Sam’s Ministrations on Life

Warning! This is not a funny email… if you don’t want to know about my baggage don’t read ahead.

I have never hurt anyone so much. It’s not as if I’m an overly sweet person, and perhaps over the years I have maybe said or done some things that slighted a few people, but I have never truly hurt someone to their core until recently.

So for those that don’t know Brian, my boyfriend (now ex), and I were engaged to be married September 24th of this year. We’d been dating for almost 7 years. Much of our time together was long distance with him in the army and in school back in MA, and me taking off to France, Penn, and most recently moving down here to Atlanta this past August. He was my first real relationship and he will always be the first great love of my life. The first five years of our relationship were great. I will keep those memories with me forever. Had I done what was in my heart and ended it then I think both of us could have been spared a lot of pain. But who really knows when to end something. I think we both could tell, actually I’d rather not speak for him as I have no idea how he feels about it. So let’s just say that I could tell that the last two years we just weren’t good for each other. We both stopped treating each other well, there was no stand out moment which drove me over the edge, it was just all the little things adding up over time. We fought all the time, both on the phone and during our rare visits together. As I prepared for my wedding, and I mean prepared, dress, place, photographer, everything was falling into place, but I just had this nagging thought in the back of my mind that if things didn’t work out divorce was always an option. No one should ever approach a lifetime commitment with that thought in their mind. Okay, so now I started doubting… but how much of that is pre-wedding jitters I kept asking myself. To be honest I was petrified of so many uncertainties. We’d been together so long that I didn’t really know me from us… we started dating when I was a teenager fresh out of high-school. Things had progressed like they were supposed to and marriage just seemed like the next inevitable step. The other option, the one of being single, was terrifying to me as I watched my friends struggle to meet that special someone, all the while dating loser after loser. I needed time to think so I just told him this and then cut all communication for almost a month. I won’t rehash the details of it all because it is still too raw but I’ll just sum it up by saying that no heroic efforts were made by either of us to fight for the relationship. I’ll admit it, I did things in the shittiest way possible. I ended seven years over the phone. There was no other way open for me, I had just started working so I had no money and no vacation time. On top of that the holidays were fast approaching and I knew that if I didn’t get it over with it would drag out for more months. It was a bit like ripping off a bandaid, I knew I needed to do it, and once that thought was in my head it had to be done as fast as possible. There are few things I regret in my life, but the way I did that will always be one of them. There was no way the two of us could be friends afterwards, we weren’t even really friends when we were together if that makes any sense, and anyways things were said between us that can’t ever be taken back.

Since then, beginning of November, we haven’t really been in touch. I found out that he wasn’t able to finish his last semester of college because his reserve unit was activated. Other than that I just hoped that he was doing okay. It was really for the best that I had just moved to a new city, with a new job, that way I was able to keep as busy as possible and not dwell on what could have been. I would say it had even gotten to the point when I could go a few days without thinking about him. That was up until two weeks ago when my masochistic side got the better of me and I just had to find out when he was getting shipped off to Iraq. Because for all the hurt I’ve caused him and as much as I don’t think we were right for each other I still care about him. How can you not care for someone you’ve known for seven years, much less loved?

This all brings me to a chance discovery that as of two days from now he will be married. Shock is all I can say I feel. Not angry so much as hurt that he felt that he could hurt me the most by not ever telling me he was getting married. I won’t go into the details of it all, but they have only known each other for a few months. They are both in the same unit and will be shipped out to Iraq in a couple of weeks. I can’t say whether this is a good decision or not. Honestly and truly as long as he is happy that’s all that matters to me. I just hope that he still pursues all of his life-long goals, like finishing college, and seeing the world. I suppose one of the strangest things is that I feel like I am just starting to figure out who I am on my own, even if I’ve always considered myself to be very independent… and in the same amount of time he has met someone, fallen in love, and decided to spend his life with someone new. Wow, if that doesn’t finalize things I don’t know what could.

I’m only allowing myself to write this now as I feel like the chapter has come to a close in my life and I need to move on by putting thought to paper. I apologize for this being an unusually serious tone, but I think my friends need to know that I’m not always as chipper as they think, and I really do keep quite a bit bottled up inside. So my plan is to shut myself up for all of Saturday and drink heavy amounts of liquor until I’m sure the deed is done. Hopefully I can walk away from this a better person. I’ve already started my new life here in Atlanta, and now this is just another sign for me to keep moving ahead towards my own goals and dreams.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.