“Dream Girl”
There’s you. And you got in somehow. Gained access to my heart when it was otherwise gated off, shielded from the world. But for you, I tore down my walls and my armor and let you in.
What a fool I was. What a lie you had me believe.
There are songs you avoid, sayings you can't utter, inside jokes you say only in your head when you would otherwise say them out loud. You begin a new routine. The early stages of rewiring your senses and erasing your memory. This all takes a herculean effort. I can do hard things, you remind yourself. It feels like a lie, but you try to swallow it anyway.
I loved you. I really, really loved you! You silently imagine a dialogue that will never transpire. Why did this happen? This should never have happened!?! You wish somehow you could beg and plead and make him “see the way” – if only he could just see and realize! Useless. In another fleeting and simultaneous thought, you also remind yourself that what you desperately want will never be. A hope that will never come to fruition. Yet still you grasp for it, as if grasping for air. Just one more sip.
It’s hard to see how much you’re struggling. I hurt with you. Your best friend and therapist offer heartfelt empathy in response to your pain. They don't judge your pain or your grief.
You know, I think it hurts so much because of how real I thought it was. I really loved him. And it was just a lie. That part is really fucking hard. You try to respond by capturing the ways in which sweet and loving memories dance in your mind with the pain and abuse. You can't unsee the abuse; it has polluted every good moment you two shared. Was nothing real? I don't know about him, but for me, I was really in love.
Sometimes, you craft up a conversation in your mind, what it might be like to talk things out, civilized, with compassion, and emotional maturity. A sliver of hope exists that maybe someday this can all be understood and worked out. That sliver once was a continent-amount of hope that fueled you. And over time, it shrank until it was hardly recognizable.
This should never have happened. Why did this happen? You’re not sure why, but you’d begin with that. It’s what always comes to mind first. We could have had something amazing – and we did! I loved you so much. I just…I just wanted to love you.
This is when your mind becomes a flurry of memories of fighting, a highlight reel of gaslighting, blame-shifting, and not taking accountability.
All I was trying to do was love you! And all I wanted in return was to be loved. At the end of the day, I just want to be loved. Why can't you remember that my intentions are good? I’m on your team! Stop pushing me away.
You’ve said this countless times. At first, you say it as your groundrules. In the end, you’re begging.
You feel as though, no matter how good your intentions are, how honest or how devoted you are in your heart, you will never win against the wounds and trauma he carries. He will pull you in only to punish and push you away. He’s afraid of losing you, so he must protect himself from that pain at all costs, even if it means inflicting it on the one he claims to love the most.
Eventually, he succeeds. He protects himself well. He creates a boundary around himself that you can no longer get past. His walls are up. His fortress is strong. The army around his heart will attack whenever any type of threat presents itself.
The more love grows, the higher the stakes and the greater the risk. This means that the more he loves you, the bigger the threat you are to him. What do we do to a threat? We attack and destroy.
You’re the love of my life, he would say. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you. I want you to be the last person I’m with – you’re my dream girl.
Yeah, you never stood a chance.
The scars of your love remind me of us
They keep me thinking that we almost had it all
The scars of your love, they keep me breathless
I can’t help feeling
We could’ve had it all.
(Adele, Rolling in the Deep)
