I'm a Bitch

I'm a chick, and I'm bitching about myself.

I hate me. And I'm posting about it on the damn internet because God knows no one in my life actually wants to hear this shit, and would argue with me even if I said it, and I feel like screaming my lungs out at them that YES, I WAS A BITCH. My friends and family are, if nothing else, loyal, I suppose. They'll say anything to make me feel guiltless and righteous.

It doesn't change the fact I ripped the heart out of someone I loved who loved me. For no good reason.

I dated a guy online for about two years. We were both equally working towards moving to be with each other, although who was moving where shifted from time-to-time. I visited frequently, and he made a point to show me good times on the town while I was there and treated me in every way I wanted to be treated. I'd found what I'd been searching for in men, and I couldn't have been happier. The time apart, though, was misery. It was like a cruel joke to have found someone I felt like soulmates with, and then be forced to be apart most of the time with no end in sight.

I liked his friends. We had the same hobbies. Our personalities didn't always mesh, but we never really argued, either. On the rare occasions he saw me cry or get upset, he'd be on his knees comforting me and apologizing for any damn thing he could think of in a second.

I counted on him, and he counted on me. I was his sympathetic ear and his defender as much as he was mine, and I heard it from other people -- "You were made for each other", "I've seen how your eyes look when you talk to him", etc. I was in serious love. The "let's-get-married" kind of love.

Yet there's a catch (there always is) and it tore me apart. I grew increasingly paranoid that who he loved wasn't really me -- it was who I acted when I was there. I hid things about myself. Things I liked, that I wanted to do, that I thought, all because of some stupid lingering high-school type fear. That we weren't "of the same kind". I was the bookish, mousey nerd, he was the athletic, outgoing jock. I figured if he ever found out how dorky I really was, he'd leave me in a heartbeat. So I stifled aspects of myself, which I'd never done for anyone before. Trying to be someone else is frustrating. And it was so stupid, because I should've known better. He loved me for me. Maybe the only person who ever did.

I even cheated on him while we were apart. All because some old flame from years ago popped back up in my life, and I guess I thought I had to sow my wild oats or some shit -- I hadn't gotten the chance to nail him the first time around, so hell, making up for it, I guess. Stupid. Then I let him get me a job working for his MOTHER. Dumber. Yeah, fooling around the boss' son while simultaneously keeping a long distance relationship on the rocks gets shitty fast. To give me a little credit, my conscience caught up to me and I ended my stupid affair in no uncertain terms that I was staying with the man I was in love with. I said the same thing to his mother, and it seemed like I had everyone off my back.

Fast forward to March of this year. I got an apartment of my own, and my boyfriend moved out to be with me. Quitting a job, leaving behind friends and family, stuffing his life into his car and moving over five hundred miles for me.

I got to be happy for about a month. Then my boyfriend got into a fight with my best friend, and it went downhill from there. Suddenly everyone became concerned about "abuse" warning signs (ridiculous -- he never even came close to hurting me -- ever) and the external pressure started bearing down. Work turned to shit. My best friend avoided me. My other friends were nowhere to be found.

Something in my brain told me it was either him or everyone else in my life, and I fell back on some old notion I'd developed in a previous long distance relationship that no guy is ever worth giving up everything for. I tried breaking up with him one evening, but I couldn't do it -- instead I blurted out that I'd cheated on him the previous year. I left him alone for a weekend after that, and I had myself convinced that there was no way he'd take that from me; I knew he'd ended every other relationship he'd ever been in where the girl cheated on him.

He forgave me. Never mentioned it again. No guilt, no screaming, no cutting remarks. He just went right back to loving me how he always had.

I tried holding it together for a while longer. We went through some hellish nights where I'd start crying and he wouldn't know why. I think he was afraid every time I was going to tell him I was done for good.

Things just kept getting worse around me, and I buckled like a fucking lawn chair under the strain. He was going to his brother's wedding late that week, and I, for some fucking weird logical reason, decided I may as well break up with him when he'd have something happy to attend and would have to be making the trip anyway. (??? Don't ask me what the hell I was thinking, I don't get it either.) Determining I was way to weak to break it off in person, I called him on the phone and told him he may as well move out. Not being a moron, he refused to continue the conversation any further until I went home. I ended up performing the most clumsy, gutless, convoluted break-up, because, in the end, I was doing exactly the opposite of what my instincts were telling me to do. I didn't want to break up. I didn't want him to go away. I just wanted all the angry voices and the stress in my life to go away, and instead of telling him everything that was wrong and working through it together like a sane person, I decided to remove the new element: him. I flubbered around my defenses, my reasons were weak and shallow, and I changed the story a half dozen times. He saw through it, and grew steadily more upset, and finally put me into a corner where there was the only thing I could say that would make him leave me: I told him I didn't love him anymore.

Lie, lie, lie, lie. But he believed it. And went from being mad to resigned to mad again. He said one moment we'd be friends again, said the next he wished he'd never met me. I didn't blame him for a word of it. He moved out the next day while I was at work (I stayed with him that night; we even went to dinner and shared the bed. It was a little surreal.) and I came home to a much emptier apartment with a note imploring me to consider suicide. I deserved it.

He'd found a job here that he had to leave. Hell, he'd done so well, he'd been offered a position within one of the universities around here... I found out about it the same day I broke up with him. He'd worked everything out -- he started working there, gain the benefits, including free tuition, and made sure they had spousal benefits as well. He was going to marry me, and make sure that I'd get to go to college, exactly how I wanted.

He'd worked it all out, and was trying to make up for the last couple of years. And I didn't give him the time.

I've been living with his ghost. I still have some of his things here -- nothing major, some towels, a book, and so on -- and I keep wondering when I'm going to send them back. And I realize I don't want to lose even the most minute reminder.

I keep hoping I'll hear from him again, and hoping I don't because I don't think I could bear to face him after what I did. I want to call and talk to him, but everytime I think of what I'd say, the words just die. I don't deserve to be spoken to after that. I don't deserve to be taken back.

I'm trying to move on and continue with my life. I've gotten a new job that is going better for me. But I can't get him out of my head, and I can't stop wishing I could go back in time and do it all differently. I hope we'll both get to be happy someday.

I just don't believe I'm ever going to be as happy was I was with him. I took something beautiful, and I fucked it all up.

After I felt so assured that no guy is ever worth giving up everything for, I finally found the one that was. I just couldn't, or wouldn't, realize it, and now he's gone.

And there's no one to blame but me.