Pizza of Doom

I’ve always enjoyed going to the cinema alone. 

Well, not always. When I was a teenager I couldn’t think of anything worse. I used to sometimes see people at movies alone and think there was nothing sadder in the world. “Please God,” I remember thinking, “Please God don’t let me end up as one of these losers who goes to the cinema alone.”

When I was living in New York six years ago I got used to taking myself to the movies for something to do when I had no friends to play with. Last year, taking my broken heart to escape in front of the big screen for a couple of hours proved very therapeutic. I guess the experience is so immersive that it actually managed to take me away from my own misery for a little while. Now, it’s concentrated April time. It’s something I do for myself, just because I enjoy it. 

So, yup, I am now regularly one of those losers who goes to the cinema alone. 

Today has been a rainy bank holiday, so I went to see ‘What if?’. Basic plot rundown (without any spoilers): Wallace and Chandry (interesting name choices, I thought that too) meet at a party. She has a boyfriend. He is fairly recently heartbroken. They become best buds. But are secretly in love with each other. 

Well, doesn’t that raise a lot of sh** for me to think about. I have only just today decided to be friends with the dude I went out with on Friday night. Why not? He was good company, although I didn’t fancy him at all. And then there’s Irish Two who I do fancy, but know I can’t be with because he has no emotion. Irish Two and I are going swimming together at 7am tomorrow. He really has become one of my best friends. Do I still want to have sex with him? Hell yes. But we won’t. Because we’re genuinely friends. 

All this was running through my head during the movie. That, and how noisy the person behind me was eating their popcorn. 

Then comes a whole part of the movie where Chandry’s boyfriend is working abroad. She struggles. She hates it. At this point I found myself wiping unexpected tears off my face. 

It took my right back to last summer when my ex first went to work in New York and started treating me like a piece of sh** on his shoe. I remember sitting on my sofa with a friend, trying to act all happy and cool, but my voice cracking as I told her, “I’m finding this really difficult”, and then dissolved into tears. Now, Chandry’s boyfriend in the movie is an OK guy. He doesn’t treat her like poo, but she still struggles. It made me feel so sorry for myself. I found myself apologising to my heart for putting it through all that. Apologising in my head, you understand. I wouldn’t talk during the movie. Especially not to myself. 

So, what’s my point?

My point is that I deserve better. 

And while I still sometimes cry over my ex and what might have been, if I keep reminding myself how he treated me last summer, I can keep reminding myself that he became an asshole. 

I deserve someone who’ll hold my hand through life. Through the challenges. Through the work stuff, the family stuff, the friend stuff, the difficult stuff. Through the happy times. Through the fun. Through the sadness. And through silly, sentimental movies on rainy bank holiday Mondays. 

It’s Friday-ay-ay. And a bank holiday here in the UK. Nice. 

Even nicer, today is my first go at Friday with Friends, when I’m handing over my blog to one of my greatest and most gorgeous blogger buddies to guest post. This is my way of saying “Thank you” to my new friends for their support over the past year, and also my way of celebrating the communities and friendships that can be formed right here on WordPress. 

Today’s post is from Crystal at All the Things that I Don’t Wish. Crystal was one of the first people I connected with on here, probably because of a heartbreak timing coincidence (I started my blog on the day her ex told her he was leaving). I feel like we’ve been through war together. And I love her no-nonsense attitude that means she went to bed the other night “mad as hell” that I’d had to pay for my own dinner on my crappy Tuesday night date. 

So I’ll shut up now, and hand over to the lady herself. (No spoilers, but the real kicker is in the final line.):

I don’t know of any little girl that hasn’t, at least once, sat at her bedroom window and gazed out at the world with wistful sighs and musings on what her life will be like in twenty years. What kind of man is going to come whisk her away on his white horse? Surely someone will fall madly in love with her while she’s walking down the street in a rush to her important job. Or maybe she will happen upon a quaint little coffee shop and walk through the door. As the bell jingles to signal her arrival, their eyes will lock – and the rest will be history.

