Dear Heart, I Hate You

But by the time I fell asleep each night, the answer was always a resounding yes. Apparently he could.

I hated feeling this way, so insecure, so vulnerable and weak. The feelings might not be familiar but they consumed me, infusing every thought or heartbeat that wasn’t otherwise distracted. It was awful. I missed Cal so much that I constantly checked my phone, hoping a text would be there. I still wanted that. After more than a week of his silence, I shouldn’t have wanted a text from him so badly, but I did.

How could a man walk away from a woman with no explanation and expect her to go on with her life as if nothing had happened?

Everything changed when someone did something so inconsiderate to you. There was no closure, no way to properly grieve the loss because you didn’t know what the hell went wrong, or what you could have done to fix it. And therein lay my most soul-crushing problem—the fixing-it part. Oh, how I still wanted to fix whatever had broken us. Or at least know what the hell had happened.

It seemed there were two kinds of people in the world. First, there were those who simply accepted things that happened without question. Those who could watch someone walk out of their life and would shrug their shoulders before moving on. The ones who could let things go easily.

Then there were the kind of people who fought to save relationships, who demanded answers when things went south. The people who, when they realized they didn’t want a relationship to end, held on with both hands, clinging to it as if their life depended on it.

I realized that I was the latter type. At least, when it came to Cal and my stupid heart, I was. I didn’t let go easily, didn’t accept well. I fought for truth, for reasons, for answers. For my heart. Who knew that I’d be such an advocate for that organ when I’d spent so many years hating it?

Each morning when I opened my eyes, I ached when I remembered that he was gone. The first thing I did was check my phone, the lack of a text notification or missed call just another stab to my already bludgeoned heart.

How much pain could one heart handle? I knew the answer: all of it. It could handle every single ounce that life doled out, and you couldn’t do a damn thing to stop from feeling it.

I admonished myself for being so sad over the turn of events. In the grand scheme of things, I shouldn’t be feeling this level of sadness for someone I’d only known a couple of months. It wasn’t as if Cal had been in my life for years. He hadn’t, and that was almost the worst part—how much I physically felt his absence, as if a part of me was now suddenly missing. But then I remembered that our hearts didn’t care about logic or time.

My heart didn’t play by rules that my mind made up. It didn’t follow silly timelines or measure its feelings based on the number of days it had known someone. No, hearts simply felt, whether you wanted them to or not. And they didn’t bother explaining themselves either. My heart longed for Cal, it missed him, and no matter how hard my brain tried to logically talk my heart out of those feelings, my heart refused to listen.

Silly brain, it would say. You know nothing.

All my heart did was remind me how easily it had opened back up after being closed for so long. I had no idea that it wouldn’t take a miracle for my heart to breathe back to life. Cal had done that so easily before leaving me to crash and burn all alone. And I had no idea why.

I searched my mind, questioning every feeling, every emotion, every second of longing. What did I want? I wanted Cal to come back. I longed for him to tell me that it had all been a mistake, that he was wrong, and beg for my forgiveness. At this point, I’d have taken any of it.

The bottom line was that I was really, truly sad. I hadn’t felt sadness like this in . . . well, I wasn’t sure how long. I wore my sadness like a blanket, wrapped around my body for comfort. No part of me was left unburdened by the weight of it. I carried it all, felt it all, and moved through my days enveloped by it.

I was thankful that work was busy and that I had clients booking me out the next few nights in a row. Work was the only thing that seemed to keep me distracted, and saved my sanity. My sadness blanket was cast aside when I was busy working, my mind occupied, my thoughts busy. There was no time for sadness. No time for thoughts of Cal.

But the second work stopped, my brain began spinning with questions and pain. I became a woman obsessed. Obsessed with his Facebook page, stalking it, checking it constantly to see what had been updated. Had he accepted any new friends, posted any new pictures, gone out with any girls?

My behavior was awful, and I hated the way it made me feel, but I couldn’t stop. My curiosity was a sickness, and there was only one cure.

Clicking on the Unfriend button quicker than I ever had in my life, I deleted Cal from my friends list and breathed out a sigh of . . . something. It wasn’t quite relief, but I knew that eventually it would be. Hell, part of me wondered why he hadn’t unfriended me first. My need to be involved in his online life would go away as soon as I could no longer access it.

I wished the questions that plagued my mind and heart would shut off as easily as my computer did. Unfortunately for me, my body was not a machine; there was no on-off switch. It would simply take time for me to heal, but I’d be lying if I said I was a patient person. I wasn’t. And I hated feeling this sad about everything.

Tami checked in on me daily, sending me texts of encouragement and letting me know she was there for me and my broken heart. She offered to fly to Boston to repeatedly run over Cal with a rental car, but I told her she’d be no good to me in jail. She begrudgingly agreed to sta

y put and allow him to live, which made me laugh.

“You know, you weren’t nearly this devastated over Brandon,” she reminded me one night as I shoveled lime Jell-O into my mouth.

“Trust me, I’m aware,” I said into the phone, hyperaware of the vast differences in those relationships.

“It’s just interesting.”

“How you can take the emotion out of every single thing, I’ll never know. I always thought my heart was dead and cold, but maybe you’re the one with no heart?”

“I have a heart. I just don’t allow it to do its job.”

I let out a laugh that ended in a sigh. “I used to be much better at that part.”

“Do you wish you’d never met him?”

Tami’s question stopped me short. The spoon with the Jell-O balanced precariously in front of my mouth. Practically dropping it into the bowl, I chewed on my bottom lip instead. The answer had come straight from my gut the moment she asked, so I wasn’t sure why I hesitated in my response.