Whatcha gonna do?? 🤷♀
It seems I should be a little tougher by now. More in control of how I feel rather than just a bit of what I show. He had been so warm for such a long spell, I had begun to get comfortable. I can so easily let go of all the hurt and disappointment. On some level, some things he’s done and said strike me as … well, they should have been hard lines, and I’ve often had the thought that if I’d had any self-worth, I’d have left. In my head I can see those times and feel the echo of that shock and pain. The bewilderment over how a person can claim to love and yet behave that way. I don’t forget. I just let go. Nobody is who they want to be every single day. I know he struggles with vulnerability, and decades of not hurting him have not changed that. And I chose to stay. You can’t choose to stay and choose to keep that pain fresh every day. There’s just no living like that. So when he changed, for whatever reason, it was easy to let those echoes get farther and fainter until I was floating again like in the beginning. He was finally back, that man I thought I’d married, and my heart was that dreamy 20-something’s all over again. Then a couple weeks ago, again for whatever reason, he went cold once more. The loud silences, the averted eyes, the chasm between us magically reappeared like it had never left. Would you believe I was actually blindsided?? And hurt like I didn’t know he was capable of it, even while I rolled my eyes at myself. Now last night the switch flipped again and we’re back to warm and I can already feel that lightening in the vicinity of the feet. I just seem to go wherever he takes me and live that experience until he takes me somewhere else. And I wonder if I’m broken. How I can love when I’m allowed to love and reel it in when it’s unwanted. I get where it comes from. I was born into a sea of fish different from me and learned early on to like people without expecting reciprocation. To love where I could love and then reel it in when it was unwelcome. I’ve never strayed from the familiar in that way. Never had an opportunity to. I guess I just thought at some point I would become a little more solid, a little more rigid, and maybe a little less willing to offer love where I know tomorrow the door may go unanswered. I’m not sure this is normal or how I should be, and while I don’t like that uncertainty, I also don’t seem capable of changing that part of myself. Sometimes I think maybe the reason we’ve been married so long isn’t love so much as just both being broken in compatible ways. Sometimes I think maybe anything good I feel is just delusion to shield myself from reality. I doubt that could stop me, but the thought does come on days like today.
