A letter of heartbreak

I don't know if you'll ever read this. Something tells me you will when I don't care anymore - life's funny that way.1

I went to tidy up the other day and I found a shinty programme stuffed in the drawer. And then I start to think: I didn't even know what the hell shinty was until I met you. And I can't even do anything to it in some moment of hurt anger; I can't even touch it. Every time I look at it, I just remember that sweet 26 year old guy who whispered the words 'together forever' in my ear; who proudly held my hand as we walked down the street; who wrapped me in his blanket of silky soft love and made me feel like the luckiest girl on earth. My thoughts go from slow motion to fast forward: telling you I was pregnant, the first scan, your marriage proposal, choosing our first puppy, looking at houses, buying our car, all the good little moments... I could go on forever. That was the person I met. 2

I don't remember this 29 year old man snapping at me, making it clear even spending ten minutes in my presence is super uncomfortable for him, telling me he just "gave up on me". The man who could stand in front of me for the second time in a year telling me how rosy everything is in his life with another woman. Breaking my heart for the second time in six months. Wasn't it you that always said TF babe, together forever....yeah... They were good words, weren't they...3

See, I find myself replaying scenes in my head all the time. Times I lost my temper, times I flipped over stupid sh*t, every time I screwed up. Not just with you, but with everything in the past ten years of my life. I think of some of the absolute losers I let enter my life... think of the good people I let slip from my life. I think of the times I felt like a mother, lover, wife, fiance, winner, loser, and total idiot in the past year. There's a lot of times I still don't know how to be me. I do know that sometimes you, me, everyone makes some pretty stupid choices. I know I have. I'll probably make more, because I'm still young, and even if I wasn't, well people mess up.4

When I'm replaying those scenes in my head, I can honestly look back and say 'wow I really shouldn't have done that' and learn from it. Do you not think that there are so many times I wish I'd kept my mouth shut to you? So many times I wish I had acted differently?Times I wish I had just walked out of the house for half an hour and calmed down? And times I wish I had got off my ass and said 'OK lets do what you want to do'? Trust me, all the times where I had to be right, or have my own way, weren't worth all the times I cried myself to sleep. And if you wanted to hurt me, you did. You didn't need to cheat on me. Losing you was punishment enough for all the times I hurt you. And if you think back to when you were that in love with me, I'm sure you'd agree that the idea of losing me was that much of a punch in the gut that all the nastiness that ensued was completely unnecessary.5

I remember being told that when you get your heart broken, you actually feel it in your chest as well as in your stomach. And I thought that was bull until I remember back to September 2008 sitting in the car with you and seeing you turn away in silence when I said that I felt something had changed in your feelings for me. Or being in your flat in February this year looking at you both and knowing something was going on - whilst feeling like I was about to vomit and soil myself all at once, whilst I pictured myself scrabbling around in the dirt, trying to pick up my ribs from where someone had punched me in the chest. 6

Do you know how I feel thinking back to all the times you mentioned her name and I thought it was a genuine friendship, when you sat telling me about the problems she was having in her marriage and me thinking you were just being a concerned friend? And deep down, by then, all you cared about was her, and how she felt? What did you expect me to do when you text me that day confirming you were seeing each other? Be happy for you both? That I'd shake her god damn hand?! How do you really think I feel thinking back to how much I loved you, how much you told be you would be there forever, how you sat in front of my family at xmas after me persuading my family to be nice to you again after affair number one only to be "dumped" again little more than a month later? If you didn't want me, why did you get back with me? Why talk about us getting married after all? Why let us re-book the entire wedding? Why proudly walk into your parents with me, see them cuddle me and tell us how happy they were that we were back together? Why make everything seem OK? Why string me along, and lie to me? 7

At what point did you stop respecting me as a human being with thoughts and feelings to continue sleeping with me and letting me believe there was a future, to turn around to my face and say I now meant nothing to you?8

See, now I'm left with all these questions in my head that I'll never get honest answers to. I'm not a proud person. I can take responsibility for why I drove you away in the first instance, because I did act like an idiot at times. I'd have left me too at some points, and I bear you no malice for that. All I wanted was to put everything back together. In my head, in my heart, we were this couple that did have their ups and downs (like every couple) but the love was there. And every time I'd panic things were not so good with us my head would become clouded with memories of the guy who'd put notes through my door saying T.F. The time after we got back together when you randomly said how you remembered I wanted the acoustic version of Heaven playing at our wedding. The guy who made me laugh and dried my tears, and the times I held you and dried your tears back after we lost our precious baby. Where did you offer me that same dignity when you ran out to be with either of the women you were seeing behind my back?9

Do you even care that I still have the first text messages we ever ever sent to each other forwarded from one phone to the next which I just can't delete? That I still have the photo messages entitled "my chariot babe" with a photo of the plane you were off to Iraq in. The pictures of you waving bye. The card you left me under the pillow to find and read once you had gone. Does it matter to you that I lost my best friend as well as my lover and our precious baby? Every damn day that I leave my house, I dread the idea of possibly bumping into you because I honestly have no idea whether I will laugh or cry. Because I don't believe one word that comes out of your mouth anymore, and that cuts through me like ice that it came down to that. And it messes me up that I have a myriad of thoughts that swirl around my head from time to time, and that I'll never ever get an honest answer to them. 10

