It's Never That Easy

I hope you grow into a beautiful person and flourish. You deserve to be as happy as you choose and not to let anybody hold you back. I hope I granted you with lessons that you can use to keep yourself safe, and to keep yourself from falling into negative cycles. You deserve not to constantly live your days as if there is nothing to look forward to, and all you're doing is holding on by a thread. You deserve better.

I wish we could have been older. Handled our problems with words and not used vague innuendos. I wished we could have been more honest. Told each other it was okay to feel how we felt and figured out a way to handle our disagreements. I wish we could have been better to each other.

Why were we so horrible to each other? Why is it that people who so deeply care for each other destroy the person they love? Why did we have to fight and never fix anything? Everything was just pushed to the side. We both took each other for granted and it was unfair. We could have done better.

Ten years from now, I can see you. You're living in an apartment in New York, several stories high in an old brick building that used to be a factory. And you're painting and drawing and thinking just as you do, day and night, non stop. Just going and going because you're in love with your hands and what they create. You paint and paint and sketch and sketch. There are unfinished pieces all over the floor, scattered just as you feel. It represents the state your life is in, and just as much as you want to pick up the pieces of shattered glass, it cuts you deeper the longer you hold on.

You pull yourself from the floor, making your way around the drawings you surround yourself with. You walk to the window for inspiration but all you find is the drips of rain gliding they're way down like little rivers on the glass. You trace them with your fingers. The city is grey, and you understand it, you feel it deeply. You lean against the brick wall, looking out across the city. You think back on all the things you've done so far with your life.

You want to get better, you want to feel blissful every morning you wake up, you want to feel love, you want it all, and you should. So you get it. You find your phone, type in the number, and call. The line rings and rings and you wait with anticipation. Hopefully, that's where it will all start. Where you will have picked yourself up and finally chosen to enjoy your life. Hopefully, that's where it will start.

I pray you make it to that point, a point in your life where you know that if you keep going the way you do, it will only lead to heartbreak. So you do a 180 and do what makes you happy, and succeed.

Still, a part of me is flooded with guilt that may have directed you in the path you took. The guilt eats at me some days. I know cheating was wrong. It was wrong and I think part of you still hasn’t gotten over it. I believe that it lingers, holds onto you, and part of you struggles with the idea of never being enough because of it. And by constantly being worried about never being enough, you never can make yourself enough for anyone, you’re constantly holding back. And I’m partly to blame for why. I tried to rationalize it every time. Because I was still in love with someone else the first time. Because I wasn’t appreciated and was lonely the second. The truth is there is no rational reason for what I did. And I am as sorry as I can possibly be.

I wish you would get help. I remember the time when you told me you started going to therapy, and I broke down crying in tears of joy because of how happy I was that you finally took the first step to help yourself. But it didn’t work. And it broke me just as much as you continued to fall apart. I continued to try to mend you but it only made it worse. And our relationship shattered and time and time again we would do the same thing. I tried to stop fixing you and instead addressed my feelings but everything was too jumbled up at that point. Our feelings were tangled in wires and neither of us could make the other happy. But all I ever wanted was for you to not love me, but to love yourself. And we could never make it work.

I miss the vibrant outlook on life you granted me with when we were young. We used to walk down Flanders Rd. I'd walk up to your grandparents' house and meet you. We'd keep walking up to the top of the hill, past my grandmother's house and the field with our horses. Going down the hill and chasing each other, back and forth slightly grazing against one another. Making our way to the intersection toward the cornfields and the bowling ball we found or toward the baseball field where we'd lay down in the grass, and look up at the sky and roll around. Getting all scratchy from the grass and holding each other as we look up. It was so easy.

I could call you out for all the things you've done wrong but that's not what this is about. This is about the love and the pain. But not your mistakes. And how it will never be easy.

The truth is I’ve never been hurt more. But I’ve never been loved more either. And choosing between if us together is worth it or not is too unbearable to consider compared to the silence. The silence, the limbo does not bring us closer but it makes a decision for us. And until one of us has the strength again to pull and push and drag us through the pain and to maybe, finally, come out on the other side... I will listen to the silence and wander within it.