It was a year ago.  Today.  The day the devil won and I lost.  Not a deal I made with him.  The man I love..d.

Did you ever picture the devil in blue?  He comes in many forms I am guessing, just as God can.  When he came to my house, he was disguised in blue, small round and quantity 180 per month…but it wasn’t ever enough.

When he invaded my home, he came as a friend.  An end to pain.  A doorway to a better quality of living without depressing debilitating pain.  We thought the pain was the devil.  We thought the pain was the soul stealer.  We were wrong.

A year ago, it all came to pass or maybe to end, and how do I start, what shall I say?  I feel like I have to do something to get the weight off my heart.  Tell my story, yet it would take so long and has no end.

Not really, not yet.
It goes, as I used to tell him my love went…on and on and on.

Who really wants to hear my sad sordid tale and even if it’s more for me anyways, what if I put it out there and the healing doesn’t happen?  What if the heaviness in my heart, the sadness in my soul are not relieved?

I don’t expect they will go away for good and completely, and for sure they are ever so much less than the were… a year ago tomorrow…  some of it anyways.

I have come such a long way and have learned things that I am sure I would not have had the chance to, or the balls to, if the story did not go the way it did….  everything happens for a reason but that rarely makes me feel better.

The pain I felt this day a year ago was such that I thought I would die.  I surely thought I wanted to.  I was hurting more than I ever had and ill-equipped to deal with it.  Deal with it alone.

When my ex husband left, it wasn’t so much heartbreak as disbelief that I had to start over AGAIN and anger that I spent 10 years of my life losing myself, to someone who only tried to “fix me” to keep me from leaving him until he decided to leave me – ironically as you will see later, it was his highschool sweetheart that he left me for and eventually married.  And ultimately it was my rebellion, my refusal to completely buy into the I will crush you  mentality that drove him away – or so he informed me over and over – I just wouldn’t listen and do what he told me to.  Huh silly me.

After a year of drowning any pain I might have felt, the divorce was final and I got permission to leave where I had been virtually a prisoner for that time.  And the kids and I moved back in with my parents and started a new life.

It was soon after that I met him.  That day, the sun shone brighter than most.  We had talked on the phone for hours and days… there wasn’t any awkwardness.  I found myself telling him things I had never said out loud to anybody…  only whispered in my mind.  It is as if we had been together before, in a past life maybe.  As if we were getting another go…another chance to get it right.

That can only be said in hindsight for if you know you are getting another chance to get it right then you must know you have gotten it wrong and who  can imagine that when they first fall in love?

I hadn’t wanted a relationship.  I wanted to date and take my time.  I signed up on an internet dating site and was flooded with messages and emails that were all the same nothing.  I figured t the time it wasn’t them, it was me.  I had dated one guy and was thinking of meeting another.  One I talked to everyday about all kinds of  mundane things but I figured I was wounded and couldn’t feel….

I wanted to feel that fire…  like in the Dierks Bentley song….

And then one day I did.

I opened another, seemingly innocuous, email and it was as if the words leapt off the page.  He didn’t say anything too special or different and there was no picture…maybe he spoke my language…the language that my heart recognizes but I can see that email in my head right now…  I don’t remember all the words anymore.  Just the way it went and that he signed it and his name ….

We met and although we had a couple starts and stops, it seems as if we were together from that moment on.  Both of us had so much baggage we were paying extra in storage fees.  So many seeming heartaches and disappointments.  That is one thing about dating in your late thirties.  Everyone is on that site or looking for someone and everyone has baggage.

We used to play the what if game…What if we had met in Highschool?  What if we had never been with others who hurt us.  What if….. What if……

What if…..

We did everything big.  If there was one word to describe us it was passion.  Not the fleeting passion that burns out, PASSION.  Everything.

We did everything with passion.  Fought, laughed, loved, needed, touched, cried, dreamed, hoped.  Everything.  We had our own language, we did stupid stuff in front of each other that we would never dream of doing in front of anyone else.  We lived.

People that don’t get it say we were dysfunctional.  That he was bad for me.  People don’t always get it and no one ever sees a relationship between two people in its entirety.  Who is anybody to judge another’s relationship unless they are there for every whispered moment, every stolen kiss, every tender moment between two lovers, two souls meant to love each other.  I heard once that most everyone knew us felt that through the ups and downs, that the only way we would ever leave each other was if one of us died.

It was while we were together that I was diagnosed bipolar… he got me to stop drinking as a band-aid for my hurts and padding for my pain.  He didn’t turn his back on me when we were confronted with the news that it wasnt just a passing thing with me….  that I was cracked.

