Zayda,
A genius with the written word has an echo that resounds silently behind her comforting words. She hides an inner pain that she has never shared. It flavors her perception and prevents her from embracing the light. She longs for the darkness, for the comfort of not being seen. She has no idea how bright her light really is. It is a white hole of brilliance springing forth future and possibility.
Hunter is a very perceptive man. He saw the void behind my words; the pain that I suppress from the world, yet that I can't hide when a few close friends look in my eyes. I can't hide it from them, but they do not know the source.
I was, frankly, shocked that someone whom I only knew through textual exchanges saw so quickly to my very soul. It shook me to my foundation. How had I let this happen? How did he see that pain?
Anyone passing by me on the street would laugh at the thought that I have low self-esteem issues or that I carry a pain with me that sears my soul and still takes my breath away on occasion. I mean, after all, how is it possible that woman could be anything but confident. Anyone who looks at those degrees hanging on my wall would ask the same question: "How could you, Zayda, have low self-esteem issues? How could you doubt yourself so?"
Well, here it is. Here is the pain that scars my heart and soul; the root of my self-doubt and self loathing:
Imagine yourself, for just a minute, in my shoes 14 years ago. You've reached a point in your life where you have recovered from a horrific assault that took your innocence from you, and it took a long 6 years to get to that point. You have moved on with your life. You're in love--madly, crazily in love. You've been with this person for almost 3 years and are 2 months from your wedding. The sex is fantastic; you feel connected to him like you have never felt connected to anyone in the world.
You're at his parents' house for the week and you have been there for 2 days when he looks at you and says "We need to talk". So, you walk out into the garden, down the path, and stand overlooking the cranberry bogs of the neighboring farm; you notice that he doesn't hold your hand, and a sense of foreboding niggles in the back of your mind. He looks at you, then turns away to face the cranberry bogs and says, "Zayda, I don't want to get married. I can't marry you."
You don't panic because you think it's just cold feet now that the wedding is getting closer. You remain silent for a minute, but, just as you are about to say something (and you can't rememember what it was that you were about to say), he says "I don't love you."
The breath sucks out of your lungs, and the words spin through your head. Then you blink, realizing he is not looking at you; he is still staring off in the distance looking over the cranberry bogs, the toe of his shoe digging and twisting in the dirt. You don't believe him, so you say that.
"I don't believe you."
He says it again, still not looking at you. And, something snaps in your head; before you can stop yourself you say "Look at me. Look at me damnit. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you don't love me."
And he does. He moves those mocha brown eyes that you love so much up to your face and locks them with your jade green ones and says "I don't love you. I've never loved you."
You don't cry. You don't say anything. You just watch him turn and walk away back down the path and back through the garden to his parents' house. You sink down on the ground and let the dampness seep through your jeans; you don't know how long you sit there numb, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, or not letting yourself feel it. You stare at the blackness of the cranberry bog, just over the fence and wonder, perhaps more than a little briefly, what's at the bottom. You wonder what it would be like to let yourself sink beneath the cranberries and be surrounded and enveloped by that cold, dark water never to surface again.
You stand up and inch your way toward the fence. Your hand grips the top of the fence not noticing that you have ripped your palm open on the wire. There is still no pain. There is only numb. And the water beneath the cranberries looks so inviting.
It's too much, but, as you stare into the darkness of that water, you force yourself to face the darkness inside yourself instead. You simply sink down to your knees in the dirt of the flowerbed, and you sob big, heart wrenching, horrible sobs that shake your whole body. And then you throw up until your stomach is as empty as your heart and your soul feel.
Hours later it begins to rain, and still you sit, just letting the rain wash over you. As the rain turns to a violent storm, matching the emotions warring within you, he comes to find you. You say nothing, and let him lead you back to the house. For the first time, you notice the blood still trickling from the nasty gash in the palm of your hand; the sting of the cut matches the sting of the rain lashing against your face and the sting of his words as they echo over and over again in your mind and in your heart, stabbing at you.
You say nothing to anyone about what transpired in the garden. You aren't sure if he has said anything to his family, but they seem to know that something is terribly amiss. You go through the motions the rest of the week, quietly screaming inside your head, hearing those words over and over again, ripping through your heart with each resounding echo.
The morning that you get ready to leave on your return trip and to the home, now merely a house, that you share with him, his mother takes you aside, looks in your eyes while her own brim up with tears and simply says, "He is a fool, Zayda, and will regret this decision and this pain he has caused you more than you can possibly know right now."
