Let Go

After the drama was over, and tempers were more even, I stood my ground. In my eyes, we had both moved past the point of turning back.

As someone commented on the previous post, I never really conveyed the conflicts in the relationship in this forum. That was not unintentional. As much as I have used this space as a place to vent and to work things out, there are consequences to sharing everything. And that doesn't just apply to writing about it - it applies to talking to friends and family as well. If you tell your mom or your sister every time you have a fight, they're going to be a lot less likely to forgive and forget and think that you're not crazy for staying with someone when the fight is over. So I was trying not to completely poison the well here with stories of the bad times, just in case things were to turn around. But there were a lot of bad times. Too many.

Last Wednesday evening I came home from work and set to the task of convincing PC that I had meant what I said the night before. I told him that it had gotten so far past the point of resembling a healthy relationship that we both needed to walk away. Yes, it was his actions that spurred this particular timing, but it would have happened either way. That's the part that you all know about: the fact that I was unhappy and didn't see that changing. I took maybe slightly more of the blame here than I was truly responsible for, but like I said, I didn't want to talk too much smack about him. After some disbelief and denial and some attempted bargaining, we came to the agreement that he would move out by Saturday and we would do our best to end it like grown-ups.

And we did. And it almost made it harder. Did make it harder. It's so much easier to let go of something when you're angry. Then letting go and moving on feels like revenge and there's a power in that. But letting go of something that wasn't horrible all of the time, with someone who genuinely has so many great things about him: that was (is) hard. Much harder than I thought it would be.

He packed his things. He put them in storage for the time being and bought a plane ticket home to Iowa. He left me the most obvious and useful things: the couch, his TV (which is in the living room), the mattress. We rented a stupid movie and had one last dinner together on Friday night. We slept in the same bed one last time. Then, in the morning, I drove him to the airport.

We said goodbye. My heart broke more than I ever thought that it would, after all that we had been through. It was hard then, at that moment, to remember the bad times. Hard to remember why I was intentionally cutting out a piece of myself and sending it away. But I did it. Still am doing it.

Lyrics of the Day

"The last time that I saw her she was picking through which records were hers. Her clothes were packed in boxes, with some pots and pans and books and a toaster. Just then a mouse scurried across the floor… we started laughing ‘til it didn’t hurt. " The Good Life Album of the Year