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.
