The Last Time

I don’t know about all of you out there, but when I fall in love with someone, I fall hard. I give everything I have from the get-go and I almost lose myself immediately trying to shower my guy with as much love and affection that I can possibly squeeze out of my mind, body, and soul. It’s safe to say that I can get pretty intense at times. In my own mind and reality, I am doing a good thing. Heck, I’m doing a great thing. I mean, what person doesn’t want to be loved and cherished by another person, right? Almost everybody I know wants to be somebody’s special someone. And that goes for me too. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a sucker for romance movies and I adore everything from sweet nothings to sweet everything. So yeah, when I fall in love, I take that guy into my world and wrap both arms around him. Heck, I’ve probably even wrapped my legs around a guy like a little kid hanging on to their parent’s leg. Remember I said that I can get intense? Yup. Like that. But of course, there’s a downside to everything. So what’s the nemesis for this? Hmmmmm…

I’ve pretty much lived my life firmly believing that you have to give what you want to receive. It’s true to a certain extent and it’s far from perfect. My logic was that if I loved someone so much and treated him with love and showed him loved, then that is what I would get back from him. I believed that if I was good or great to someone, then he would want to be great or good right back to me. The problem with this is that this was all my logic. This made sense to me and I believed it for its face value. To me, this was a simple equation that everyone should follow. This “golden rule” would make everyone happy. And if everyone would just follow my simple logic, then the world would be a better place and we would all bake cookies and smell like fresh, clean laundry and run through the meadows picking wildflowers with the animals dancing around us… Yeah, again, this was my logic, so please bear with me. I am happy to report that I now know that that is not the case.

The last time I tried to see Omar was such a heartbreaking experience for me. It’s still fresh in my mind like it happened yesterday. I remember feeling alone, unwanted, and abandoned. I felt like I meant nothing to him and in that moment in time, it didn’t matter if I even existed or not. He didn’t care about me and he didn’t even like me, let alone love me. Just the thought of it brings tears to my eyes and this heavy, hurtful feeling in my chest. Wait…. Did you hear that? That’s the sound of my heart breaking all over again. Sigh.

Omar was going through an extremely tough time. His anger and frustrations were spilling over into our relationship. I tried my best to just let him go through all the motions and I pushed my patience to the outer limits. I did everything I could to try to make him smile or be happy or laugh a little. I drove myself insane trying to think of things to do and things to say to make things better and easier for him. But instead of getting better, it felt like things were just getting worse. The more I tried to be there, the more I felt pushed away. The more I tried to love him, the more I felt like he hated me or resented me. The more I tried to go out of my way to make things easier for him, the more I felt taken for granted and unappreciated. It really sucked.

It got so bad that I finally reached a point where I didn’t care to reach out to him anymore. I didn’t text him like I usually did throughout the day. Instead, I just started responding to his text messages. Every time I heard the sound of a text message notification, I would get a real quick thrill of hope and anticipation because I knew that if he texted me, it meant that he thought of me. But the feeling only lasted a few seconds and I would just reply normally and then close my phone like it never happened. I also didn’t allow myself to want to see him. I got accustomed to the “I will see him when he wants to see me, even if it isn’t very often” mode. I knew that I always wanted to see him or be with him. I was content doing anything or nothing at all, as long as I was next to him. But it was feeling like he didn’t feel the same. It got bad. I mean, I was totally shut out and shut down from our relationship.

So on this particular evening, I was waiting “patiently” at home for him to “want to see me.” I think he had taken the day off due to fatigue and pain and he got hit with some bad news from his car insurance. As if this poor man didn’t have enough to deal with, this was an added topping to his sundae of disaster. So he decided to rest some more, which for me, meant more waiting. Ok, fine. I would wait. Well, my patience wore thin after about two hours. One of my good friends invited me to go hang out so I thought it would be a good idea to wait and hang out with friends rather than wait in my room and just drown in irritation and impatience. So I got ready and then texted Omar what my plans were. He responded and it wasn’t a very nice text. I decided that we weren’t going to “solve” anything via text so I called him. No answer. Voicemail. Ugh. I called again. No answer. Voicemail. I took a detour from where I was headed and started to drive toward his place. I kept calling. Always no answer. Always voicemail.

About 7 minutes from his last text, I rang the doorbell and my cousin let me in. I took off my boots and walked down the hallway to his bedroom door. I could hear the TV on inside. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. And again, no answer. I was about to knock louder when I heard another sound along with the TV. I knocked again and listened. Are you kidding me?? Was that the sound of… Snoring? I stepped back in disbelief and tried to process what had just happened in the last ten minutes. I knocked again. The snoring got louder. I couldn’t believe what he was doing. The louder or longer I knocked, the louder and more obviously fake his snoring got. Was this really happening? Was he really doing this to me? Me!?

I got angry and decided that very moment that I was going to knock all night long. I texted him and let him know I was outside his door, even though I knew he already knew. I also let him know my intentions of waiting there all night until he opened the door. I knew he was eventually going to “wake up” and need to go to the bathroom at some point in the night. And when he did, he would have to trip over me first. Ha! I slumped to the floor and sat down leaning against the wall with his bedroom door on my right side. I knocked. I literally formed a rhythm of my knocks and pauses. I had so many thoughts going through my head and felt a roller coaster of feelings.

After what felt like forever, the snoring got lighter. And then I heard it. I heard him move in bed. And then I felt it. When you lean against a wall, sometimes you can feel what is happening on the other side of it. And that’s what happened. I felt him open his closet. I heard him put down a glass on his dresser. It sounded so much like a wine glass but it could have been just a regular glass of water. I don’t know and I was fuming. I kept listening. I heard him get back into bed. I still couldn’t believe this was happening. Why would someone do this to someone who did nothing but want to love them? I sat outside his bedroom door for a little over an hour. Just sat on the floor and waited. My heart broke. I saw myself ripping my heart out and throwing it on the floor in front of his door. I couldn’t take it anymore.

I picked myself up. I left my heart and pride on the floor. I walked back down the hall to the living room and saw my cousin sitting on the floor. I got down on the floor with her and put my head on her thigh. I curled up and cried. I cannot even begin to tell you how much I hate crying, yet there I was, like some helpless, pathetic thing, crying; on the brink of sobbing. He didn’t love me. He didn’t want me. He didn’t care about me.

Ok Omar. You win. I left.

Learning to love Omar. To be continued…

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