I do not want to write today. I feel resistant to sharing what I am thinking. Not because it is bad but because I really am resistant to what I am feeling. I do not want to feel this way. I want to feel differently. Pathetic in my inability to take my leave of these feelings.
Lane’s daughter is back in my life which I am ever so grateful for...she has never really been out of my life but there have been periods of time where she has not initiated contact so I have faded to the background - all in an effort to not insert myself into Lane’s life.
When I found out Lane had a girlfriend, I stopped calling or reach out to his daughter to allow them all to move on. To allow her to create and maintain a new relationship that was free of me.
Much to my surprise, she reached back out through my daughter and very clearly maintained that she wanted me in her life. My absence not required for her to move on. Instead confirming that my presence in her life was something that she not only wanted but needed.
This, of course, makes me happy. But she is the link to him. She reminds me of him even though she attempts to leave him out of our conversations. Skipping over details of his life so as not to cause me pain. I want to tell her that it is ok, she can speak freely but I can’t because that would be a lie for me. Hearing about him is painful, it does hurt and I feel both repelled and beckoned at the same time.
I can honestly say that I would not willingly undergo this pain for anyone else but his children. I love them as if they were my own. Which brings me, finally, to today’s topic...
As much as I do not want to admit this, I still love him. I have tried not too. I have made every possible attempt to move on. I feel that I have addressed the ideals that I have that created this dynamic in the first place. I have dated. I have not dated. I have grieved. I have mourned. I have cried. I have hiked and cryked. I have done everything I know how to do to move on. But the love remains. It is not manifest in a longing for him to return to me. He is not mine. He is gone and the subject and actor of another love story. But I do not not wish for that. More than a desire to effectuate some change in him or the current status of his life, I just still feel the love. I do not want to. I have done everything I can think of to stop it yet it remains.
I kind of hate myself for it. Me, a life long willer of feeling. I have always been able to decide that I am going to do this or not going to do that and my feelings have pretty much always fallen in line. It has been over two years and my feelings still stubbornly refuse to move on. They allow me the fiction of moving on, progress seemingly made but then without warning, bring me up short with the revelation that nope, I still in fact love him. Fuck me!
Sometimes I feel like I am destined to walk the earth still tethered to him by heart strings that I have cut but continue to grow back with the rapidity of kudzu in the south. Seemingly re-infesting an area that was almost completely void of the vine just the day before. I cut back the feelings and thoughts and I feel like I am making progress and then WHAM I am driving in my car and there it is, this deep well of love for him and his well being. It is not coupled with a desire to reconnect or attempt to re-establish a relationship nor with a belief that he will ever return to me. Those feelings or thoughts somehow easier to process than the ones I possess. I am just left sitting there with this love that no longer has a container. I cannot give it to him, he doesn’t want it. I cannot give it to another, at least not anyone that I have met yet. I have absolutely had some pretty amazing men come along but my heart remains off limits and untouchable.
So the what the fuck am I supposed to do?
I have tried pouring the energy into other things: myself, my children, my job, my work out routine, my family and friends. I have clearly poured it out here, so much so that I am sure some of you are completely sick and tired of this particular subject matter. I know I am yet here I am writing about it...again.
It seems that I need to find a new container for this love I feel. Some new place to put it. It would be so easy to place that with another man. But that seems to not be likely to happen. His face and image in the way of every new man that crosses my path. Try though I may to remove all remnants of him in my life and memory, he remains this constant, unrequited love.
It isn’t all him that prevents me from moving forward and onward. It is fear also. He kind of embodied my worst fear. The fear that kept me from ever really loving before him. My life long fear that I would completely give myself to another and he would leave. Hard to ever step up to that offering again. I did that and despite saying that he wouldn’t, he left and moved on and now love’s another.
I have been resistant to sharing this because I feel like I am bordering on being viewed as some pathetic ex-girlfriend of Hollywood fiction that is not really all that fictional. The pathetic loser that just won’t move on despite the fact that everyone else knows that she is the only one who hasn’t. I do not like seeing myself in this light. I do not like claiming this part of myself. But I also can’t seem to do other. To not claim this, a lie. A falsity that is inauthentic. That a violation of my pledge to myself and to you, an infraction of authentic living that voids my progress and commitment.
So what the fuck do you do when you still feel the love but the object of that love is long gone?
How do you move on?
Where do you put the love?
How do you force yourself to move forward into a life that doesn’t contain the person you still love?
Truth?
I haven’t a fucking clue. I guess you just get up every day and try again. Be willing to move forward while at the same time, honoring the fact that you haven’t. Complete incongruity. Live with that. The incongruence itself becoming the container for all the feelings that have become unaffixed from their object.
My continued hope is that I can someday love another. Someone more worthy of all this affection. Someone who won’t leave but will instead have the courage to stay. But that seems impossible from where I currently sit. Hope a dangerous drug that robs me of my present.
For now, I love his daughter. I love her independent of him. I love her even though being with her causes me pain. I love her because she is who she is and simply because I do. I cannot and will not turn away from her to protect my own heart because the love I feel for her requires that I sacrifice my peace of mind in order to do the more challenging thing...to stay.
Funny, that is what I am most critical about him for not doing...staying. I guess I am learning how hard it is to do that. How hard it is to stay and love when a part of you needs to not be tied. The sacrifice for her worth the pain and effort because the love finds a home in her life. She a container for the overflow from a love unmoored from its original object.
I am working on finding another container. I really am. I really do not want to love him for the rest of my life. I want to move on and give this love to someone else who actually wants it. For now, my heart the only container available.
So if you are in my life and see me struggling, please feel free to drop kick me any new vessel that might contain the love. I could totally use the boost. Currently, I am over here drowning in love overflow. Please, someone, come help me bail.
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