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he was going to join the royal air force and he thought that he was doing me a favor breaking up with me now instead of having me endure future heartache. according to him, the RAF has their soldiers deployed 6 years a rotation. So lets say him and i were to have a long term relationship and even get married, he would miss our kids growing up, he would miss 6 wedding anniversaries, and my 30th birthday, too. But even if you don’t go that far into the future, statistically he said its very likely for him to die in one of those 6 year rotations because of the countries that he has to fly over. I don’t know much about the Air Force but I do know that I can make my own decisions if i damn well please so when he kept telling me that “i’m doing you a favor, trust me,” it made me upset because if i wanted to stay with him in my own intentions then let me figure out the consequences on my own.
Moreover, what broke us up was his own insecurity. He said he was bound to mess up with me anyhow because he was never “good with relationships” and that he didn’t want to hurt me in anyway possible. So to avoid that he decided to just end it all. He felt like his life was meaningless and that I was too smart, pretty, and amazing to be with him: he felt like he didn’t deserve me. He said I was the first girl he ever loved, the first girl who ever fought for him, and the first girl to ever make him feel like this.
But i told him that the distance wasn’t going to be forever and that, in fact, 7 months from now we’d be together but he said it drove him crazy because all he could think about was kissing me or holding me in his arms and it tore him up inside when he couldn’t even hold my hand. He said he knew the distance wasn’t forever but that everyday his feelings for me got stronger and everyday it got harder for him.
Then there’s the biggest part of our breakup in which he told me he’s made huge mistakes in his past that he doesn’t want reflected onto my life. He told me he can’t tell me why he can’t be with me but that i needed to “trust him” that i would be “better off without him”.
We video chatted and he wouldn’t stop crying which made it harder for me because I, in turn, couldn’t stop either. We said Goodbye for literally 35 minutes and I told him that he’s obviously making a big mistake because it shouldn’t be this hard to say goodbye. He said he knew he was probably making a mistake but that it would be best for me and that he just couldn’t do this to me.
He wanted me to say “goodbye” back but i saw nothing “Good” about our parting.
I’ve literally been crying for the last 6 hours and I have the worst headache ever. I actually haven’t cried this hard since my mother passed away.
The thing is I know in life there are multiple people who could be “the one” and there are multiple people that you can fall in love with but once you’ve truly truly fallen, and have lost that person, it’s like an experience that’s incredulously hard to bounce back from. Jack was that guy where, naively, we read about in story books when we were younger. He wasn’t perfect but his soul was pure, he had a beautiful heart, and he was incredibly charming. Because of him, I may not date for a long, long, long time. Not because he ruined dating for me, but because it will be hard to date anyone else who treats me even a miniscule amount worse than Jack did. And i’m not putting him on a pedestal. In actuality, i recognize that Jack treated me with the utmost respect, honesty, and love and it will be incredibly hard to find a guy as genuine with his feelings as Jack was.
He wasn’t afraid to cry if he was sad, punch something if he was mad, or even laugh until he fell off of his bed. And I’m going to miss every single aspect of him.
I think what hurts the most is completely losing someone that i didn’t even completely have yet. I think it’s one of the cruelest things that life has dealt to me and I know that I will forever struggle with why it had to happen this way. For me, I had finally found a guy that I felt completely comfortable around, and I had finally been in love, real love, and it seems to me that the universe found it funny that It just wanted to snatch it all away from me.

To see Jack sobbing, trying to hold back tears, and then just bursting out crying again, was more painful than to see my own self crying. I’ve loved, and I’ve lost and I honestly feel like I’m 100% done with anything involving anyone outside of just friendship. I don’t think my heart can take another heart break like this and I honestly don’t even think I will be lucky enough to meet someone as amazing or even more amazing than Jack. I know it sounds sad, but he was the only guy i’ve truly ever wanted, the only guy that i could realistically see myself with years from now, but No..the universe snatched him away and wouldn’t let me have him.

We swore to each other that we will never forget each other, and In my head I will always hear him repeat the words “I love you,” because he is the only boy that I believe has ever truly loved me.

Thursday November 15th 2012 | tags: jack aari goodbye my lover

i knew you could

I was sitting on the edge of the building, watching the neon of my socks swing back and forth while my untied laces swung freely in the damp morning air. The sun had risen but the sky was still grey with a foreboding morning shower that could happen at any given moment. Risky me. Had I been sitting anywhere else, a bench, a swing, a couch, it wouldn’t be as bad. Yet here I sat, on the edge of an 8 floor, apartment building that, with the slightest amount of push or slip, could send me hurdling to my doom. But all that seemed to worry me was if my mismatched neon socks looked stupid, if my bra would give me lines on the skin under my rib cage again, and if Luke would stay.

Luke’s foot steps hadn’t startled me. My senses were at their peak because I was at maximum arousal. Every time I looked down at the startling height below my feet a shot of adrenaline bolted through me. I sat back and took it all in, arching my back and turning around to speak to Luke just as his lips parted.

“Hi,” I whispered to him with a small smile forming on my lips.

He sighed, shook his head and sat down next to me. His body was shaking. I knew he had loved me when I asked him to take me on the Ferris wheel that night of my 19^th birthday and he told me he was afraid of heights but took me anyway. I knew he loved me when he took me to a pool party just to introduce me to his friends despite the fact that he had watched his little brother drown when he was 14 and still didn’t know how to swim. I knew he loved me now, too, because he always talked of how much he loved life, despite how much it sucked sometimes. So to be so close to the edge like this; literally, in a physical limbo between life and death, just to convince me to stay here with him, I knew it was love.