Or maybe she’ll know the boy from childhood and they will grow up to fall in love with one another. Maybe he’ll promise her the world and the stars and the moon, and then take it all away from her in one swoop of his hand. Maybe he’ll say the words “I love you, but not in that way,” and every whimsical romantic notion she ever thought about or dreamt of with him, will fall from her heart and lay broken on the ground at his feet.

I was (un)fortunate enough to dream of the first one and have the latter become my reality. I sit here at my desk reliving the year ago on August 20th that I sent Andy an e-mail telling him that I knew something was wrong. I could feel it. I could sense it. He was so distant. More than once he had left to go somewhere without me, and left me crying on the bed wondering what I had done wrong. He claimed there was nothing wrong and I knew different. Intuition is one hell of a power for a woman to have. I had finally had enough and I sent him an e-mail from work. I knew he wasn’t awake yet, but I knew that he would read it as soon as he got up. The three things he did every morning while drinking his coffee was read the news, check Facebook, and read his e-mails. I hadn’t heard from him by lunch and sent him a text to which he did tell me that my fears weren’t unfounded; he was in fact moving back to Indiana to be with his kids. He didn’t want to marry me or anyone else, he didn’t want a relationship, he didn’t like the intimacy that came with it. He was content getting laid every so often and having the rest of his time to himself. That’s what he wanted. That was completely opposite from everything that we had discussed.
I had bought a honeymoon cruise to the Bahama’s. We were six months away from being married. We were unstoppable. There was no other couple like us. We were the powerhouse and poster-children for a beautiful relationship. We were finished. After sixteen years of friendship and a year of plans being made to be married – we were done. It was over. I was broken. He was cold. All of this seemingly meant nothing anymore. I cried an ocean of tears. I cried alone and in front of him. I begged to continue our relationship even long-distance. I told him that surely something as beautiful as what we had could withstand distance. He had no interest in it. I begged him to continue living with me until he had saved up enough money to leave. He did. I had him for three months after that.

It’s like April said – my loss was a terminal loss. It was like being with someone and investing all of your emotions into someone that you know isn’t going to be there in the end. It was watching something slowly die and grieving the entire time. I bought books on moving through the pain, getting over someone, endings in relationships – everything. I listened to sad, shitty music and went running on a regular basis because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
The day after Thanksgiving, he was gone. We made love one more time before his departure, the night before, and then the next morning I left the house to allow him to move out of it and my life in peace. And I died a thousand deaths over and over again for months afterward.

I’d like to say that it gets better, but it doesn’t. Not really. You just learn to live with the pain. You go through life seeing their car driving down the road, hearing songs that remind you of them, going to stores alone that you both used to frequent together. It took me three months to go to the mall without crying. Every time I walk by a jewelry store, I remember us shopping for engagement rings. He was so excited, but not as excited as I was. I was going to belong to him. We were going to grow old together. I was going to be a step-mom to his kids. They loved me as much as I loved them. I loved him more than he will ever love me.

And eventually you move forward. You don’t move on, because how can you? You just keep going. It’s like driving a car away from a memory; if you look forward, you can’t see it. If you look in your rearview mirror, it’s always there. And that’s how it is. I drive forward in my life and when I look in that mirror, I see him standing there with his hand slightly raised, waving goodbye to me and to our life and to our love.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I loved a man so much that I was willing to watch him leave me if it meant making him happy. I love knowing that I have that kind of kindness and compassion in my heart. I love knowing that I can be hurt to the extreme, and manage to come out on top, even if I am wounded.

It’s the stuff that we are made of that shows how much we can go through. We aren’t to be underestimated. We aren’t to be pitied. We are to be celebrated. We are strong albeit a tad bit eccentric. If we can get through the love of our life crushing our dreams, there are few things we can’t make it through.