There is no way to describe what it is like to be in Texas again. I am grateful in every way to be home ... by my parents ... working heavily towards goals that wouldn't have been reached without being down here. Most everything about this place has been positive.
And then there is the big D word again.
I hate to bring it up ... it is nothing I am proud of ... but it is something that is ever present in my life. It is something that has influenced who I have become ... the way I live my life ... the way I love my husband.
Being back here ... there is something about here ... Texas ... the very name slides from my tongue as if it were mud ... the floodgates open ... almost daily ... with thoughts of who I was when I made the decision to say "yes". Yet, it is not the state that caused me to make the silly mistakes of my past ... to hurt ... to cry. But how do you wipe the memories from a place? I have always believed that houses hold stories ... a kind of muscle memory engraved in their 2x4s and sheetrock by the many residents who were fortunate enough to live there. But this was his state ... if houses have muscle memory then states have loyalty to those who love them ... he loved this state. I am here to invade it ... white flag of surrender already waving.
Forty-five minutes ... that is all that separates us these days ... forty-five minutes. I turn down streets that I have turned down a hundred times ... expecting to see his face ... preparing myself in case he is down the street at the house of his high school friend ... clenching my fists around the red of the shopping cart at every turn. But, there are still forty-five minutes and almost a million stores in between us. I ... there is still that ... fear ... that I will see that old white pick-up pull down my street again. Haunted by dread.
I don't know what would happen if I were to see him again ... I don't hate him ... I don't blame him ... I am happy that he is happy. There is just something so inexplicable about the way I feel about him. A nothingness, for sure ... a sorrow ... a desire to see inside his brain so that I may know why he never came after me after I walked away ... why he couldn't have done those three simple things I needed from him.
All of this opened like an old festering wound ... waiting for the right knife for just the right cut ... the move was that knife ... living in Texas again was that knife. Something about two thousand miles was more comforting than forty-five minutes ...
I was with my parents at Hobby Lobby the other day ... there was someone who looked like him ... it was as if I had been pulled over by a police officer ... all the feeling drained from my body ... I had this lurch of dread ... It was then that I realized how much I didn't ever want to see him again ... how I would avoid it at all costs ... I probably never will. How do you stop your mind when you are so immersed in the life that brought you together ... driving by the spot of your first date on a daily basis going to work.
It has been four years ... I used to be able to go months without thinking about him ... without seeing the scars ... but here ... I need to learn how to control here ... how to make it more of a present than a past ... Maybe that will only come when we move out of the place where we had our start ... where we fell in love ... where he proposed. When I stop going to the church building where we had our wedding reception ...
Not wanting people to get the wrong impression ... I know that I have a lot of new readers lately ... I am not in love with my ex-husband ... I do not hate my ex-husband ... I have healed immensely over the years ... more than I could have hoped for ... the lingering feelings are that of hurt ... I am hurt by the way our marriage was ... by the way it ended ... and by the way he just disappeared and left me with no closing statements. No way to close my own feelings ... just grappling for anything that might help me to understand what had happened ... that ... well ... that takes so much longer than anyone could ever expect ...
I don't have anything to take away this hot topic ... It is still something I am trying to figure out for myself ... I have no advice this time ... It has been on my chest like a succubus everyday since we have moved here ... I write in hopes that getting it out will help me to get what is going on and solve the problem.
So I am sorry my fellow divorcees if you were hoping for more this time ... like last time ... I will figure it out ... but for now take comfort in the fact that it can be figured out ... that things will get better ... and they do ... everyday.
sleep tight readers!
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