It Is What It Is...

Another year has passed.

Today was the 2-year mark. Today, 2 years ago, the man I thought would one day be my husband broke my heart in a very public place. In the middle of the Student Union, I fell apart and watched, helplessly, as my boyfriend took a sledgehammer to all that I had worked for, hoped for. Of course, in hindsight I can see that both he and I had been sledge-hammering the relationship for a good long while, but I was blind to it at the time.

So, it was 2 ygpears ago today. 2 years ago, I watched Michael get up and start to leave the student union. I got up, too.

"Where are you going?" he asked me.

"I'm going to follow you," I answered.

"Why?"

"Because that's what I've always done."

And indeed, I followed him out of the student union, down the street, stumbling along, not really seeing. He was on his way to the apartment complex where all his friends lived. Outside the apartment, he turned to me. "You can't come in."

"Why not?"

"You're not welcome there."

Cruel words, but perhaps I needed to hear them. Perhaps it took cruelty to penetrate my shocked brain and make me realize that it was over.

That was 2 years ago today. And then I stumbled home and spent the next 12 hours on the futon, waiting for Michael to come home. He never did. Instead, everyone who loved me called me, tried to help me. Finally, my friend Eric simply came over and took me to his home.

It would be nice if, during moments of awfulness and angst and over-blown despair, when we are suicidal and numb with misery, we could look forward and see a future day in our lives, in which the present pain has simply become a bad memory, and not the crippling entity that it is at that moment. It would have been nice to have a vision of the future, to see me two years down the road (now), house-sitting for friends, living in Southern California, working at a job that I love, planning to move to Palm Springs, having the courage to love again. It would be so nice if I could have had that vision to comfort me as I sat there in Indiana and truly believed that my life was over.

Every heartbreak seems to be the worst, the most wretched. And when we recover, we remember the pain, but in a muted way, much like childbirth, and think we can handle it again in the future. And then when the next heartache comes, you forget for a while how resiliant and brave you can be.

Well, now I am in between heartbreaks. But I remember the last one, I remember Indiana and the life I had there, and I look around at the life I have built here, and I remind myself:

It is possible to rejoice in where you are in your life, but mourn how you got there.