Why did you even come back, and say you still loved me? Why let me forgive you for all the hurt you had put me through with affair number one? You see I did, because, again, I believed that we were stronger than that. And people screw up, I'd screwed up, obviously you'd just screwed up too. I forgave you for all the times I cried myself to sleep; the weeks I slept continously because I was stuck in a nightmare awake; the times I walked and walked and walked, as if I were trying to outrun my thoughts; the times I sat in the shower sobbing into the sprays of water; the vile things you said to me about just sleeping with her one last time, even when I was crying in front of you. I was apprehensive about letting you back into my life, but I thought our love was worth it, thats why I wanted you back. I still have the texts from our second time round, back to T.F again, nothing was ever going to split us again, you were so happy to be back with me... 11

And then came affair number two. Well, you can tell yourself whatever you want... it doesn't make it the truth. You cheated on me, if not physically then emotionally. You got back with me again and then for the second time emotionally stuck the knife in AGAIN. And why? I don't understand. I'll never understand. I don't understand because I've never felt how I felt for you about anyone.12

I know things changed massively between us when we lost our little boy. I look back now and I can see things from both sides. I remember over and over the amount of times you said you were more terrified than anything of losing me.... pretty ironic eh? I look back to when I was told about the help I would need to keep a baby safe inside me and how you held my hand saying we would get through it, then like a flash of lightning my train of thought changes to you breaking my heart. But why think of me when all that matters is your own happiness and walking your own path; just kicking the debris out of the way.13

I know you don't get it, because to you its tiresome, its boring. You have moved on and I should be over it, as you said 'four years isn't a long time to be a couple'. Like it's never occured to you that you've left me holding onto my end of the rope, sat on the grass and thinking 'what the hell just happened?' 14

Why can't you just realise that you left me still winding the clock even when you didn't want it to tick anymore? That I have all these memories and seemingly inconspicious things are charged with the same emotions for me? And part of me doesn't want the memories when I don't have the person who gave me them. There's some moments where I want to do an Eternal Sunshine and obliterate you from having ever existed in my life. Why can't you understand that it did still beat for me, even if it didn't beat for you? Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in a snow globe that is haunted by memories of you. Of me. Of us. And everywhere I look, there's tracks of where I was with you, of places we were... so many places hold memories, no matter how insignificant.15

I ask myself, what was so wrong with my love that you had to reject it in such a nasty, sly way? Why did you have to twist the knife in my back? All I ever wanted to do was make you happy. It might not have seemed that way at times, but your smile was the most beautiful I ever saw. You don't get how you coloured so much of my life.16

You don't get how it affects me in day to day life. And the saddest thing really isn't the thought of someone else saying all the things that I said to you, or touching you the way I touched you, because that happens. Life goes on. Its the thought that maybe I'll never meet anyone I say those things to again with half the emotion. That I'm doomed to some emotionally vapid life where I turn MY back on him in bed. And you just don't get it, that this is how deeply you coloured me. That nothing is the same for me anymore. Nothing. And I dont understand why. Maybe all this writing is helping me figure it out even if you never do read it.17

One day, someone will do to you what you did to me. Or one day you'll be sitting there realising that for all my faults, I loved you so truly, the kind of love that doesn't come along every day, and all you can do is hang your head. You see, I know how it feels to have been in bad relationships. And I look back on us, and yeah I did crappy things, but I didn't deserve to be treated this way. I know I didn't.18

You were my fairytale real love, and I suppose the cold daylight fact that I want to give that love to someone else now means something. It means I am moving on. If nothing else, I have realised that the guy I fell in love with, that wrote those words on loving me forever, wouldn't have done half of what you did to me in the past six months. And the fact that I have the gut feeling that if you had forgiven my faults of the past, the way I forgave yours, we'd still be together, is irrelevant. Sometimes I tell myself that I probably became the better person for it - you learned how to creep and lie, whereas I learned a lot about respect and selflessness. There's a spiritual saying that 'our hearts have to be broken, because thats how they open'. And believe me, my heart got well and truly broken out of this. If the only consolation I can get out of it is that it makes me more able to give a future partner a more open love, I guess it was worth it. 19

Every time I see something lying about of yours I remember the guy I fell in love with so vividly. And I still remember the smell of your skin and the touch of your hands. But I now know you aren't the person I fell in love with, and maybe what breaks our hearts more is to admit that the people we fall in love with aren't the people who stand in front of us at the end. They just look like them. And more than anything I do truly wish you were still that same man, but you're not. I don't know where he went. Maybe we do just keep falling in love with the same person... just in different people's bodies. So I guess the fact I fell in love once means I'll fall in love again, and maybe the nervous kind lovely guy I fell in love with in 2005 is going to spring up as a another loving kind man sometime soon, and it'll be like he never left... I don't know.20

For what its worth, if I'm right, I look forward to meeting that guy again one day .... just in a different body.