Marianne Dashwood, how I feel your deepest, open wound. When you cannot eat, cannot sleep (or can do nothing but), cannot focus on the conversation before you after the devastation that Willoughby hath wrought! Oh! That pain I feel! For three weeks before my dearest broke the news to me, I could not eat. I could barely sleep. I could only wander in a tear-filled haze, trembling from the sheer exhaustion of existing. And then it worsened. He told me he "probably shouldn't have a girlfriend right now." And my world stopped.
For the past seven years, aside from that short period of time I attempted online dating, I have been single. I have come to know myself, what I wanted in a partner, and have found silent comfort in moments of solitude. He was suddenly there, and everything I wanted and needed.
I love him.
Sleep, when it comes, is such a dear comfort to me. Waking is a hard knife in my heart. Living is a dark cloud that neither brings rain nor surrenders to sun. Every damn day is...indescribable pain. The love I felt when we were a couple was that of fairy tales. It was incredible. It was the kind jaded people say doesn't exist. The pain from the loss of such a love is easily one million, no - one trillion, no - infinite lifetimes worth of the deepest, darkest, most numbing pain any creature can ever know.
Yet, when we were together, I knew Heaven. I knew completeness.
Now, I know pain. I know what being let down truly feels like. To be a part of something so out of this world, then suddenly have it ripped from you as if it were your skin...
People have described the loss of a loved one as losing a part of one's soul; a part of your heart feels like it's missing. Nothing can be more appropriate here, yet feel so superficial. What I am feeling is so much more. And indescribable. A piece of me is missing, yes. My heart is broken, yes. Everything hurts.
I am so tired.
I am so broken.
I am so lost.
And life is so long.
I have so many more years ahead of me, and sleep is the only thing that comforts my aching.
I would walk forever if it meant he'd return to me. I would wear out endless pairs of iron shoes wandering the Earth for him.
I only wish that he could look past material things. I wish he could feel love, like he said he used to.
It was a fairy tale love. Maybe he's under some greedy spell?
And people say, "He wasn't the one. The one will be amazing!"
And I say, "He was the one, he just wasn't ready. We're on different time-frames."
But if the high of being with him was so exquisite, and this low is so nearly unbearable, why would I chance feeling like this again? What if the next one isn't "the one," feels just as great, if not (impossibly) better to be with, but ends in a break up, too? Why would I even entertain the thought of going through this level of Hell, again? I would have to be crazy, stupid, or a glutton for punishment.
Love is not worth the pain.
***UPDATE: I maintain this point of view. While the pain has subsided, for the most part, the memory of it remains. Nothing is worth feeling like I did when I wrote the original post. Being single is far sweeter.
