two months. I enjoyed the conversations and really, who says no to free food?

By the third month, I found out that my hands fit perfectly in his and I should have know to snatch my hands out of his and run, instead I stayed put convincing myself everything was under control.

In the fourth month, we talked about the all the reasons sharing meals was a bad idea but we left the restaurant that night with the date for our next meal picked. I should have known to decline the next meeting invitation but by that point, all of me lived for sharing 12-piece chicken wing with him.

By the sixth month we fell into a routine: of sharing meals, sharing ideas and sharing our lives with each other. Looking back on how things progressed, there are two important lessons I learnt from those first six months;

  1. When you know the attraction will end in tears, run! Don’t let the warm feeling in the pit of your stomach get the better of you.
  2. Be brutally honest with yourself about the situation and make the hard decisions.

The sharing, eating meals, meeting family went on for the next few months and by the time I was ready to face reality it was too late for my heart, it had already gone and given itself away.

I found myself dreaming of my future with him in it. We went from ‘’my plans’’ to ‘’our plans’’ and from ‘’you’’ to ‘’we’’. I think what made it hard was we actually work well together, complementing each other’s strengths and weakness, it became difficult to run because it started to feel right.

In the fourteenth month, my uncle staged an intervention. He talked to me about physical compatibility and spiritual compatibility. By this time, there was no point pretending ‘we were just friends’, I listened attentively and when he was done talking, I asked, ‘’So what do I do?’’ He didn’t have a ready answer for me, he told me I was between a rock and a hard place and he understood perfectly the turmoil I was going through.

Two things he said stuck with me.

  1. Everything good isn’t Holy.
  2. You need to blend physical attraction and spirituality, one can crowd the other out and blur your vision but for successful long term relationships, there needs to be a blend.

I went into deep reflections asking myself hard questions about my future and all the things I want my life to be filled with. I plotted a timeline for the current course I was on and I didn’t like the places my mind’s eye took me.

My next decision was clear; unlearn back to ‘me’ from ‘us’. It was in the course of unlearning, of detangling, that my heart broke. Its strings had become too attached and weren’t willing to let go, the yanking off that needed to happen broke it into a million pieces.

So, that is how I broke my own heart and spent Christmas tucked safely in bed grieving what was, what could have been and learning to be just me again. I am not quite there yet but the experts of this type of thing say it takes times, I am therefore giving it time.

January 14, 2020