On July 1, 2009, I was happily engaged to the love of my life, my best friend, my favorite person in the whole world. We had plans to conquer the world. We were "epic." Our story was strange and beautiful and complicated and so wonderfully rich. Our relationship was never easy, but is anything in life (that's really worth the effort) ever "easy"? And yes, he was my very best friend. There was nothing about me he didn't know. . .
On July 2nd we broke off our engagement. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe the words coming out of our mouths. Everything we'd worked and fought and struggled for for the past few years. . . just vanished into thin air. And of course it wasn't all that abrupt. We'd been fighting more than usual, I'd been crying more frequently: things weren't perfect. (But they never were!) I guess I thought we would work through the rough patch, just as we'd worked through all the other rough patches before. But this time it was different. This time we just let go. . .
To make things more complicated, we were living together, in a commune of sorts, with all of our best friends from college. . . in this house that used to be our home. There wasn't a corner in a room that didn't remind me of him, or carry some memory of the two of us. . . and I needed to get out.
To be honest, I don't remember July. I do remember numbly walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on the 4th of July, feeling more terribly and utterly alone than I have felt since my parents dropped me off at summer camp for the first time. . . Homesickness. I had lost the home that was my best friend, my fiancee, my carefully-planned future, my favorite thing in the world. . .
Loss and homesickness and heartache and anger and paralysis and hurt and nausea and nothingness.
No comments:
Post a Comment