Nic Narrates

Someone asked me the other day if Kit was real, and I couldn’t help but laugh a little to myself. I couldn’t make him up, nor the last five years of emotions and experiences even if I had the most prized ghostwriter. He has been my deepest love and my deepest sadness. And he is real.

It seems lately there’s been quite a bit of speculation about him:

Is he or isn’t he the Appliance Fairy?

Why won’t you just talk to him already?

Don’t you know he adores you?

Last night I dreamed you guys got back together and didn’t tell us- so did you?

And there have been the warnings as well:

He’s less fixed than he’d have you believe.

We were thisclose to staging the intervention.

Looks like he has someone new who doesn’t know his games yet.

You’re hogging a good one; get out of the way.

I think sometimes people forget there are two sides to every break up. That it isn’t one heart that mourns, isn’t one person’s pride that’s wounded. I’ve tried to remember that and treat Kit fairly when I’ve written about him. I chose him for a reason. I came back to him time and again over five years not because he is a bad person or because he’s made mistakes, but because I loved him and wanted to forgive him. I always wanted to believe he was better than his faults.

And after all that, maybe the fairest thing I can say is that yes, there are two sides. But, this is mine.

I don’t write about him that often, not considering all that I could say. I try not to actually. I know he reads, as do many of the people in his life. Maybe to some of them or some of you it seems that I write about him more than I should or that it’s unseemly (?) that I would write about him at all anymore. But, five years, you know? And the thing is, I’m still in it.

I’m still sad about feeling compelled to give up. I’m still hurt by what he did and did not do. I still wonder just how much of the man I saw and the relationship we shared was created by what I wanted to see rather than by what actually was. And I doubt whether I really was the one who none of the others could even come close to for him, or if I was simply the one who stuck around. I’m still afraid to see him, to speak to him, to hear his words spoken to me, to have to fight back the tears that still fall even as I type this.

So I’m silent. I don’t write, don’t call, don’t return the clever take-me-back gifts, don’t even take them out of the box. I don’t trust myself not to be taken in and hurt again. Again. By him.

And yet, without encouragement or hope, he persists. But I know him too well to believe his bed is empty, to believe he spends his weekends alone, typing at his keyboard even as I sit at mine. I know better. For all his pretty words and extravagant flowers, he’s moving on too, trying to at least, and certainly doesn’t pine away for me. I know, several times over, that he is just as capable of turning me into the other woman as he is of turning me into the wronged woman. That if he’s not fervently in pursuit of making me the one, he’s fervently in pursuit of making me one of many.

More than anything, I think that is my greatest sadness and the greatest lie of our relationship. I believed if I was good enough, everything and everyone who came between us would just melt away and he’d love me the way I hoped-wanted-needed him to at last.

Filed under: break ups suck more, dirty laundry, engaging boyfriends, knowing, letting go, things people say, wakefulness by Nic