It's what we all want to believe in. No matter how awful the relationship, how awful the result, we want to believe that we were in love, that we were loved.
The apex of that for me was John, the man I thought of for so long as the love of my life. And I suppose that in a way, he was, at least in terms of the amount of time that I spent thinking about him, in one way or another. But without opening that giant can of worms... there will be another day for that... at the end of the day, he left me. And even that is a bit too... I don't know. He didn't leave me. He dumped me by refusing to answer the phone when I called, because he didn't have the guts to talk to me. And when, in a moment of stupid, I called him again months later, he lied to me again, and I believed it, in a way. And lied to me again when he fobbed me off with a nonsense story. But still, I held him in my heart. I made excuses for him. I took words whispered in the dark and hung on to them. I believed with all my heart that he did love me, that we were star-crossed lovers just destined to be apart. In the long nights when everything was bad, I'd go in my head to that time; I'd recreate every second of that time together.
I wrote about that in the blog that I deleted, the blog that Michael read, because I couldn't bear that he had read that. But it was the truth of the moment.
But ironically, I see all too clearly how it was in no way the truth, that it was fantasy born of desperation and misery, no more real than sending my head into the imaginary worlds of my childhood. And I wish that the untruth hadn't had so much power to hurt, especially since it turned out to be a distortion born of pain.
That's not what I really wanted to talk about, though. It's that every time I've told that story to someone... very rarely, because it is too much pain... I've made excuses again and again, for the man I thought I loved, the man I had to believe loved me. I couldn't just say, it was a mistake that I knew I was making, a hope that didn't come true. I couldn't just admit that he cared so little about me that he would rather inflict a staggering and unnecessary degree of pain rather than tell me unpleasant truths himself.
It's true, though. We spent a year and a half together online; we spent ten days in person, and then, hey, he was just not that into me. Or whatever. And I couldn't let go of the grand romance.
It's what sent me to Michael to begin with. It's what caused me to screw up any number of things in my personal and professional life. It's what put me on the path to here. I'm not blaming him, and I'm not even blaming myself. It's what happened, a lifetime ago. It's an old story, except for where it took me.
It was just a story. But I had to make it a love story.
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