The people who love me and think I am better off without him and that he put me through hell, have no idea the hell I put him through.  They have no idea how hard I pushed him to test if he would really truly stay.  To make him prove he loved me.  They don’t know that sometimes, so afraid that he would not be with me, that I was too damaged to deserve love and a relationship, how I would scream at him to leave me to get the fuck out and leave me…and then when he would just try to leave the house to get away…how I would fall apart and dissolve into tears and beg him to never leave me….

They do not know he saved my life more than once…. that he kept me here when I was so tired of living, so tired of trying, so tired of being me.  They did not see how he held me in the night when the dark was coming, how he soothed my fears, how in the lonely mae of my mind he did not leave me alone but took my hand and showed me the way out.  They did not see  how he carried my heart.

I said ” I love you”

He said ” I love you bigger”

I said  “you can’t”

He said “biggest”

One day he asked me “How much do you love me?”

And I held up my hands, spaced apart as wide as I could go and said “this much, but you see how this hand is flat, (extending my arm, not perpendicular to it)  it is like that because this much is immeasurable and it doesn’t stop.  It goes on.  And on and on….  I will never forget how his face lit up, how he laughed.  His laugh was infectious and …big and he wasn’t laughing at me or laughing because I was being stupid or silly.  He laughed because I love him.  He was my man and I was his girl.  And we… we were together.  Through thick and thin, up and down, love, pain…all of it.

When I went with him on trips to deliver trucks, we always made an adventure of it.  We used to say that if we were on the road together, we would always be ok.   It was life that took its toll.  He is a gypsy and I a free spirit, neither meant to be bound and restricted.  Sometimes we would hole up for an entire weekend and not talk to anyone else or leave the house or do anything but just be…. and I always felt like if …..  if…

In quiet moments he would play his guitar and sing to me…  for me.

He had his own demons.  Horrible nasty creatures that haunt him and I did my far share of chasing away the dark too…scared as I am of it.  We had each other.  We had nothing much more.

The beginning of the end came in the dark, sneaking in without a peep and working its devious way to become the actual end.

Some years ago, many before we met, he had been in a motorcycle accident and broken his back.  A few years ago, his pain got worse and became almost debilitating.  Then over a week’s time he began complaining of tingling and numbness in his hands and face.  One night after returning from a trip, we lay in bed together and when he turned toward me, his mouth was funny..and he had drooled all down his chin and onto his chest, his eye was drooping and he was talking as if he had been drinking.  He is not a drinker.  Startled, I insisted we go to the ER where they admitted him and ran a bunch of tests.  They did an MRI of his back among other things and although that was not the cause of  this episode, it was discovered his bones were grinding together, he had degenerative disk disease, and arthritis.  They gave him morphine….  and then after leaving the hospital, he went to a doctor and he was prescribed….the devil.

Once before, he had been an addict.  If you are an addict once I guess you are an addict forever.  Or at least until you face whatever the pain in your soul you are trying to hide from is.  His pain was deep and many times as unbearable, more unbearable, than my own.  And he was being given a free ticket to have his old friend come back into his life.  He thought he could handle it.  I believed him.

His friend is a liar and the deeper entrenched in his life his friend got, the more desperate he became, the more of a  failure he perceived himself to be, the more unlovable he thought he was.  And when his friend told him that he shouldn’t be with me, that me being bipolar was enough reason to leave, then taunted him by whispering I didn’t love him, that I was using him, that I took him for granted…and eventually he just decided his friend was his best friend and I was nobody special.

I grow weary of the story, it is after all, from that moment on, when he gave in to now, my life and I have relived it in my head over and over…at first I wondered what could I have done different.  What was wrong with me? But I gave that up quickly.  I could have been perfect..  I was perfect for him anyways…  and the end would still be the same.  Here.  Now.

Or maybe, I am afraid to go on, to put it here in black and white, to finally tell why my heart is so heavy, my soul so sad.  Afraid if I let it go, it will stay anyway.  Afraid if I let it go, I will have nothing more than memories to prove it was real.  Afraid… of the dark  and the loneliness.  Afraid of revealing the devil in one of his forms because he may turn his wrath on me in another.   Of the rest of my life lonelier than I have ever been because I got to see what not lonely looked like..  So maybe I should finish it and face it.  Maybe the light will be brighter and tomorrow will look different….  because today there is no light.

Maybe I should let it rest a while…  and gather my strength.  Maybe I should just stop for now.. Let my heart heal a little.  Maybe just for a while.

To conquer fear is to love…  I don’t want to be afraid anymore.
Maybe I don’t have the words…

One of OUR Songs….