Hang On

I'm almost finished. . .

We sat under the water tower. He told me he couldn’t get past it. It was too hard. He didn’t even want to discuss it. Two months later he was dating someone else.

They got married last month.

The last time I saw him he told me he still loved me. That he’d always love me. And I don’t understand that. Then why couldn’t he forgive me? Why couldn’t we make it work? Why did he stay with her?

Maybe because as much as we all want it, we fear love. It’s hard. It hurts. It makes you feel carved out and high and low and twisted up. Like someone just stuck their hands inside you and pulled your insides out and shoved your outsides in.

And maybe my fear of it is too great. I’ve seen my friends get their hearts broken – shoved down low into that dark place they never thought they’d get out of. I’ve seen the heartache in my mother’s eyes. I lose feeling in my fingers when I think about it.

It killed me to see Mark go through that. To see him question himself, his dreams, his motives, his actions. It killed me. Here is someone who did nothing but love that girl. Build her up. Believe in her. Kiss her forehead and tell her she could do anything she wanted. And I hate myself for hating her. For thinking she wasn’t worth that kind of love. For thinking she didn’t deserve it. Because really, don’t the broken down ones deserve it more than any other? I don’t know. But really, this is a story for another time. Y’all would be here all day if I got into it.

And here I sit. Anxious. Wondering when the Texan will call me. He’s going to Dallas for a wedding this weekend. If he likes me he’ll call, or email, to say good-bye before he leaves, right? And we work together – it wouldn’t be that hard to just stop by and chat. Tell me we’ll get together when he returns.

So we’ll see. We’ll see if I make this one work. If I let this one work. If I don’t push it off out of fear, out of emotional ineptness. We’ll see.

I think too much, don’t I?