Him

(Content warning: rape)


I have lost a lot over the past year. My mother, my father, and him.

Regardless of their own experience, everyone seems to understand the enormity of the death of a parent: it is life changing; it is beyond words. 

But words are what we humans reach for, to comfort each other: "Too young!" people cry - they were in their late fifties - and, "Too close together!" - just nine months apart - and, "Too much for you to have to go through!". And, yes. They were, and it was, and it is. And then (as I smile stiffly, and hold back the tears) people tell me, unbidden, about how much they love their own parents, about how happy they are that their parents are healthy, and quite how incapable they are of imagining losing them. It is understood that this is a loss which I will take time to accept, to grieve for, and to move on from. 

But the end of a relationship? I do not feel that same generous understanding from those around me. Parents are irreplaceable, the logic seems to go, but partners are not. Give it time! And anyway, it's not as though he's dead. 

And no, he isn't. And I'm so glad. So glad that he gets to keep living his life - hopefully more happily and healthily than he has been. So glad that the world gets to keep him.

But that doesn't mean it's not a loss: the person he was to me is gone. Run away with the person I was to him?

He has been my best friend, my lover, and my family. For one quarter of my life, I have slept beside him. When we met, he was the brightest, most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had no idea the universe had produced something this wonderful. And we fell in love so fast and so hard. 

He used to kiss me on the chickenpox scar on my forehead, so gently but so intensely. And touch me on the nose with such tenderness. We would hold hands, squeezing tightly, fingers intertwined, and he would say, "I love the way we fit together." He would tell me I had perfectly ear-shaped ears, a perfectly nose-shaped nose. His was the truest, most unfailing love I had ever, ever known. 

But now it is gone, and we are caught up in the cruellest limbo. Living apart together. Waiting for the practicalities to catch up with reality, every day hoping I can bear more than I think.

But... when my phone beeps, my heart says his name. When I'm sad, I want to bury my face in him. When something is funny, I want him to laugh, too. I want to travel back in time to all those mundane little moments of quietly loving and being loved, to live through them again, to soak them up and keep them forever. 

Being in the same place as him is agony. Hearing his voice not saying "I love you". Watching his hands not holding mine. Wanting to press my face into his chest, and breathe him in, feeling safer than anywhere else in the world. But I can't, because the space he inhabits is no longer my home. 

On Tuesday, it would have been eight years. On Wednesday he moves out. 

And then I can fall apart entirely. And then start putting myself back together again. Without him. 

...

EDIT (21/07/2017)

It is now 13 and a half months since I wrote this post, and it is like reading someone else's words. The day after I wrote this, he and I were arguing. (I so desperately needed him to leave, as soon as possible, as his continued presence, and flaunting of his new relationship was unbearably painful, and making me lash out, criticising both him and the woman he was leaving me for - which he denied, but was proven almost immediately.) He was telling me, with vitriol in his voice, what a "nasty" person I was. Winded by this, and incredulous at his double standards, I said: "you raped me". Because he had. Years before. And then (as I lay, head turned away, sobbing silently) apologised, apologised, apologised. And I, in the middle of a spell of treacly, black depression, self worth already bruised and broken from the sexual violence in my chidlhood, silently accepted his apology, absorbed all my feelings about it into numbness, and never spoke of it. I literally never mentioned it. But I did not expect that he would forget it. But he did: raping me did not matter to him, because I did not matter to him. I can reach no other conclusion. 

So, as horrible as it felt that evening, to have his brutality laid bare, it helped. And from there I was able to look more closely at the ways in which he had controlled me, gaslit me, made me quieter and smaller and less. Realising precisely *what* I was losing (and what I stood to gain. Myself, for one) changed the grieving process, fundamentally. 

Today I am in love with someone who actually likes me. Who does not wish to change me. And whom I feel able to trust with my entire self. It is fucking glorious.