Member-only story
Another October
My mind spews acid, anger flows through my veins, replacing blood, destroying kindness, ending my ability to be generous, to be human.
Is it me? Is rage what I am at the core?
I have a lifetime's worth of anger in me, a lifetime of being less than I should be, than I need to be. A lifetime of neglecting who I am.
This was started almost a year ago. The anger, I don’t even remember the moment that sparked it. I remember how it felt, I still have it inside me. It was about her, everything was, for a very long time.
We started just before Halloween. An inappropriate story for another time, but we started. She will always believe that she wanted me more than I wanted her. I didn’t believe she really wanted me then, because she said so. I believed she wanted my body, because that’s what she said.
I wanted more. I wanted the intensity, the caring, the connection, that I felt towards her. I wanted her in my arms.
I didn’t believe she wanted me, so I did things one does when one isn’t with their person. I did this because she wasn’t there for the long term (in my mind). Perhaps everything could have been different if I hadn’t been in that state. I was, though, and it wasn’t.
This would have been eight years for us, although there were breaks. We were always together for our anniversary though, even the year we spent seven months apart. We missed my birthday, we missed her birthday, but we never missed October.
This year, we will. I say this not because I am being dramatic, not because I am expressing sorrow over it (although there is some sorrow), but because I have made that decision. There is no back from where I am, no way to us, to her.
While I still love her, will always love her, I don’t want who I am with her to exist. That person needs to die, and can’t die while I’m with her. I am also unable to get past some things she did, at least not without changes so radical that they are beyond the ability to fathom.
See, that anger and venom, it’s still in there. It’s mixed with sorrow, pain, loss, guilt, all of that — but there is peace underneath. For the first time, I’m okay to let go, for real, at the very core of me.
I stopped wanting her to understand the hurt she caused me, and I have accepted the hurt I caused her. That was hard, harder than almost anything I’ve felt.
It brought clarity, and it brought that peace to me.
I finally wrote the love letter she always wished I had written, the honest one. I was finally over her enough to do so.
