A Love I Can't Carry Anymore

All I have, all I need

He's the air I would kill to breathe

Holds my love in his hands

Still I'm searching for something

Out of breath, I am left hoping someday

I'll breathe again

I read the following quote in a NYT essay and it really struck me in both its simplicity and the way it clearly described my experience:

'I was struggling myself after a recent heartbreak and was trying to teach myself how to do basic things again: to think for myself, to walk properly, to hold myself upright, to sleep and to breathe.'

I am 2.5 years post-breakup - an absolutely insane amount of time - and I still struggle with this stuff sometimes.  I likely will never be able to trust another person again, nor will I have the family I so desperately want.  

And I will blame him for this for the rest of my life.  

Room At The Top

I got someone who loves me tonight

I got over a thousand dollars in the bank and I’m alright 

The Writer turned me on to Tom Petty via a mix CD that I can still remember all the tracks to to this day. 

Tom Petty is my standard answer to the “who do you wish you had seen in concert” question.  I wish I had seen the band in its heyday...when they’d play stuff like The Waiting but also Free Fallin’.

I thought about Room at the Top tonight, though, when doing a puzzle on my iPad.  It was of a tent, in a snow-covered field, under a blue-green sky full of stars.

The scene made me think of Camp Lifer.  That’d be his happy place.

I try really, really hard to not think of him these days.  He is getting married, to some girl in her early 20s, and either it’s the pairing he really deserves or a divorce just waiting to happen.  I don’t know.  If I dwell, I spiral so badly into despair that I cannot function for the rest of the day, and crawl into bed in a depression that I know in my head makes zero sense but that my heart still cannot reconcile. 

But tonight I thought of a night, years ago, when there was a meteor shower, or something similar.  He had driven us to this lookout point atop a hill about 15 minutes from home, that he knew about having been born and raised here.  We sat on the hood of the his car and watched the sky for hours.  I remember that I was scared of all the other random people that kept driving up alongside us, and he didn’t even flinch.  He didn’t have a damn care in the world; much like his outlook on life, and a philosophy I wonder if I myself should have adopted sooner.  

It was a peaceful night enjoying the view with someone I loved, and I miss that so much that I cannot even explain the ache I still feel for him on a daily basis.  

I Hope You’re As Happy As You’re Pretending

I know he didn’t write this.  

But I’m going to pretend he did.

On Grilled Cheese

I love grilled cheese.

Like, I’m watching a show on Hulu right now and the main characters just split a grilled cheese and now it’s all I can think about.

No, really.

Camp Lifer used to make them for me by request.  We always had so many different types of cheese in the fridge.  He would make his “specialty”, which was really just slices of cheddar and pepperjack, but man, was it good.

Good because I didn’t have to make it, and great because it was something he enjoyed doing.  For me.

From The Cape

Camp Lifer proposed to his 25-year-old girlfriend last weekend.

A friend of a friend saw the announcement on social media, and the news made it to me pretty instantly.

I froze.

My heart pounded.

And I tried to ignore it was happening.

Did I want him to come back to/for me over the past two years?  Of course I did.  I loved this man with everything I had.  I helped him beat an addiction to alcohol.  I helped him beat a devastating job loss.  We were a team.  We could face anything.

You know, until he got bored after five fucking years and decided to marry someone over ten years younger than me.

I cannot stop thinking about it.  Why wasn’t I good enough?  Why could he buy a house with THIS girl, and build a foundation with THIS girl, but after FIVE FUCKING YEARS couldn’t commit to me?

Thinking about it doesn’t help.  I’m not going to get any answers.  Certainly not now.

My one true love was The Writer.  That will never change.

But Camp Lifer...he was my world.  And even though it was shattered when he left...now it is officially impossible to rebuild.

No one in my life understands.

I fled to a friend’s house on the Cape to escape.  A group of us walked along the beach, and didn’t talk about anything but the nature around us.  We watched the sunset, and the moonrise, and I didn’t think of him once.  Just me, and my friends, and memories that he cannot touch.

I miss him every day of my life, and now he has promised his life to another woman.  

I am shattered beyond belief, and I am coping one weekend at a time.

Locked In This Hell

This is where I say I’ve had enough

And no one should ever feel the way that I feel now

A walking open wound

A trophy display of bruises

And I don’t believe that I’m getting any better 

Yesterday marks two years since Camp Lifer decided to erase me from his life.

