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live through this

From my personal journals:


This is the darkest moment of my life.

I never met anyone who so completely got me.

He couldn't tell me he was miserable because I made him feel guilty.

I wish I could do it over. I wish I could be the person he needed me to be.

I am completely lost.

I cry myself to sleep every night.

I want to die.


All the above statements are sentences that I wrote.

In 1999.

I met C. on Match.com. He wasn't my first foray into Internet dating, but he was my first Serious Relationship as a result. I had had boyfriends before. Men who I fooled myself into loving because I thought myself to be unlovable. While I knew that they wanted me and wanted to be with me, I stifled the question of whether I wanted to be with them.

But C. was different.

I knew three minutes after he introduced himself in the bar that I wanted to be his girlfriend. I don't believe in love at first sight, but I do believe in that spark that screams yes! More! An initial one hour meeting stretched into four, and blossomed into a nine month romance that made me think I Had Met the One.

Ten months later he broke up with me over the phone.

In the months that followed, I had a career crisis, car problems, money issues, and my beloved dog was diagnosed with cancer. Everything that I had ever loved was torn from me. I was devastated. Every night I went to sleep, tears stained my pillow. Every morning I woke up, cursing that fact that I was still alive. I spoke to a shrink. I hoarded pills. I collapsed as I discovered that the love of my life was moving on.

I thought there was no way that I was ever going to survive this.

I'm not going to lie and say that I weathered the breakup with any sort of dignity. I called him. I wrote. I stalked him online, googling his name at every opportunity. I almost even broke into his email, except that I was saved by a random slackreader who had emailed me stating if you ever feel weak, just call me.

I stopped eating and lost ten pounds. I started exercising and lost forty more.

My career was going nowhere I was in tremendous debt. I started making plans to move back home and do something else with my life.

In November he came back, pledged his love to me and then left again. a I spent a terrible Thanksgiving, a crazed Christmas, a nervous New Year. I started to heal when he came back for real,In May, promising love and a future and togetherness. Two weeks later he recanted like an intimidated witness and I bid him farewell at six in the morning at LAX.

Two weeks after that I was offered my first writing job. Thurber died the first day of work.

With this breakup, I had to move out of the house. Then my computer died, taking with it my entire hard drive. The other evening I was on My Space and noticed through another friend's page that he had a different photo up. A photo that I had never seen before. A photo that I hadn't taken. It was a clear sign that he was moving on. With his friends. With his life.

I dropped to the ground and wept, huge, wracking sobs that I couldn't control. Daisy shook and licked the tears from the floor. I composed myself and opened a new document. I wrote

This is the darkest moment of my life.

I never met anyone who so completely got me.

He couldn't tell me he was miserable because I made him feel guilty.

I wish I could do it over. I wish I could be the person he needed me to be.

I am completely lost.

I cry myself to sleep every night.

I want to die.

And then I thought this sounds somewhat familiar.

I knew where my journals were located because I had just moved. I removed them from the enormous box that read DO NOT OPEN, poured a glass of wine and leafed through the pages. There I am at 26, lonely and hysterical and so completely done. I won't survive this, I wrote.

But I did.

I read those pages written by my 26-year-old self and think he wasn't worth it. There was someone out there better for you! Hell, there was someone out there better for him!

I smooth the places where the ink is blurry with tears, and I wonder how I'm back here, right where I started seven years ago. Missing the person I love. Feeling like there won't be anyone else. Scared that my career is in the crapper. Terrified that I'm going to have to move home and end a secretary for a balding insurance agent, because I have no other skills. Certain that I'm a Big Fat Failure. Wanting to die, because there's no way I can withstand the pain.

And it all could be true. Except for the last part.


When I wake up
In my makeup
its too early for that dress
wilted and faded somewhere in
Hollywood
I'm glad I came here with your pound of flesh
no second billing, cause you're a star now
Oh, Cinderella they aren't sluts like you
Beautiful garbage, beautiful dresses
can you stand up
or will you just fall down?

Seven years later, and I'm in the same situation. But I'm not the same person.

I miss him. I love him. This is the hardest thing that I've had to do in my entire life.

Except that my old journals are proof that no matter how horrible this is, I can do it.

I can live through this.