Be still, my heart

He is back in touch, and I am, at one and the same time, mad at him for it and loving him for it.

It started with a little message last night. “I miss you.” I did not reply, and an hour later, another message came. “I miss you terribly.” To that, I replied that I miss him too. I then turned off my phone and went to bed, got to sleep, uneasy, but still, I managed to sleep. When I woke up this morning (I am on Central European Time, for now) two long e-mails were waiting for me. One of them, a sexually loaded declaration of continued love. The other, an update on his life this last month. Both were sent the very same minute, he must have written them both offline and cut and pasted, and I don’t know which of the two was the most important to him, or why he didn’t fuse them both into one.

And now, I can’t think of anything but that man. Heart’s pounding, blood’s burning, head’s aching and stomach’s turning. The fact that we’re right now not just on different sides of one and the same continent, but on different continents, doesn’t stop me from feeling his smell in the air, and his touch on my skin. The sound of his voice rings my ears and I see him in front of my very eyes. Doesn’t matter if they’re open or closed. Doesn’t matter that I know he is not here. He is.

I still love him, you know. Reasons we broke up were not about lack of love. I have never loved anyone like I love him, and he says the same thing about me. Still, we did what we had to do. Should I have lived with him, I would have had to give up lots of things very important to me. So important I feel it would have been giving up a large part of who I am. I don’t want that. It’s not that he is unreasonable or has unreasonable demands to me, it’s just how the realities are. If we are to be together, I’d be living his life and not mine. His future, the way he wants it. Not mine, the way I want.

I can’t do that. I don’t doubt I have made the right choice, because I know that. He says he understands, but I don’t think he really does. And the feelings I still have for him, doesn’t disappear despite this knowledge.

We’ve talked about it so many times, over and over, and nothing has changed, this last month. I believed I had moved on. Baby steps. One little step at the time. I have been with others, you know, fucking like crazy to diminish his memory. I have thought everything through, a million times over and over. I have done hours of yoga, hours and hours, trying to gather my mind. I have drowned myself in work. I have lain sleepless, and I have managed to get back to sleep. I have been hyper, and I have managed to slow down.
It’s not as if I do not know what I have to do. It’s not as if I do not know what I am facing. It’s not as if I don’t realize I will need time to heal.

And then, three little words, and I am back to the rawness of that pain.