The trip back is horrible; the weather conditions are horrible; you pass dozens of accidents; you spin out on the interstate yourself, but luckily avoid an accident. You, stupidly, have hot steamy, thankful-to-be-alive sex upon finding a hotel after the near accident. You get back to your house in two days instead of one. You walk into that house you share with him, walk down the hall to the bedroom you share with him, and close the door. The next morning, you lay your engagement ring on his desk because you have still been wearing it the whole time; you look at him, wordlessly, turn, and walk back to the bedroom you shared.
He moves his belongings into one of the spare bedrooms that had been his office. You call the caterer, the florist, the pastor, the reception hall, and you cancel everything. You call your parents and tell them the wedding is off and somehow stumble through promising to pay your father back the hundreds of dollars he just lost in deposits but you cannot explain what happened because you are not sure yourself.
A year and a half goes by, and you still feel bound to this person. You, somehow, maintain a friendship, as crazy as that may seem. You haven't stopped loving him; hell, you even still have fabulous sex with him. But he also has other women in his life. After all, you aren't engaged to him; you aren't dating him; you are no longer living in the same house or the same town with him. But you visit him or he visits you nearly every weekend. You're just fucking him when you both need someone. Then, you decide to pursue a Ph.D. and you get accepted to one of the best programs in the country in your field, which means moving to Texas.
You know it's time to say goodbye, yet you can't do that over the phone. You drive the hour and a half to see him; the plan is to spend a couple of days with him. You have fabulous sex, go to dinner, come back to his place, and as you are lying on the couch, his hand lazily running across your stomach, up across your shoulder, and across your cheek, brushing long dark auburn curls away from your eyes, he asks you to marry him again.
But this time, you can't say yes, even though you love him as much then as you ever did. You cannot say yes because saying yes means admitting that you love him to yourself and to him, and you are not prepared to open up your heart that way to him again. So, you walk out of his house, sit on the front porch, and stare out at the small college town, quiet in the late summer evening And you sob, those same heart wrenching horrible sobs that you sobbed in that garden a year and a half ago. People walk by, staring, but you do not care; you huddle into yourself sobbing until there are no more tears.
You hear him dialing the phone; he is calling his parents. He tells them he asked you to marry him. And you hear him say "She hasn't said anything; she's just sitting on the porch sobbing". You can't hear the other end of the conversation, but you do hear him, with a voice filled with tears say "Yes, I know. I hurt her, horribly. I was scared; I purposely pushed her away. I know, Mom. I know there is no way to take the pain I caused her away."
The phone clicks, and he silently walks out the door. He looks at you and wraps his arms around you, holding on. You push away, your mind screaming as you slam into the house. You silently pack because you cannot stay. You cannot breathe in this space. He watches, tears brimming his eyes.
As you reach for the door, he says "I love you; I always have, even when I told you I didn't. I did the one thing I knew that would drive you away. I lied to you on purpose because I was scared and I made you doubt yourself."
Your hand wavers on the door handle; you need him; you love him, but you do not trust the emotions raging through your own heart. You think you could possibly hate him. But, you know that you don't hate him; you never have, despite the pain.
"I know," you whisper, choking. "I still love you; I always have."
He says nothing.
You look in his eyes. God, those eyes. Your hand shakes on the door. You want to run into his arms and lose yourself in those eyes; the eyes that darken and shimmer with passion when your body slides along his; the eyes that glow the color of warm cocoa when he laughs.
"I can't," you whisper. "I don't trust you, and, worse, I don't trust my own heart right now."
He nods.
"Let me go easy, David," you whisper as you walk out the door, the screen catching, not closing, even though there is no one there to hold it open. The door remains, open…waiting…
You get in your car, and, as you drive off, you look in the rear view mirror to see him sink to his knees in his front yard. Yet you do not stop yourself because stopping yourself means opening yourself up to the possibility of that soul-wrenching pain that you have been through once before. And as you drive off, the final strains of the Indigo Girls "Let Me Go Easy" wafts out of the speakers from your radio followed by the Indigo Girls "Ghost"...
...and i guess that's how you started
like a pinprick to my heart
but at this point you rush right through me
and i start to drown
and there's not enough room in this world for my pain
signals cross and love gets lost and time passed makes it plain
of all my demon spirits i need you the most
i'm in love with your ghost
i'm in love with your ghost...
