The Man I Loved Broke My Heart.

He broke it in every way you can possibly break a person's heart. This is a story of heartbreak.

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The beginning.

When you're a little girl, your Dad is your idol. I often craved those primitive years later in my life because our love felt so simple. I now realise that during early childhood, I didn't have the emotional maturity or language to understand the flaws in my father. He felt perfect to me because he was a reliable source of food, companionship and money. But he wasn't perfect, even though in those years it really felt that he was. So once I gained the ability to speak, hold meaningful conversations and receive education, around four years old, I also gained the awareness of neglect and abandonment that I was receiving. And when you're young, you're too young to understand that these behaviours are a flaw within the person carrying out those actions and not a flaw within the person they're happening to. I thought it was because of me. I thought it was my fault. I was too young to realise that he had his own demons, his own accord, his own emotions, and his own issues. Instead, I spent my childhood wondering why he was leaving me... again, why he was screaming at me, why he was so angry at me and the world around him, and why he wouldn't love me in the way my mum did: with gentleness, giving and understanding.

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The middle.

Some say that the only way out is through, but I wholeheartedly wish I'd gone straight to the end so I didn't have to face the agony of going through... the middle. The middle was always cold, like an eternal winter. It was so cold that I couldn't ever find the words, and when I did, they came out wrong. I didn't sound like myself. I chose words meant for self-preservation, protection, and retaliation. They were words that I chose because I was scared and afraid to face the truth that existed as his daughter: I was never enough, and I was always to blame. The middle was insufferable. I came to know it like the back of my hand. There was this to-and-fro pattern in which we'd fight and make up and fight and make up. Despite its predictability, when it came to the section in which we made up, part of me never stopped hoping that this time, things would be different. It hurts to recount the most painful period of my life, so I hope you'll understand my brevity in this section, the worst one of them all.

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The end.

It ended when I realised I couldn't change him. It ended when I decided that having no relationship was the best thing I could ever do for the relationship I have with myself. It ended when I realised he would always be the same. After 18 years, I realised this because I spent my whole life waiting for him to be a version of himself that he was incapable of ever being.

Some people can grow, listen and evolve, but others, I believe, will never be able to do that.

The end was so easy in the beginning. I felt free, peaceful, and renewed. But then the nightmares started, him always featuring, me always cowering, shivering, fearing, shaking, and escaping. And then the moments came where I remembered the good bits and none of the bad bits, and, just for moments, I found myself recalling a version of a relationship that never existed. I simply wanted it to. Because that was a nicer story to remember than the one that played itself out. The end became lonely on the nights that I missed him and had nobody to tell because all the people I knew shared the same experience of this man as I did. Sometimes, just sometimes, I would miss the sound of his voice, I would miss the way he bought me nice things, or I would miss the sound of his voice as he sang me to sleep with lullabies as a baby. The end was hardest when I wasn't sure if I'd made the right choice. But I know now that no matter how hard the end is, I can never have another beginning with the man who broke my heart because he did break it, like the glass in a picture frame that's been plunged off a balcony: shattered, crystallised, and unfixable.

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I wrote about the story of the man I loved who broke my heart because, as strong as I was to end it all, a part of me will always feel weak as I wonder, did I do the right thing? I think many people go through life needing to create outcomes with information that they are on the fence about. It takes a brave heart to do something in the hopes of constructing a better life for yourself, a life you deserve. I stopped waiting for the day that I would finally believe I was worthy, because I worried that I would spend a lifetime waiting for a day that would never come. Instead, I decided that today was the day I started acting like it was true.

Whilst the man I loved broke my heart, the girl that is me is the one who started putting it back together.

Kisses,

COS x