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I’m a cofounder of The Scintilla Project, along with the beautiful and talented Kim and Onyi. We believe that your stories make you who you are and we’re asking you to share yours. Interested? Learn more at scintillaproject.com and find us on twitter @ScintillaHQ. |
prompt: the saying goes What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but sometimes the opposite is true. talk about a time when you were hurt by something you didn’t know.
we developed a habit of laying in bed and talking. i suppose this isn’t uncommon, when you’ve been together a while. our conversation drifted to the past, and i asked, in one of those sappy ways that they do in rom-coms that i should know never translates well to real life, i asked when he knew he loved me.
what’s sad is that i can’t remember what is answer was. i can’t remember the thing, the thing that should be so important. he mentioned something i’d done that happened in the fall of the year we got together. except he first said the words in june. there are many months, between june and autumn.
and i should tell you, that the subject of those three little words between us was always fraught with awful, because i said them first and i said them at the wrong time and he could not say them back, not for a month. and i don’t think i have ever been more vulnerable in the most terrible way or splayed open than i was that night, where all i can remember is staring at his pre-war wall with cracks, and they blurred over and over as i sat in shame.
but now,we’d come a few years past that and it’s astounding how quickly i went from normal to disaster. it’s a talent i have, i think. it took me less than a minute to put the timeline together, and from my first “so, wait…” to hysterics, it didn’t take long.
he was shocked, to say the least.
“so you lied to me? how do you lie, about something like that? how do you…how do you let me think i am safe when i am not? how do you leave me alone in this?”
he said he was confused. he said he did not know how to identify what he was feeling. he said he wasn’t trying to do anything wrong. i believed it all, i still do, but still. still.
this is a lie you just don’t fucking tell.
Ohhhh man. Ohhhhh man. I’ve not been in this position, but I’ve been in the position where I loved someone who didn’t/couldn’t love me back, and it hurts like hell.
Oh, how painful. How did you get over that?
I’ve had many moments in my life where I’ve had to reexamine the past and realize hard truths. It’s always surreal to realize the moment you’re viewing is different in someone else’s memory, in their story. That something you’ve built a story on has been a completely different experience to them.
And it’s hurtful as fuck, whatever they mean or didn’t. Whatever the reality is now.
<3
Oh, this is such a big bad one. I am so glad you wrote it out and that you did it in such a raw and honest way, because I know that these kinds of things are the kind that I never feel like I can blog safely. I admire the hell out of you.
And Shakti has it right on the money. Hurt feelings don’t care about different versions of the story.
To come to a place where you feel comfortable enough to ask those questions thinking that the answer you will receive is one you can file under “happy things” and then to have that snatched away in an instance is just…well it doesn’t even bear thinking about. Yet you wrote about it eloquently here and for a second, I was with you in the hysterics and the outrage. And yes, the pain was not intentional but fuck, it was still there. ♥
In his defense, there are some days when I really and truly love my boyfriend, but I can’t bring myself to say the words that day anyways. In all honesty, I loved him most of all when we were broken up, but still hanging out. There is one moment that I remember when he hugged me really tightly when we were in my bed watching YouTube videos and I just thought “I love him that much too.” But I definitely couldn’t have said “I love you.” And that’s not when I started loving him. On some level I started loving him from our first date, the morning after which I jumped on my couch and exclaimed to my roommate “I actually like him!”
Saying the words out loud is not the same as the moment of knowing it. I knew it on some levels for months before I said it. But there are also days that I still doubt it, even now. And “the moment when I knew” is somewhere in between the first date and the day we broke up and the day we got back together and today and tomorrow.