Relief

Reaching a goal that you never thought was achievable is one of the best feelings in the world.  Whether it is running a marathon, I mean if that’s your thing (aka you're crazy), or something more personal, it is a sense of triumph.  Last week I was able to spend a whole night in the same room with D and not feel a thing.  I didn’t feel jealous, or wonder what he was thinking.  I didn’t give a damn that he was there and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let it ruin my good time.  The moment when I saw him and my heart didn’t skip a beat, and my breath didn’t flee me brought the most gratifying sense of relief.  That was the moment that once and for all I knew, without a doubt, that I don’t love him anymore.   

The thing about love is that it doesn’t just go away because you want it to.  The opposite of love isn’t hate either.  Loving and hating both mean you care.  Apathy is the real opposite of love, the ideal when looking to move on.  My heart stopped hurting a while ago. It hasn’t hurt to breathe when I think about him, and tears haven’t filled my eyes if he happens to cross my mind.  A little part of me thought that was just because I never had to see him,.  I worried that just being in a room with him would make me slip, that my addiction to his attention wasn't gone but just dormant under the surface.  But when I looked at him, all I felt was relief.  I don't love him, and I don’t even hate him.  I just don’t care what he thinks or what he does, as long as he doesn’t talk to me.  

Don’t get me wrong, I still think D is a terrible person, and I hate the things he put me through, but I don’t care enough about him to hate him.  I believe that some day, in one way or another, we all pay for the terrible things that we do.  I also know that I wouldn’t be who I am without struggling through that particular relationship in my life.   I honestly never thought I would get to this place.  I never knew that I would find a way to let all of the angst and tortured part of heart that belonged to him fall away.  It happened, and not because I found some magic combination of heart healing things.  It happened because I started to fill my life with people, activities, and things that made me happy.  Doing things that made me laugh pushed away the tears and the negative thoughts.  With every laugh or good memory made I missed him and hated him a little less.  If you fill your life with real pure love and joy, there eventually isn’t room for the rest.  

I guess I just want anyone out there who can’t see the light at the end of their dark and twisty emotional tunnel, that it is there.  You just have to fill your life with amazing people and positive things and have hope that one day you will feel relief when you realize you don’t care anymore either.