Within Us

I thought I knew what heartache felt like but boy was I wrong. The level of pain I felt physically, emotionally and mentally was like nothing I could have ever imagined. He and I grew up very differently. We didn’t have much growing up but I always felt safe and loved. His childhood was rough, he lost his father at a very young age and has no memory of him. He was murdered when he was 2 years old and he also lost a sister to cancer as a teenager. He lived with his mother until the age of 12 then moved to live with his grandfather who was the closest thing to a father figure. His life was built on survival skills. He had to make his own money and pay his way through school while living in a very rough environment, surrounded by gangsters, drugs and murders on a daily basis. All his life he experienced pain and suffering. Knowing this and seeing the softness in him made me love him even more. When he did things that hurt me I would get angry at first but after processing I told myself all he needed was for me to love him a little harder, for me to not give up on him, to continue to show up for him and show him what love is. The more love I showed him, the more he would feel controlled and distanced himself. After a while it became too much to excuse. I realised that even though he would apologise and promise not to lie again or that he would not repeat the same mistakes, he continued to make the same choices and the pattern continued. When we fought and things got heated I just wanted him gone because I felt like he was the root to all the pain, this unbearable overwhelming pain. The confusion became frustration and the sympathy turned into rage. Yet I couldn’t let go. One night he went out with a colleague from work, called and said he would be home soon but hours went by and during that time I couldn’t reach him, his phone was off. I was worried because he was in this strange and unknown country as a black man and didn’t really know his way around. Didn’t sleep until he got home hours later. He said they decided to go out and listen to some live music and his battery died and he had lost track of the time. Something about that night didn’t feel right and a few days later he left his phone unlocked on the bed and I saw a message from someone asking why he didn’t reach out after, his response was you could have called me. That was the first time I saw red. I asked him to explain and he said that was someone he had met the night he was out and they engaged in conversation and he was simply trying to create a social circle here, being new here he wanted to make friends. All I heard was that he exchanged numbers with some random woman in a bar and she wanted an explanation as to why he hadn’t reached out after. After what? He got defensive and said that he didn’t see anything wrong with trying to make friends and that they just talked and he liked her vibe and had no attraction to her. It made no sense to me that if that was all why she felt the need to ask why he hadn’t reached out after. I lost all sense of control and smashed the phone against his head. I could not believe that I had brought this man into my home with my kids and he was out doing God knows what with other women. I had never experienced such pain, rage and disappointment. I hit him so hard that the screen of his phone broke into pieces and a splinter ended up in his eye. I called her and asked her how they met and what went on between them. She confirmed his story and so I let her know that he is in a relationship and she needed to back off. I hated being put in that situation of calling some random woman to ask about my man, I hated intuitively looking through his phone, I hated that he felt so comfortable to go as far as exchanging numbers with some woman, I hated that this now had brought such darkness and heaviness into our lives, I hated that he made me feel like I was crazy for not being ok with his disrespectful behaviour, I hated that my perfect bubble had been burst, I hated that I had physically hurt him, I hated that this ugliness had been brought out of me, I hated the backsplashes I had of that evening, the confusion and sadness in his eyes when I got violent, I hated that I was capable of hurting him even though I loved him so much and most of all I hated no longer feeling like I could trust him, no longer feeling that my heart was safe with him. After a few days and many long talks of trying to understand each other’s point of view, me explaining that it is ok to make friends but if he met a woman who he wanted to befriend he needed to tell me about it, that it was not ok to keep that from me and also that it needed to be abundantly clear that he was not available, he wanted me to understand that he didn’t feel as though he had done anything wrong because nothing happened between them but did finally understand why I felt disrespected and said he would make different choices in the future.