The plan for today was to run some errands and to unpack most of the boxes in my room. I moved in and just piled boxes all over since I had limited time and that resulted in an interesting wardrobe situation all week since I couldn’t find most of my clothes, shoes or makeup. I hung a curtain (yes, one) and got most of my clothes hung and sorted through so I know that I definitely need to do laundry tomorrow. The boxes have been emptied almost all the way and are stacked against one wall, the sheets are on the bed rather than sitting in a box next to the bed and I can walk around the room safely without adding bruises to my already battered legs. It was a successful day.

I also had a good talk to my bestie, Chili Pepper, and it was amazing to laugh and talk to her and remember that no matter how bad things are in my heart…there are always people that can make me laugh. Thanks to the besties that have been there for me as I go through this ordeal. Mel, Chili Pepper, Shanny Pants, and my step mom have all been wonderful shoulders to cry on as I heal my heart and try to find new love. Doom, Ogre, Marti, Uppers, Ryan, Lil Nazi and Narm have all been awesome guys as I get my shit back together and vacillate between slutsauce drunkenness and crying alone while curling my hair before I go out. Thanks to all of you for taking care of me and showing me who my real friends are and how much you guys care about me! It has been really rough and I know that I have spent most of the time… ahem…drinking self medicating but it has been a process to get over this breakup.

Hopefully, we are turning a corner? A corner where there is less Patron and more productivity?

It’s surreal being back in this house since this is the last place I lived on my own before I lived with your family and then with you. I have this strange sense that you are just about to call me or walk in the door and then I remember that we aren’t together anymore and that you’ll never call or walk in the door again. It’s nice to be around people and have friends close again but I feel like the trade off of gaining friends and losing you was unfair. I keep reminding myself that love isn’t always enough and that even though I loved you with my entire being…we just were not meant to be together for the rest of our lives and it would have been unfair to try to keep each other tied down to an unhappy relationship. It was so hard to walk away from you when I knew that you would have spent the rest of your life with me but I thought we both deserved the chance to be with someone who we were perfectly paired with instead of fighting tooth and nail to make it work between two people that were incompatible as we were. I thought I was doing the right thing but I didn’t know that doing the right thing would be so heart breaking.

I pray that you find someone that can love you in all the ways that I couldn’t. I pray that I find someone like that, too. I pray that the pain of not having you in my life subsides soon.

This has been my beautiful broken time. My heart is broken, my body is broken. My mind keeps breaking as I push thoughts and memories of you away time and again. I feel like I have been through a divorce since I felt like we were husband and wife except for the ceremony and I feel like I lost all of that when I realized that neither of us were happy but that you would never leave me. This beautiful broken time after the “divorce” as we refer to it has tested me, strengthened me, broken me and will hopefully purify me…I’m so sorry I did this to us.

My mind drifts back to you and I can’t focus on all the bad things that made me leave you. All I can see are the moments when I loved you so much that I felt like my world would collapse if you weren’t in my life. The memories of what it felt like to be loved by you keep flooding back and they crash down on me over and over until it feels like I can’t move or breathe or speak. I can’t remember the last time we kissed. I can’t remember the last time you told me you loved me. I can’t remember the last time that you looked at me with all of that love in your eyes and I felt safe. All I feel is alone.

I know that we weren’t meant to be together but I never thought that being apart from you would hurt this much. I thought that my heart had been shattered into too many pieces to even feel this pain but the pain is magnified and reflected in each broken shard of my heart. It feels like I lost my best friend, my lover, my roommate and my future all in one moment…it feels like I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to you or the last six and a half years. It feels like there was so much left to say to one another and we never had the chance.

The only thing I can wish for is a chance to heal. I want time to erase this pain or at least dull it. I wanted a chance to be myself again but I didn’t realize that you defined so much of who I am. This breakup has been devastating but I don’t have anyone to talk to about it since everyone keeps telling me that I am better off now without you. I try to hear them and the logic in their arguments but they didn’t know you the way I did…they didn’t see the horror of our fights or hear the cutting words that could crush me but they also didn’t see the way you loved me so well and so fiercely when I needed love the most.

