Noel and I have a history of getting each other riled up really easily when communicating through text. It's happened in email and in IM conversations. It happened more times than I can remember precisely, but it was more than a few.
Against my better judgement just now I had an AIM chat with her about residual junk I'm dealing with in the wake of this break up. I kind of figured at this point we would both be a little less prone to anger when we're both a little less invested in the outcome of the conversation. Meaning, there's no relationship anymore, so there are no stakes to get heated over.
Surprisingly, it actually went well. Over the course of a long and rational dialogue I finally pieced together the puzzle. I get it now. Right off she could sense where the conversation was headed and pointed out that a quest for understanding would probably only get me hurt worse. I persisted, and in the end that was not so.
The biggest reason why it's been so hard to begin the moving on process is because none of it seemed to make sense. Things were never perfect with us (no relationship ever is) but overall things seemed to be so good for so long, and then suddenly BAM... she needs out. It came as a blind-side.
Turns out, things weren't allright for a long time. They hadn't been since the early days of the relationship. Not since before the wedding, at least. Noel is just so good at hiding from herself that she could convince us that things were fine and dandy long after they weren't. On some level Meg and I both could always sense her unrest, but she was never forthcoming, and insisted it was fine. Eventually, we just stopped trusting out instincts about it and accepted her words at face value.
Other things came out that kind of completed the picture. The long and short of it was that this relationship was always destined to come to end. If it hadn't been the wedding, something else would have triggered it. There's nothing anyone could have done about it ending, none of us saw it coming, not even Noel at first. What could have been helped was how badly protracted the ending turned out to be, but that has already been apologized for a couple times.
Make no mistake, this is still the most painful break up of my life. I want nothing more than to have what we had in the beginning and have it forever. Who knows, maybe one day when we're all three different people... Crazier things have happened in my life, but for now I will let that hope go. I'll still be grieving about this for a while, but at least I can grieve now. I couldn't let it go and start to grieve until I understood it.
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