witness
I’ve been in a long relationship. 6 years, 5 months and 3 days. As I write this we have been broken up for 2 weeks. It should be easier this time, because there were so many, too many, other times. At least 24. That’s an embarrassingly high number. But I don’t feel embarrassed — I feel devastated. Just like each and every time before. Each time we had gotten back together, I know him less and less - feel less safe, less wanted, less cared for, less understood, less seen, less valued, less desired, less loved. Until he was like a stranger to me — a stranger whose inner wounds, fears, drivers and patterns I know deeply. Yet continue to be shocked at the actions and decisions he took.
We had never reconciled. We reset. That’s how he prefers it — to reset. Some moves will be made to appear to reconcile, but in truth, it wasn’t. We merely went back to being with each other, ignoring the “keloidal” damage that kept building up. Keloid — origin from Greek kēlis, meaning ‘stain’ or ‘spot’; modern usage defined as “resembling or being a keloid, which is a thick, irregular scar that develops after an injury to the skin. Keloids are caused by excessive tissue growth at the site of a wound or incision.” It was his word — in a beautiful message to me after 5 months of silence after one of our endings — to get back together.
He’d written “The fighting felt overwhelming, the keloidal damage seemed to deepen and when my attempts to fix things didn’t yield rapid results I would become resentful and stop trying.”
I believed, with relief, hope and gratitude, it was finally a moment of insight.
My grief is the result of my own doing. Because I chose to be with someone whose actions brought all my insecurities out to play, but who didn’t want to understand it and do the work we needed to do to overcome it.
He’d said “I just want a happy and harmonious relationship.”
He’d said “I just want a relationship that is organic with no conflict.”
He’d said “I don’t want to be in a relationship where I have to sit in therapy.”
He’d said “All the therapy you do didn’t make any difference. You haven’t changed. I’ve changed for the better. Therapy is useless.”
It was my fault our relationship ended. All 24 times. He’d done all the ending. Abruptly. Because the blame laid with me. My behaviour, he said, was intolerable. I become angry. Why anger rose was not material. Context isn’t important. The simple fact that I reacted at all with anger is unacceptable and crosses his boundaries. And he won’t have it. It is, he said, my inability to regulate my emotions; and my attempts to explain why, simply “manipulation, guilt-tripping and gaslighting”. He had suggested I go on HRT to manage my “mood swings”. I was, according to his army of female friends I don’t know, menopausal.
What do you do as an over-thinker who mulls over life? You take on the emotional responsibility of yours and and theirs, and the burden of blame for us.
The silence is crushing, I tell my therapist, Salwa. She says it’s “like an echo chamber for all your fears and self-doubt.” I imagine what he is doing now. Messaging platforms meant to enable communication has become my temptation, my drug, my albatross. When he isn’t online for a long time, long enough to go on a date and bring someone home, I imagine. What I imagine is based on the patterns over the years. In the earlier break-ups I’d imagine he was going through what I was going through. We “got” each other after all. He’d said that. “We get each other.” I’d believed he was mourning us, as I was. Him, longing to reach out but unable to let go of his rage. William Ayot wrote a piece, That Bit Again, that I believe described his experience.
Oh, he knows that vulnerability’s a threat
and that innocence can bring out the killer in us.
He’s made his “feed it, fight it, or fuck it” choices.
He’s neither a monster nor a bloodless ghoul.
What’s hard to stomach is that bit inside him
that reaches for the knife, that slips into the water;
the dead-eyed, threatened little boy, that morphs
into the stranger who savages those he loves,
who sweeps away years of trust and affection;
turning a tiff into a bloody crime-scene.
When I had conviction that was his experience when we are apart, I longed to reach out and just hold him. Soothe the “reptile in him that wants to kill, to rip out the throat of this unfair world” in an embrace of all my love. But I don’t have that conviction anymore. I only have the facts, which are that when we are apart he replaces me. With other women. Fast. Immediately. And facts cannot be ignored. I torture myself now with that fact — a fact he’d share with me when we reunite — in the interest of being honest, he said. But we can’t talk about it, because if I bring it up, or anything about his actions that hurt, “I’ll break-up with you and block you.” Even if what I’m saying is true, he said. Because it’s in the past, and I like to keep “picking at the scab” and he won’t have it. He won’t be “made to feel guilty”. I torture myself with the fact that I am easy to replace, that he is giving his best self to another and, that he doesn’t think about me. His words - I pick; and he doesn’t think about me. It is my fault. I am a romantic, he’d sneered before. And I won’t let things go.
He’s right. I am a romantic who clings to hope. That’s a character flaw. But what is honesty without empathy? In Hope In The Dark, Rebecca Solnit wrote:
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.… To hope is to give yourself to the future — and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
His beautiful message gave me so much hope; a validation of the rightness of holding on to it.
He wrote: “I realise I have royally fucked it up between us.”
He wrote: “I cherish the time we shared and value what you did for me.”
He wrote: “I failed you by not showing you.”
He wrote: “Your patience, compassion, kindness and generosity enriched my life immeasurably. Your intuition and unconditional love gave me a feeling of being chosen and wanted that I haven’t previously felt, or ever felt I deserved.”
He wrote: “Our chemistry and your willingness to ‘love me with abandon’ (I have no words more appropriate than yours), meant everything else was secondary when we were in the moment.”
But a happy and harmonious relationship isn’t based on small, disconnected moments of chemistry. They are an accumulation of all these moments, weaved into the fabric of life. Sewn in. When we stop weaving, or worse, when we choose to unravel what had been weaved, it falls apart. We need to stay long enough to keep weaving, especially when the loom gets stuck — then we repair it so we can keep weaving; especially when we run out of yarn — we look for more yarn together; we keep creating this layered piece full of colour and texture together, so we can keep going. Keep going until we connect our flawed, beautiful masterpiece to the end of our days.
He wanted perfection from me. He called me a “prize fucking catch”. He said he “won the lottery of life” when he met me. He said “I love how you fight for us.” He said “We’re only here because you won’t let me cut my nose off to spite myself”. But I could not deliver. The pedestal too high and the fall soul-crushingly hard. And it was harder to climb back on each time. I was tired. I am not perfect. I don’t know how to be. He said if it wasn’t for me life wouldn’t be worth living.
But he’s living it now. And lives it every time he’d walked away from us. Lived it with every trip he took that was our trip, with every woman he brought home, every one he tried to bring home, lived it every time he held someone else’s hands, lived it doing everything he had said he only wanted to do with me with someone else. Choosing to be without us, and sharing it with another. But that’s on me. He is simply moving on, isn’t he. And why shouldn’t he? I failed him. It was a beautiful message and I failed him.
He wrote: “It’s telling that it took psychedelics for me to experience your pain, albeit temporarily…I gave up on us.”
He wrote: “I regret that decision and I regret the pain I caused you.”
He wrote: “There has been a gaping hole in my life since we parted in December.”
He wrote: “I have reflected deeply and I keep coming back to the same conclusion. I love you…you were enough, I still love you.”
Beautiful words.