Dating you, the magician
Words were the distraction
The illusion of connection
Blocked depth from gaining traction

It’s funny how people hide sometimes
Often in plain sight
They seek closeness and connection
Something doesn’t feel right

I recognized the mirror you were being
My mistake to think it’d pass
I hoped with time you’d gain comfort
I should’ve known it wouldn’t last

It must be hard and isolating
Trying so hard to read people’s minds
If only I could teach you
It’s communication that binds

I waited so long for you to let me in
To show yourself to me
But you were too busy blocking that
With the perfect reflection you tried to be

Every relationship a mirror
Something in us we need to see
I suppose I learned from this one
What I need to see is me

Suppressed and waited for far too long
For my own needs to be met
Reading minds is a fool’s errand
Communication is the safest bet

Our time on Earth is precious
And our days here are far too few
I need to voice my needs sooner
Because communication is our glue

I need to write about him. Every time I try, the words come out all wrong. The words that do emerge resemble a playbook of important events, but they do not capture the relevance or the weight of all that happened between us.

I feel like there’s a gigantic wall inside of me in between the words and the emotions. Perhaps this is what he felt. Perhaps this feeling is why he was never able to talk about emotions with me.

Every time I think for too long about him, the sadness wells up inside me and the tears come flooding out, but the words remain trapped. Waiting for exile I suppose. Waiting for the day I can capture the emotions properly and put them to paper. Perhaps the emotions need to subside before that happens, or maybe I have yet to properly embrace them. Maybe a proper embrace would bring the words to life.

There’s a tender place in my heart that he will always hold. I know his story, or at least the parts he decided to share with me. I know how hard it was for him to connect with people, and I also know how hard he tried. I was gentle with him, waiting patiently for him to become comfortable with me so that he’d relax into being himself around me. Now I wonder if he will ever be able to find that level of comfort with anyone.

I don’t know what went wrong for him. Parts of me wish I knew, other parts are glad that I don’t. I’d like to be mad at him for how he so abruptly left me, but I realize that what he did was born out of pain and he wasn’t trying to hurt me. It cut me deeply because I believed that he respected me enough to try to communicate the difficult things, but he didn’t even bother. He just vanished. Maybe one day he’ll explain it to me, but I’m not holding my breath.

A part of me feels that he will come back one day. Maybe that’s my wounded ego acting up, but I feel that it is intuition. Do I want him back? When I came to the realization that I never really knew him, I fundamentally understood that I can never let him back in.

Above anything else, I need someone who can relax into being their true self with me. That’s the kind of love I have to give- the deep, abiding kind that persists through the mundane but also through difficult times. The kind that you can relax into and worry about taking for granted. The kind that makes you feel safe to know someone will always be there for you, as long as you want it. The kind that is safe enough to communicate difficult things and know that the issues will be worked through- together.

Maybe I can’t put into words all that I felt for him, but I am grateful that what I really need from a relationship has come more sharply into focus.

We had been dating for close to two years when he gave me a very special gift for Christmas of 2022. A Bath and Body Works shower scrub scented with roses, my favorite scent, tucked away inside my stocking. As a mother of four, my stocking was usually the neglected one since I was the one doing the stockings, and I’d never think to buy special small presents for myself. I appreciated that he thought of me enough to fill my stocking with small gifts, and the message on this gift was precious. “You’re the one”.

When I saw it, it warmed my heart and worried me. I didn’t want to draw attention to the message on the shower scrub. I was afraid to read too much into the words on the bottle, but I secretly hoped that he meant it. I was terrified that he was idealizing me, and I knew if that was the case, it would not last forever. Maybe he was still in the honeymoon phase of the relationship. Time would tell.

“You’re the one” sat in my shower mostly unused until he broke up with me. I wanted to hold onto that message for as long as I could, so I used it sparingly. Words have always been so important to me, and he wasn’t much for words. He’d talk all day about the most mundane of things, but using words to talk about feelings was damn near impossible for him. I hoped in time that would change, but it never did. I thought he just needed time to warm up to me.

When he ended our relationship less than a year later, I was devastated. I quickly started using the shower scrub so I could throw away the daily reminder of him. But the daily reminders were all over my house, my neighborhood, my city, and my mind. He had become a major part of my life, and now he was gone. There would be no escaping the onslaught of triggers that would cut deep into my heart and remind me of what I had lost.

Four months later I still wonder what went wrong for him, but I also wonder why I have to keep repeating this pattern: being in relationships with men who are emotionally constipated and unable to talk about their feelings, but who are also deeply incapable of acknowledging their own needs even to themselves.

I have wasted nearly three decades of my life on men like this. because guess what? My dad was like this. Thanks dad. The main difference between my dad and the important men in my life is that my dad was not conflict avoidant. He was aggressive, not passive or passive-aggressive.

I was aware of this pattern when we began dating, but the awareness did not prevent me from repeating it. It did not prevent me from hoping that he would be different. There were ways that he showed up that were very different from my past relationships. Ways that were healing. He was consistent, and warm, and liked to spend time with me. He tried so hard, up until the moment he didn’t want to try any longer. He never expressed any signs of an internal struggle within himself, or things that I could do differently that would make him feel more connected. I am left yet again wondering what I did wrong or how I was not enough, when I know consciously that things were never going to work out the way that I needed them to, because he was incapable of communicating his emotional state.