You loved me in ways that I don’t think I will ever find again and the thought of starting over with someone else is so daunting. I keep seeing you in other people and turning away from the pain of recognition because I fear that if I let myself grieve the loss of you, I’ll never be able to stop mourning you.

It never occurred to me that I would lose my first love. I hope that you aren’t my last.

My favorite song of the moment; literally has been on repeat nonstop for the last three work days…I can’t turn it off. It’s haunting, emotional, full of mourning, yearning, longing and regret. I have always loved Blue October but I think that this is one of those albums that came at a time when I could connect to it on a level that almost frightens me because there is so much raw power, anger, pain in the lyrics and sounds.

The Feel (Stay) is one of the best songs of the summer for me.

I know the music video is a little intense but I have listened to Blue October’s music long enough that it is tempered enough for me to see the beauty and art within it rather than be off put by its rawness and honesty. I think that it is freeing for someone else to feel some of the emotions I am dealing with and to express them; it’s liberating for me to hear that and experience it through someone else’s eyes.

I see the sun go down on the river

I feel the wind blow out, would’ve stayed to grey

I feel the air around you, it’s kind of closing in

Do you feel it fall, or do you feel at all? I can

I see the world keep moving as I stumble

They seem to move much faster than me

And while I sit in my four-cornered room dividing hearts for a little girl

Well I can’t be anything but who I am

And I wish you’d stay

That was the beginning of the two of us, the start of our show

Stay, stay, stay.

Now I would never have let go

And I see the sun go up as your image

And I feel the weight of your eyes as you stare

I feel it all when you, when you first, when you kissed my lips

You used to make me feel at home, you made me feel at home

You made me feel again

Oh and that’s when you used to say, “Will you stay, and not let go?”

That was just the two of us to think about, the stars of our show

And you would say, “I wish you’d stay and I’d never let go”

Oh I would never have let go

So take this heart of mine

You’ve taken it a hundred thousand times

But this time, this time, I’m gonna take it with me

I see the door close down behind you

I watch your face turn from glow to straight grey

I see the moon go up and it shines this glory on my face

Who would know? Who would know? Who would know?

How we would stay, and we should stay and never let go, oh hell no

There’s just three of us to think about now, in our show,

our show, our show

I think we’d stay, we’d just stay, and then we’d know

That we should never let go

Something to think about, her heart

Just look into those big brown eyes, and you’d just fall apart

We should stay, at least we’d stay, at least she’d know

That we should never let go

No, no, let go, go, oh.

I wish you’d stay

I wish you’d stay…

The Feel (Stay)

Cause all that’s waiting is regret

And don’t you know that I’m not your ghost anymore

You lost the love I loved the most.

I learned to live half a life

And now you want me one more time.

-Note: I have so many feelings inside that sometimes I don’t think that there are enough words to express what I am going through. I left someone that would have spent the rest of his life with me and I am rediscovering what it means to be on my own. I am battling a multitude of emotions so pardon the intermittent song lyrics as I struggle to find my voice again.

It has been disconcerting to realize that my entire future has been wiped clean and all those well-laid plans have become obsolete. All my plans for the family, kids and eternity of love have disappeared with the words, “I can’t do this anymore” and I find myself untethered for the first time in six years. For the first time in a long time, I can make plans and not consider someone else’s feelings and plans. I put my life on hold for a long time to accommodate my boyfriend and I feel like I might have lost a little too much of myself in trying to please him and keep our relationship going. I need to remember to take care of myself and rediscover the things that make me happy rather than constantly be planning for someone else’s life.