I also knew that I was letting him down. That every time he looked into my eyes and wished that I saw a future in us, but couldn’t, he clenched his jaw in frustration. But yet he stayed with me, in this dead end relationship, even though I drove him crazy with my crazy. And to me, I wasn’t even beautiful enough for him to suffer like this.

“look at yourself,” he whispered to me. He clenched his jaw, the universal sign of his anger, and turned to me. “look at what you’re doing. You’re too far now,” he whispered. “and I don’t know how to help you this time.”

A shock of cold wind blew through my long auburn hair and slightly cut off my breath. I reached out to hold his hand but he snatched it away and dug his nails into the asphalt.

“no,” he growled. “I need this. You’re not taking me down there with you. I said I’d go with you anywhere. But not to hell.”

There was a long silence that passed between us. I could hardly believe the indifference, the negativity that was spewing out of him. I wanted to shake him and tell him to get back to his senses. To be my better half again. To save me. But he wasn’t interested anymore.

He turned to me, his eyes mirrored a world full of hurt. “I can’t keep helping you kill yourself, Rory. I can’t keep helping you drive yourself to the edge. If you’re really going to do it, then do it this time. but stop taking the people who love you for a ride. Stop scaring us, thinking you’re fine one moment but really you’re not. You’re just planning when you’ll hurt us, for sure. When you’ll take yourself away from us. Its selfish.”

He swung his legs over the edge and put his feet on solid ground. As I faced backward towards a cold and shaky plunge, he faced forward towards a cold but unknown walk. And the difference between his options and my options at this very moment in time, was knowing. Because I knew what would happen to me if I jumped, if I ended it all. But I didn’t know what would happen if I decided to work it out, to try harder, to push myself, to take a risk. And that was the scary part. That was the fear of committing suicide. It wasn’t the pain, or the people that I would lose, that would lose me. It was, as I lay dying, wondering if I had made a mistake, if , maybe, had I of waited longer, would things have turned around.

Luke ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ll go to your funeral. I’ll tell people how much I loved you. How much I TRIED to save you. But I wont continue to let you kill me in the process. I never said that doing the right thing would be easy. If you would have just tried to make an effort to make things better I would have never let you turn back. But you didn’t try. That’s why, little by little, I stopped trying, too.”

I gritted my teeth, “why do you keep talking about me in past tense. I’m still here,” I murmured.

“because you’ve given up on yourself, Rory. You are a minute away from ending it all and I cant stop you. I feel like a failure, I swear to god I do. But nothing in life can ever make me choose the same way out that you are. Nothing.”

There was more silence. Silence that I couldn’t handle. Silence that I didn’t necessarily want to break. So I closed my eyes. It started as a light drizzle at first, and then the clouds parted for a momentary lapse which led to a steady rain. I was getting drenched and when I looked up Luke wasn’t there. I guess when you see the person you love in front of you, healthy, alive, young, talented, trying to dream of ways to throw it all away you would give up , too. Because its frustrating loving someone who doesn’t love themselves. Its hard to try to go through life, battling your own demons and someone else’s, too.

I used to think that I was doing a disservice to the people that I loved by being the way that I am, by being so defeatist. But I wasn’t doing any disservice to them, only to myself. Because in some odd, obstructed, fucked up way, I was right. These things do happen. People do give up life. And then life does go on, for everyone who did and didn’t care for that person. So no matter how much I hated myself, no matter how much I cut myself, or cried myself to sleep the person in the room next to me could never possibly, completely know my own individual struggle.

That was enough to make any person want to kill themselves. But it was also enough to make you want to live. So that if you did make it you could say to someone else who is struggling, “I don’t know you very well, and I don’t know what you’re going through, but I went through rough patches and made it out even when I didn’t think I could. I hope you make it, too.” Something as simple, and as unapologetically raw as that could also serve as something therapeutic and motivating.

It was then at that moment that I realized that I didn’t want to die I just didn’t want to live for anyone else. And that’s different than not wanting to live at all. I wanted to continue my life without feeling guilty for not being happy. But I wanted to live knowing that if one day I tried hard enough I could be happy. I think what Luke wanted me to realize was that no one ever expected me to turn around and to be happy all of a sudden. To wake up loving myself and to realize that I’m this “beautiful, talented, strong” individual that people tell me that I supposedly am. I think what he wanted me to know, and to realize was that life almost had nothing to do with being currently happy and had everything to do with finding happiness. That’s why we continue on this never-ending quest. Because we want to be apart of that circle of happiness that others have worked hard to find. Gaining happiness might be like gaining muscle. You have to do things that will bring you closer and closer to your goal. How you want to be.

And if you’re dead you cant compete. You cant work towards anything. You’ve checked out and you have no option of ever checking back in.

I shivered and swung my legs back around to solid ground. My mascara ran down my pale face and I sneezed and snot dripped down my soaked blouse but I left the roof and climbed down the stairs. When I got outside to the first floor the rain stopped but I heard it in pitter patters over my head. When I looked up I saw Luke standing over me with an umbrella. He smiled which set his green eyes ablaze with laughter.

I looked disgusting, and I was shivering but he held me close to him and said, “I knew it. I knew you could make the best out of things.”

Wednesday September 12th 2012 | tags: aari