Today marks his 34th birthday.

Tomorrow marks the day I came home to our apartment half-empty, as the person I was committed to spending my life with upended everything I trusted, loved, and believed in without a second thought.

I have not heard from him or seen him in nearly 18 months.  I know he’s been promoted, then fired, from the job I helped him get.  I know he was hired elsewhere mid-pandemic and broke his foot on his first day.  I know he is playing house with a girl in her mid-twenties that, of course, works at the same company I do.

But that’s all I know.  

A couple of months ago he went on an unfriending spree and disconnected from anyone he ever met through me.  Over five years of friendships - people we spent every Thursday with at trivia, people whose weddings we attended, people who checked in on me every summer when he left for months with no contact - all deleted, as if none of us ever existed.

We have one mutual real-life friend left.  I told this friend I only want to hear about him if he is hospitalized or if he shows the slightest bit of remorse for the absolute hell he put me through. The broken foot got me the update on his employment status. The rest of the info came from an awkward phone call with my former father-in-law, who, if it came down to choosing between me or his son, might have chosen me.

I remain entirely closed off to everyone.  It is too embarrassing to admit that I still struggle with this on a daily basis.  I don’t need people telling me I should be over it by now.  How do you get over being quite literally ghosted by the last person in the world you ever thought would hurt you?  How do you heal from being dropped like you meant nothing, then harassed for weeks in desperate pleas for attention, then seemingly erased from existence?  How do you move past walking in to your home and seeing your life literally gone before your eyes?

A former friend of his - now my friend only - has told me multiple times that I am not the first girl he has done this to.  The same friend admitted that after years had gone by, he thought the cycle was over.  He suggested I look into personality disorders - not to diagnose, necessarily, but to understand.  I have spent countless nights reading about BPD, and narcissism, and psychopathy, and sociopathy.  The information I devour contains the only explanations I can find that even come close to why he became the monster that he did, seemingly overnight.

And what’s to come of the victim?  When the psychopath has moved on to a new supply, as they say, what happens to the person he left behind, with shattered self-esteem, zero closure, and such severe trust issues that she likely will never be able to have another romantic relationship again?  I still feel like the breakup was entirely my fault, that I’m not capable of being a good girlfriend, and that I obviously am not good enough to be anyone’s wife, and that something must be so inherently unlovable and shitty about me that I brought this all on myself.  

I was made to believe in a relationship, a future, and a person that was likely never even real.  It seems bit cliche to say I was gaslighted, but I do believe I was emotionally abused in a way that I will never fully understand, let alone be able to conquer.  

When The Writer dumped me for greener pastures, I felt physical pain for months. That was real.  That was the one true love of my life.  That was the one that failed because two people just didn’t make sense anymore.  That was the one I can look back on with incredible fondness, and a wistfulness for a man that really was my better half.  That was the one that broke me in ways I didn’t think were possible.  

That was the one I often wish I had met at 31 instead of 21, instead of the one I actually did meet at 31.

That one, I fear, has done irreparable damage.  

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome To @Midnight

I just looked up at my wall clock and it was 11:30pm and my first thought was "gotta turn on @midnight".

Camp Lifer and I used to watch every single episode of @midnight.  We would come up with entries for Hashtag Wars, get super excited when our fave comedians were on, and sit together and laugh for a half-hour straight.

The show has been cancelled since 2017.

I have now lived alone for a year and a half.

Why does my brain do this?

Seasons Greetings, Hope You’re Well

But for me it's just a lonely time
'Cause there were Christmases when you were mine

December 16 and I finally opened our bins of Christmas decorations.  

I put all of Camp Lifer’s stuff in a pile.  His stocking.  All the ornaments I bought him.  All the ornaments my mom bought him.  The ornament he bought me that said “Our First Christmas”, that he gave it to me on our third Christmas, explaining that he had bought it on Amazon and couldn’t read the text in the photo, but he got it because it had two snowmen holding hands and he knew I loved snowmen.

I do love snowmen.

And fuck...did I love him.

In case you were wondering, my search history following the decorating was variations on “what to do with Christmas ornaments after a divorce”.

I’m not sure what to do yet. 

I hate him for doing this to us.