Musings of a broken heart

I saw a comment on Instagram saying: “death is hard to handle, but we find peace and solace in knowing they’ll be okay in the next phase of their being. The ‘death’ of a relationship is a whole other uncharted, heart-breaking massacre.” Losing someone to death is vastly different then losing someone who is still alive.

I lost a friend to suicide and it was horrible. I kept dreaming about her and then halfway through the dream I realized it couldn’t be true and the dream always ended with me saying to her, how are you here? cause I know you can’t be. And I think that’s what loss through death is to me. You’re truly saying goodbye to someone. All the what if’s and could haves are meaningless, because nothing can change the fact that they’re not here.

But a breakup is having to say goodbye to someone who is still here. Every time you want to talk to that person, you could, but you can’t. It’s knowing their life and yours keep going on, without you and them being a part of it.

About a year and half after my friend died, I met my now ex-boyfriend. And we would sometimes have conversations about her, and he would say he thought he would have liked her. And I think the other way around she would have liked him. And my heart would break a little, knowing that she would never meet my person.

And now he is no longer my person. And I made that decision knowing that even though we loved each other very much, the relationship didn’t work. But he still feels like my person. Everything I go through, he’s the one I want to tell about it. When I am engulfed in sadness and heartbreak, I want him to lie next me and hug me to sleep. The nights are the worst, because I still remember what it feels like to hold him, how soft his skin was, the contour of his face in the moonlight. But he’ll never be next to me again, even though he could, but he won’t. And that’s a really difficult reality in which to have to say goodbye.

Saying goodbye to someone who is physically not here anymore is really hard and it takes a while to realize you’ll never see them again, but it eventually makes sense. You don’t brace yourself for the impact that they might just show up. But somebody who still roams the earth, maybe even in a very near proximity to you occasionally, is fucking weird. Sometimes when my doorbell rings, and I’m not expecting anybody, I think it’s him. Every corner in my neighborhood where something significant or insignificant happened, reminds me of him and that makes it feel like I might run into him right there. But I never do.

And every time I need him, I need to talk to him, I know he is technically just a phone call away. But we agreed on no contact for a reason, because speaking to or seeing each other just makes everything infinitely worse. So I am saying goodbye to someone, who isn’t physically gone, but will never be in my life again. He won’t meet my next person, or the kids that are hopefully in my future. And he won’t know that I am going back to school and I don’t know where he lives or what his house looks like. What if one of us gets a cat and we’ll never get to meet them.

The future I was sure he would be a part is now devoid of him. And that’s a grief I don’t yet know how to overcome.