I Was There

Another break up letter.

11 months loving you will fade easily into the scope of my life, I know. I know you are a stranger now. I know that because you are a stranger, the pain of it begins to feel otherworldly (of another time and place within this world, of course, unfortunately), because it is. It was. It was and now it isn’t.

This isn’t rocket science, yet I find I can only speak of it using the language of a clinician. Shoving pain into the narrow frame of “trauma responses” and “insecure attachment.” Redefining our end as an “avoidant discard.” The pathologization helps me cope, I guess. It does nothing for me, ultimately, except help me explain you to everyone but you, and least of all myself. It’s a predictable break up pattern lived and re-lived over and over and over again by nearly every woman I’ve met. Not our love story, no. A collective cliche. Yes. You made promises, implicitly. You said you wished we could attend our children’s birthday parties together. And then you were a coward.

You weaponized the technicality of our relationship status remaining “undefined” and "unlabeled", with “no formal commitments,” to justify the cruelty, severity, and suddenness of your withdrawal. But I know better, because I know there was a time you celebrated the first moment I hung my keys by your door.

Every small sign we were growing deeper made your heart bloom. I was there. You loved seeing my keys on your rack. And you loved finding my thick winter tights beneath your bed, where you had carefully removed them the night before. You loved my hair clip on the bedside table and my coat on the back of your armchair and my toothbrush in your shower and my shoes next to your shoes. You were overjoyed by the revelation of my spare clothes neatly hung beside your adult sized tiger onesie, the onesie I once discovered like a secret treasure revealing a dimension of your you-ness, your silliness, your levity. The way I delighted in discovering you, in loving every part of you I discovered. The way you asked for more of me, please. Begging me, coaxing me, inviting me to open so you could violently sew me shut again.

I know better, because I was there. Because I know when you swiftly cut down every small moment of love revealing itself, speaking in past tense, referencing “what we thought we had,” we had it. We had it even then. We have what we have, even if we decide we no longer want it. Your love was not brave.

I have lived every regret, fully. Every part of my part in it, every possible theoretical moment I could have prevented the horror and pain, every fractal of complicity and recklessness, every scrap of evidence proving my foolishness and insanity. I have analyzed it. I eat analytics for breakfast because I have lost my appetite, and because I already know the technicality of hindsight. The way we re-write our romantic ideals to sound unromantic and grounded, as if there comes a time when we will be absolved or rewarded with a pay off for trading intensity in favor of something low to the ground. I believed because we made our bed in the dirt, we could bury ourselves deeply, sleep endlessly, rooted. Full of life. Quiet. Unassuming.

I was there. This happened. We happened. We were not strangers, then. We were newly acquainted lovers becoming family. We were a rare, common love. I was there.

I was there when you made me someone I wasn’t, someone else, someone I had never been to you. I was there when you cherished me, and I was there when you grew cold and stiff. I was there when we were beyond words, when you could not believe your dumb luck, when I was a miracle to you, when you did not look at me all night and when I said, “What is the best way for me to love you when you get like this?” I was there when you said, “I don’t know. Thank you for asking.”

I was there when you called two months of stonewalling “just needing a couple of days to myself” and when you said those overdone words of denial and dying devotion, “I need space,” after we hadn’t seen each other in weeks. I was there when you frantically paced in your drenched driveway, terrified I had crashed my car in the storm, on the verge of a passion fueled rescue mission. I was there when you assured me, “I can promise not to give you everything that you want.” (And you didn’t, did you? You held true to this one promise.) I was there when you told me we were like tree swallows.

You cannot undo what has been done. You cannot tell me what I did not live or what never happened or who I never was. Because I was there. And you were there, too.

Artist: Ana Cabrera