Rediscovering What Was Lost- Two Kinds of Pain Revisited

This is tied into Two Kinds of Pain, at least I am trying to tie it together.

The first time I heard them say she "sucked the life out of me" I giggled. I was certain that it referenced some sort of sex act. It wasn't hard to imagine it either and it was even easier to picture who I wanted to do that to me. Had I not been looking at his face I probably would have made some kind of salacious comment about it.

But I had seen his face and it was clear that he hadn't said it to be funny. There was no male bravado. It wasn't a story of conquest, at least not his. If anything it was a comment about how he was conquered and then broken into tiny little pieces.

Back then I didn't understand what that meant. I hadn't experienced the kind of love that overwhelms you. I didn't understand what it was like to see my partner as being the air that I needed to breathe. That sort of experience was beyond me, but not beyond my scorn. I thought that giving that much of myself was a joke and that those who did were weak.

And then one day I woke up and found out that I had become him. Weak, insecure and broken. I remembered laughter and I remembered love, but I couldn't really feel either. All around me was the pain of my loss. The scorn I had felt for the broken hearted had come full circle. I had become what I had hated.

The joy had left my life and the days had become nothing more than something I had to endure. I didn't want to feel because all I felt was pain. A dull ache that never went away it filled the hole created by my loss.

Some people claim that the hardest time to be broken hearted is at night. Lying in bed they are no longer able to keep busy and in this quiet moment they are left to contend with the awful silence.

I was different. The hardest moments were the early mornings. Because sometimes I would dream about the past and I'd wake up thinking that I was still a whole person. The vestiges of the dream would be so strong I could still smell her, touch her...until I opened my eyes. And then I'd be reminded of what I had lost.

It never ceased to surprise me just how bad that felt. Bitter. Angry. Resentful. For years that was my BAR and there never was a last call.

I remember the day that I realized that I wasn't angry anymore and that the pain was gone. The sick thing about it was the feeling of loss I had because I didn't feel that pain. An old friend was gone. I had been abandoned again.

That feeling didn't last long. After a while I began to realize that it was time to learn how to walk again.