The Hurt

After I left from the last time, I sat in my car and wondered if I was doing the right thing. I was going to drive off and leave him, for good. This was it. He had finally pushed me over the edge and I fell. I fell and it hurt so bad. I was crushed, drained, and left for dead. I texted him a final goodbye. And then I drove off.

I was crying but managed to drive home blindly. I parked my car and turned it off but I just sat there. I didn’t want to go inside because I didn’t know exactly how I looked and I didn’t want my parents to know that anything was wrong. I texted my daughter to see if she needed a ride home. There was some event at her high school that she and her boyfriend wanted to see. My phone rang and it was her. She asked if we could give her boyfriend a ride home and I said yes. Good. I needed more time to gather my thoughts.

I pulled up to the curb in front of my daughter’s high school auditorium and they both jumped into the car. I tried to keep up with their small talk but all that rang loud in my mind were the last two hours and all I could feel was this heavy, hurt feeling in my chest. It took so much of my strength to keep myself together but a few tears managed to make their way down my cheek. I figured it was too dark in the car for her to notice so I didn’t wipe them away, plus I thought that would look too obvious and give me away. I think I gave short, quick responses to her questions and comments about the event they had just seen. I really didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to curl up into a ball and fade away.

After we dropped off her boyfriend, we headed home in silence. I didn’t say a word. I had nothing to say. I started thinking about the very last time I actually seen Omar. It was the night before and he had fallen asleep while I was visiting him. I remember just looking at him and not wanting to leave but I knew I had to. I leaned over him and kissed his face. Oh, how I loved kissing that man. I wonder if he ever felt how much I adored him with every kiss. Each kiss held a feeling and message. I missed you. I want you. I adore you. I don’t want to live without you. I love you so very much. Every kiss…

When we finally got home, I went straight to my room. I changed into my pajamas, turned on the TV, and sat in my bed. Every where I looked, I saw him. The flower he gave me for Valentine’s Day was to my left. The empty package of cough drops was on my dresser. The dying flowers for my birthday were on the right. And every where else I looked was a vision of his face, his eyes. Oh, his eyes. I could even drown in his eyes by just thinking of them. I knew I still loved him, but right then and there, I was so hurt. I cried my pain out. I took a deep breath and let myself cry as hard as I could without being louder than my TV. With every exhale, I tried to push out the heavy, hurt feeling in my chest. I have no words to express how hurt I was. I was so hurt that I prayed to not love him anymore. I prayed for the strength to let him go. I prayed for me to get over him fast. I prayed to not worry about him and to not care about him. It hurt to love him.

Then I heard a familiar sound. It was my phone. I hesitated. It was a text message notification. For a pathetic moment, I thought it might be him, responding to my goodbye. But then I remembered how heartless he was and told myself that it wasn’t him at all. I grabbed my phone and read the message. I was right; it wasn’t him.

Are you okay, mom? It was my daughter.

No baba, I am so heartbroken </3. I cried more.

What happened? I didn’t know what to say. All I could do was cry.

I left Omar. I had to. I think my heart broke again as I sent the message.

Did he do something to you?

Just broke my heart and crushed my feelings. Then silence.

I don’t know how long I sat there crying. I kept telling myself that everyone says that you’ll feel better when you cry it out. But I still felt as hurt as I did when I sitting on the floor in front of his bedroom door. The hurt wasn’t going away and I wasn’t feeling any better. Please God, help me. Let me let him go. Don’t let me look back. Please. How many times can a person die in one night? I swear, it felt like my heart was made of mercury. Every time it shattered, it would come back together, and then break all over again. I kept waiting for it to be over. I wanted to hurry up and feel better already. But I couldn’t stop crying.

Then my door opened. It caught me by surprise because I thought I had locked my door. My daughter came in. I stared at the TV. She put her things on the corner of my bed and then climbed over to sit next to me. Then she leaned over and held me. She held me and whispered that everything was going to be alright. I held her and I couldn’t stop crying. I nodded my head to let her know that I heard her. And then she cried with me. She just held me and cried with me. She had done it once before and I swore that it wouldn’t happen again, yet here we were. Now my heart was breaking for her, for her seeing me this way. I took a deep breath and let her go. I told her I was going to be okay by the morning. I looked at her stuff and saw that she was getting ready to take a shower. I told her to go ahead and take a shower and that I would be alright. She let me go and looked at me. She wiped away a tear and then I started wiping my whole face. I reassured her again that I would be okay and told her to go shower. She slowly got up and gathered her things and left my room.

I cried most of that night. I felt lost and unsure and scared. And somewhere in the mix of all my emotions, I actually missed him. I was angry at myself for missing him. Why would you miss someone who just hurt you? I cried and told myself that someday I wouldn’t miss him anymore. Someday, I will stop thinking about him. Someday, I will stop caring about him. Someday, I will wonder why I loved him so much.

Someday.

 

Advertisement

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…

Integrity

They say that when a person is lying on their deathbed, he or she starts going through thoughts and visions of the life they lived. They start to see what really mattered, what should not have mattered, and what should have mattered enough to make a better choice. Then come the thoughts of wondering if he or she even made a difference in anything. We start to wonder about the integrity of our entire life.
I think we do the same thing when it comes to the end of a relationship. When it is over and we have no control about it being over, all of a sudden we realize what really mattered, what should not have mattered, and what should have mattered enough to make a better choice. Did we make a difference in the relationship? What was our part in the integrity of the relationship? All of a sudden, the small things that were good become big memories in our mind. Beautiful eyes. A gorgeous smile. An infectious laughter. A loving touch. A tender kiss. A safe embrace. A genuine “I love you.” Suddenly all that is all that matters and becomes all you want back. All the petty bad stuff suddenly seem bearable. But it’s over. Gone.