When these emotions first hit over the weekend, I heard that voice tell me to “sit with” my feelings. Actually wallow, let them wash over you in hopes to try to understand what’s about to happen. Wrestle with the discomfort, learn how to no longer accept what seems to be the normality of these moments. You don’t ever want to feel this way again in your life.
I haven’t experienced a lot in my life. In truth, that’s not true. My experiences are vast but because they are full of pain, trauma, hurt, heartbreak, struggle, setbacks and what feels like this eternal stain of sadness, I really don’t want them to count. There is true value in happiness, right? But I feel like I can’t escape the realities of what – up to this point – has been my life. Yet scared to change it because you don’t know nothing else but the life you swear you no longer want to live.
I told him that I’ve never been in a relationship. I’m floating in the regrets of telling him that. Just this constant reminder of what I haven’t been lucky to experience even if all of the men who could’ve been “Boyfriend #1” were in the terrible stages of their lives. But just to check off the box, it may have been worth it? The one I wanted to be the first and only was declared ‘fucked up’ from the start. But, hey … to be a girl with a story to tell, you know? I didn’t have those in high school and college but all of my best friends did. It’s insane the things you turn into markers of desirability and something-ness.
And then 2013 happened. Then 2017, 2018 and 2019. The moments when I learned that there are consequences to wanting so badly to be wanted in a moment where it felt like you had no other purpose than to be just that. Consequences that no one believes you could be facing because you’re “such a good girl” or, in one ear, call you “damaged goods” in a soft whisper while a man says sweet nothings to you in the other one.
I have to unlearn a lot of what I see in myself. Just afraid of being seen as if I’m not good enough. You deal with someone off and on for ten years because in your lowest moments, he knows just the right things to say to make you feel special. Like, you’re really that girl. But then he dogs you out every chance he can get. Or he never claims you.
These past four days reaffirmed a belief I have in myself: there is no one out here like me. I’m really a “one of one.” No one talks like I do, thinks how I do, sees the world like I do. I really am that girl full of signs and wonders — you don’t believe I’m possible until you see it for yourself.
For better or for worse.
The worst is how I feel. I didn’t want to send that text saying that I couldn’t do it but I knew I had to. I had to get out of my own way. I had to eliminate the inevitable before the pain got rid of me first. Call it a defense mechanism. He called me out for talking too tough. I’m scared, always. Even in the infancy of it all, he saw it up close.
I don’t want to feel this way ever again. I have to believe that I learned my lesson: when you live in fear of the unknown – when you live in a place of assumptions – you miss out on all of the good things. He would’ve been a really really good thing. I remember how I felt after our first phone call. My mind, body floated above the Earth and I didn’t want to find a safe place to land. Sensuality and intimacy became a tangible thing.
I told my Auntie about him. She knows absolutely nothing about my life outside of the glimpses of when everything went wrong. “You sound like you’re in a really good mood!” Life has been a challenge but those days on the phone and those texts back and forth felt way too easy – in a good way. Vapors were caught. I was happy to drown in them.
I’m mad at God. She knows I’m tight. I honor all emotions when it comes to Her. The book of Lamentations is one of my favorites in Scripture for a reason. God wants the “woe is me” moments even if you feel – or know – that you walked into them. Why let me experience that? I know God don’t carry a kink for watching me cry myself to sleep. My bedroom light just went on, natural light being at a premium. My homegirl told me to remember to give my grace.
Grace is great and I’m eternally grateful for a lot of things but the gracious thing would have been succumbing to the experience of what this would have been, even if the ending would have been the same. And walking away with lessons learned and a story to tell but only from place gratefulness and joy.
I’m writing this to lay it down and let it go so I can go on – alone. With the hopes that if I experience this again, that I don’t fold. Fold from being too green: scared.
ciara roslyn-james 