“He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes: in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down.”

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

As unfortunate as it is to admit, my intuition was right. It was foolish of me to have let someone in. They have done what I feared they would do, but the way in which it was done was infinitely worse than I could have imagined.

I have been thinking about the person who has wounded me so deeply. No need to mince words here or beat around the bush. I have been thinking about them in every way possible. I’ve thought about them in my apartment watching TV or falling asleep. I have thought about how they will never be in my apartment again. It is an incredibly strange mix of emotions I am experiencing. It is all of them together. I am unable to differentiate where love ends, hatred begins, anger comes in, sadness leaves. It has amalgamated into one beast that I feel, intensely, at all times. They show up in my dreams, but only in the mornings when I am already half awake. Any chance my consciousness gets to create them in my mind, it takes. It is exhausting to know that I am always feeling about them what they have not felt about me.

When I dream about them, it is always some version of the same thing – a place where they are sorry. I dream that they can love me how I need them to, that things are playful and good between us. A manifestation of that nasty, straggling hope inside of me that they will realize they do want to make things work, that I am worth something to them. While I know it cannot happen, and that even if they tried to make things right, the naïve, unabashed love I was able to feel for them could never exist again, I am desperate for it.

There is also some strange inkling within me that doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps it’s the bit that can’t muster up the energy for it anymore. That little part of me will hopefully get stronger with time. As of now, it is embryotic. Every day is passing by against my will. It feels cruel that the world can continue to go, go, go, while I am stuck here. I am being pulled to go, go, go anyways. I do not want to. I would like to wallow, but I have to cook my dinner and wake up to my alarm and smile at my coworkers and go, go, go.

It surprises me how normal I am able to act. Can anyone tell something is wrong with me? I don’t know what I crave more – for them to know, or for them to never be able to. It exhausts me so thoroughly to behave as if I am alright. By the time I arrive home, I cannot muster anything.

The apartment itself is a bit of a hellscape. I have only ever known it as a place where we loved each other. To be here on my own has filled everything with strangling emptiness. Our pictures are no longer on the walls, their keepsakes are packed away in a box. It is like they were never here.

The emotion that is perhaps the most surprising to me is the betrayal. Partially a betrayal on their part, but overwhelmingly a betrayal of myself. As I reflect on the relationship, I watch myself in horror as I do what I have always done and had promised to never do again: I molded myself for what they could give to me. I settled for the way that they spoke to me, or more truthfully, rarely spoke to me. I decided it would have to be okay that they did not initiate, that I would say “I love you” and they could never manage to say it back with any degree of seriousness. That I was envisioning a future with them that they had no interest in with me, and that even though I could see that through the thin veil of attention they had to force themselves to give me, I would always turn my head and smell the flowers. I was overwhelmed with how lucky I must have been to be loved at all. Was I?

I am embarrassed and ashamed. After all the work I thought I had done to be a better person for myself, it was thrown away as easily as it was envisioned.

G.D.