Sometimes I’m so lonely its physically painful. my heart aches in my chest. i don’t know what brings this on. most of the time I’m fine being alone. But every now and then, it hits me. my life is always going to be exactly like it is now. I’m 34 years old. I’ll never be married. I’ll never have children. When I grow old, no one will visit me in the home. These are the nights i curl up in my bed and sob. why didn’t that boy love me? the one i tried to love? its been five years since he said he didn’t want me but even now it hurts like new if i let it.
i thought…no i truly believed…if I did everything i was supposed to do, eventually my prince would come. “love will come when you least expect it!” “It’s always when you stop looking for it that it falls in your lap.” “become the person you’d want to be with.” it turns out…some of us are just destined to be alone. and it hurts.
i could try online dating. my brief forays into it usually end pretty quickly. I’ve been on exactly 2 dates from dating websites. they were enough to shut down the account. I don’t have the constitution for it. Most of the time, it doesn’t seem worth the energy of formulating a message. And even though it shouldn’t, it hurts when they don’t respond.
all of this makes it sound like i’m unhappy. maybe i am. most of the time i think i’m doing pretty well. I have a good job. I have friends. I have pets. I have a graduate degree and enough income to pay my vet bills. for a while i was really happy. 2020 has been a rough year though.
5 years ago I was doing things that mattered. I was part of a team at work. a small accounting firm where everyone pitched in and worked hard to meet deadlines and serve clients. 5 years ago I had a big part to play in my church that gave me purpose and direction. I felt like I was making a difference in the spiritual lives of my friends. I was working out. I had a big group of friends. I could talk in front of a group of people and have something to say. I had something to do almost every night of the week. I met people who changed my life.
When He came along, I thought “finally! Here he is! My reward for all my hard work.” I had watched all of my friends pair off and leave. I made new friends and watched them do the same. In my world, when your friends get married it feels like they die. They move on and live their domestic lives. only a few of them still talk to me at all.
The hardest part about The Boy is that I would have been fine just being friends with him. I went up to him and introduced myself. He seemed nice enough, but it wasn’t love at first sight or anything. We just started hanging out. I liked hanging out with him, but he didn’t seem all that interested in dating, so I just wrote it off. But then…he started wanting to stuff with just me. He asked me out on a real date. He planned it out and everything. Brought me flowers.
We started spending pretty much every evening together. Yeah our friends were there for most of that as well. But we’d text into the evenings. We shared spiritual goals. It was easy to be with him. I didn’t feel like I had to hide my real self from him. I should have known he wasn’t really serious. there were signs. but i hadn’t ever been my real self with a guy I liked before. I let myself think it was finally my turn. after a few months, I decided it was finally happening for me and decided to love him. I didn’t tell him. It was too soon for that. But I made the choice anyway. It wasn’t too long after that he decided to move away and leave me behind.
Something about people moving away and leaving me behind really hits my buttons. I have some childhood abandonment issues. Not that I was ever actually abandoned, but my parents had a bad habit of leaving me behind or forgetting to pick me up. Then my best friend moved away and never wrote me. I came home after college, and everyone in my family left. or died. but i guess you can’t blame them for that.
so when he moved away and used that as the reason we couldn’t date, it crushed me. i wanted to try to keep it going. he didn’t. it would have been easier if he had stayed and just said he didn’t like me. at least then I wouldn’t have tried to fight it or hope he’d change his mind.
I’m a full-grown woman still dwelling on one boy from 5 years ago. i don’t even want him. but why didn’t he want me?
yeah…i’m a strong, independent woman.
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