Unfortunately, I am slightly daunted and terrified by all this empty space and time. I have spent the last six years with another person next to me in bed, another person to tell the ins and outs of my days and to be the support network that I needed in some of the toughest times of my life. In an instant, that support and comfort is gone and I am learning what it means to be on my own. I think that I have never really been on my own as an adult because I have never been single and on my own since I moved out of my dad’s house. I know that a lot of people think that it is an essential experience to live on your own and learn what it is like to be independent but I am so scared at the thought that it really is just me now. I rely pretty heavily on my friends in times like these and I am blessed to have some really special people in my life but it still isn’t the same as having D there to hold me, hug me and tell me that it will be ok.

I know I didn’t make a mistake but I feel bereft. I feel as though I lost my best friend, my boyfriend and a piece of myself in one swoop.

Sometimes the pain is staggering.

Sometimes I have to stand still a moment to let the pain pass before I can take a breath.

Sometimes, I feel as though my entire world is falling apart and I am not strong enough to catch and carry all the pieces.

So for now, I don’t know the reason why I left a man that I know would have spent the rest of his life with me. I just know that I did and I have to put my life back together on my own. I just know that I am beyond happy and free while mourning a deep loss at the same time and that dichotomy is mind boggling. I just know that I have to exist breath to breath because even breathing hurts right now.

I have been told so many times that I need to love myself before I can love someone else but I never really heard the words until I realized that my self-hatred, –doubt and discontent have been detrimental in the development of my relationships. I need to learn to know and love myself so that I can be one half of a relationship rather than feeling like I have been absorbed by the other person since I am not solid on my own identity.

In my last relationship, I felt like I was constantly being molded, re-shaped, battered into the shape of what my partner wanted me to become. I never had a chance to learn who I was as a person because I spent six and a half years trying to be what he wanted because I think I was too terrified of having to define myself. I didn’t want the challenge of identifying myself because I think that too much self-scrutiny can be daunting, especially when you are 19 years old. I found it easier to define myself through his eyes, even when I knew that he had it all wrong. It was easier to let someone rewrite my definition than to write my own.

Towards the end, I began to understand that there was a deep-seeded fear of having to look at who I am as a person because I am horrified that I wont like what I see. I think that being abandoned by my biological mother has left a subconscious tendency to feel displaced and inferior (because no matter what, you always think that if she had only loved me more she would have made a way to keep me) and that has affected the way that I perceive myself. I have subconsciously based my self worth on the decision of one woman I have never met and allowed myself to be defined by a need for approval and acceptance as a result of being left by the one person who is supposed to nurture and accept you no matter what. I have developed an identity of longing…longing for a mother’s love and acceptance, longing for self-acceptance.

To come to this point, I have had to acknowledge that my biological mother’s abandonment of me has broken something intrinsic to my ability to love myself and other people. I never had the initial love that a being is supposed to experience when they are birthed, placed in their mother’s arms and cherished with a love so intense that I believe it marks a person for the rest of their life. That first interaction with love (and especially a love so pure as a mother’s for their own child) lays a foundation within that child from the first moment that a parent holds them in their arms and wants them.

In the end, I have to reject all the feelings of being undeserving of love because my own mother couldn’t love me and redefine love for myself. I have to love myself and be independent of someone else’s love before I can love another person…I have to be a complete person so I can completely love someone once I have learned to love myself.

in our rainbow

now our rainbow has gone

Overcast

by your shadow,

as our worlds move on,

But in this shirt,

I can be you,

to be near you

for a while

In this shirt

I can be you

to be near you

for a while

There’s a crane

looking down

all those things

that we were

I awake,

in the night

to hear the engines purr

There’s a pain

it does ripple

through my frame

makes me lame

There’s a thorn

in my side

it’s the shame

it’s the price

Of you and me

ever-changing

moving on now

moving fast

And his touch

must be wanted

must become

through your ask

But I need Jake to tell you

that I love you

it never rests

And I’ve bled every day now

for a year

for a year

I did send

you a note

on the wind

for to read

Our names

there together

must have fallen

like a seed

to the depths of the soil

buried deep

in the ground

On the wind

I could hear you

call my name

held the sounds

I am lost

I am lost

in our rainbow

now our rainbow

has gone

I am lost

in our rainbow

now our rainbow

has gone

I am lost

I am lost